About Mango Chan

I just won this award! Hehehe. Thanks to the new Mango Chan site. If you'd like to be chosen next time, these are the strict criteria:

• You must have a blog that is updated regularly
  
• Your blog must be interesting
  
• Your blog must hold more than 30 seconds of my attention

Who was Mango Chan? He was an emperor of Cathay (China) as told in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, published 1371. By the way, the author claimed to have seen the couple on our left. Don't complain there is no sex in my blog. His veracity is impugned at The Museum of Hoaxes:

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville described the travels of an English knight who left England around 1322 and journeyed throughout Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Persia, and Turkey. The stories that Mandeville returned with were fantastic, by any measure. He told of islands whose inhabitants had the bodies of humans but the heads of dogs, of a tribe whose only source of nourishment was the smell of apples, of a people the size of pygmies whose mouths were so small that they had to suck all their food through reeds, and of a race of one-eyed giants who ate only raw fish and raw meat. All of this fantasy was interwoven with other geographical descriptions that were perfectly accurate.

The authorship of Mandeville's Travels remains unknown. Historians cannot decide whether the author was French or English, though they agree that the book was originally composed in French. The character of Mandeville, as already indicated, was almost certainly fictitious.

So what? The pictures are cute.

I've read people don't like long posts, so I've excerpted the story of Mango Chan from the whole thing at romanization.com.) Warning - more sex!

Ye shall understand, that all the world was destroyed by Noah's flood, save only Noah and his wife and his children. Noah had three sons, Shem, Cham, and Japhet. This Cham was he that saw his father's privy members naked when he slept, and scorned them, and shewed them with his finger to his brethren in scorning wise. And therefore he was cursed of God. And Japhet turned his face away and covered them.

... this Cham, for his cruelty, took the greater and the best part, toward the east, that is clept Asia, and Shem took Africa, and Japhet took Europe. ... the fiends of hell came many times and lay with the women of [Cham's descendants] and engendered on them diverse folk, as monsters and folk disfigured, some without heads, some with great ears, some with one eye, some giants, some with horses' feet, and many other diverse shape against kind.

[One of the nicer Chams dreamt an angel said he, Changuys, would be emperor so naturally] ... he went to seven lineages, and told them how the white knight had said. And they scorned him, and said that he was a fool. And so he departed from them all ashamed. And the night ensuing, this white knight came to the seven lineages, and commanded them on God's behalf immortal, that they should make this Changuys their emperor. [More genealogy...]

And after him Mango Chan that was a good Christian man and baptized, and gave letters of perpetual peace to all Christian men, and sent his brother Halaon with great multitude of folk for to win the Holy Land and for to put it into Christian men's hands, and for to destroy Mahomet's law, and for to take the Caliph of Bagdad that was emperor and lord of all the Saracens.

OK, that's getting uncomfortably political even if it was 1371, so I'll stop there and if you want the rest of the racy stuff, buy the book at Amazon.com (it's available).

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