1654–1722 
EMPEROR CHINA
He deserves to be called a wise ruler through the middle years of his reign.
—FREDERICK W. MOTE, AUTHOR
Seven-year-old Xuanye looked on as his father moaned from his bed, sick with a fever and a rash. The Emperor Shunzhi had smallpox. Although Xuanye had survived the disease when he was younger, most people who developed the rash back then didn’t live for long.
“It’s up to you now,” Shunzhi told his son. “Be a wise ruler.”
Xuanye nodded solemnly. He would be the youngest emperor in the history of China.
Once Xuanye became emperor, his name was changed to Kangxi, and he was the second ruler in the Qing Dynasty of China. Because Kangxi was only seven when his father appointed him emperor, he also appointed four advisers to help him. These men were corrupt, though, and wanted the throne for themselves. They plotted to kick Kangxi out of his role as emperor, and one even had another one killed to beat out the competition! By the time Kangxi was fourteen, he’d had enough of it, and he fired the one remaining adviser so he could rule on his own.
Kangxi is known for bringing cultures together. He was multicultural—Manchurian on his father’s side, Han Chinese on his mother’s, and Mongolian on his grandmother’s—and he felt he was a stronger person because of it. He learned the Mongolian tradition of riding horses, knew the Manchurian skill of hunting with a bow and arrow, and studied Confucian thought per the Han Chinese tradition.
Not everyone in Asia thought multiculturalism was a good thing, though, and Ming Dynasty followers in the south and in Taiwan resisted Kangxi’s rule. Likewise, the northern borders were churning with unrest as Mongolians clashed against Kangxi and Russia invaded. Kangxi responded with many trips to the south to talk with the Ming followers. He showed his respect for their traditions and culture by asking them to write a history of the Ming Dynasty. Then he went to Mongolia. When the Mongolians saw Kangxi with his eighty thousand troops and hundreds of cannons, while they had just bows and arrows, they didn’t fight back. Finally, Kangxi met with Russian rulers to sign a treaty about the border. It was the first time in a many years that China had not been at war.
Because the emperor’s staff could not all be trusted, Kangxi developed a secure way of passing messages to his reliable officials who worked in other parts of the country. He’d put the message in a box, lock it, and then send it with the messenger. The official had the only other key for that box, so Kangxi knew no one else would read the message.
Kangxi was also fascinated with Western culture. During his rule, Jesuit missionaries from the Christian world came to China. They taught Kangxi about astronomy and medicine, and he taught them about Confucian thought and Chinese traditions. This friendship came in handy when Kangxi caught malaria when he was forty. Chinese medicine didn’t know how to cure the disease, so he would have died for sure. But his missionary friends gave him quinine, which cured him. Unfortunately, the pope of the Christian church wasn’t as open-minded as Kangxi, and he declared it unholy for anyone to practice Chinese traditions. Kangxi responded by asking the missionaries to leave China.
Kangxi was the first Chinese emperor to play the piano. Pianos had been part of only Western culture before, but Kangxi thought they were beautiful.
Kangxi loved language. When he was a boy, he memorized all the important Chinese texts, and as a father, he made his sons study them too. As a ruler, he’d already asked the Ming followers to compile a history of the dynasty, but he wanted people to be working on other books as well. He hired a committee to write a Chinese dictionary. In Chinese, words are represented by symbols—called characters—instead of combinations of letters. The dictionary the committee created for Kangxi include forty-seven thousand characters! Only about a fourth of those are used today, but that dictionary was used for about two hundred years. Kangxi also focused on literature. He hired another committee to compile the Quantangshi, an anthology of more than fifty thousand poems by 2,200 authors. New editions of this book are still being published today.
I want to be a photographer for a nature magazine. I would like to take really interesting pictures of misunderstood or feared species and write articles about why we should respect them like any other animal. My role in this would be to provide the knowledge it takes to convince people to stop fearing strange animals and to start to know just how beautiful they truly are. Whether they’re winged or clawed, scaled or finned, they are all wonderful, fascinating forms of life and need to be recognized as their true selves, not as monsters or nightmares, but as fellow creatures that can amaze us if we just take the time to discover them.
CAMERON LIVERMORE 
AGE 12