Dear child, whenever I write, what I always think of is your chubby little face. I don’t know how old you will be when you read these words. You are a young man in his twenties, the same as me.
Now you are still middle-aged, but you have already entered your old age. Maybe it would be a good thing for you to never see these words.
In fact, I am very conflicted in my heart. I don’t know whether I should continue writing these diaries. The risks involved have been mentioned many times in my previous diaries. But in the end I can’t help but write. This is not only my daily view of myself.
Record, this is the only way I can talk to you.
The Chinese say, "Seeing words is like seeing faces." I cannot accompany you to grow up. I can only hide this love and longing in words. My dear child, my love for you will not be less than anyone else.
Seeing this, you may feel disgusted with your father's pretentiousness again.
Let’s get back to the subject, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, the weather is very sunny, I am sitting on the streets of Istanbul, Turkey, waiting for an important person. He was supposed to arrive yesterday, but he missed the appointment. I don’t know if he will arrive today, maybe he is
Watching me? That's not surprising, people like them are always cautious.
When it comes to Turkey, I don’t know if you have heard of this country. As far as I know, there may be more people who know turkey than people who know turkey. From my observation, our country has many
The international perspective of few people is actually very narrow. The United States, a little bit of Europe, and at most a little bit of Japan and South Korea, this is their entire international world. My child, I don’t want you to become such a person. Learn more about this world.
Although there are no immediate benefits, you will definitely benefit a lot in the future.
The country of Turkey actually has a deep connection with our country. This land once carried the supreme glory of the Ottoman Empire. When the French writer Flaubert visited Istanbul, he lamented that "in the next hundred years, Istanbul will become the capital of the world." It is a pity.
Contrary to this prophecy, the Ottoman Empire fell apart after World War I and shared the same fate as our country. It became the "sick man of West Asia".
Kang Nanhai's "Preface to the Preface to the Weakening of the Turks" was regarded as the forerunner of the Reform Movement of 1898. He believed that "Looking at all the countries, they are very similar to China in appearance, and compared with the same kind, the one who can draw the most profound reference is the Turks. The Turks came from the Xiongnu.
The Gaiyin people came after Chunwei, and I am of the same species." The Ottoman Empire is the Turks, after the Huns, and has the same origin and species as China. If the Qing Dynasty did not want to follow in the footsteps of the Ottoman Empire, it had to reform in order to be reborn.
After that, I don’t need to say much about China’s historical process. Turkey also maintained its sovereignty under the leadership of the founding father Kemal and established today’s Turkish Republic. Kemal also implemented radical secularization, separation of church and state, and the abolition of
As for the status of the state religion of Islam, it fully learned from the West and even changed the writing from Arabic letters to Latin letters.
Two countries span thousands of miles. Have you ever thought about what someone thousands of miles away from me is doing now? This connection is really wonderful.
If geography is used as the horizontal axis, time can be used as the vertical axis. Reflecting on the past and present at one time and one place, there is a sense of fateful tragedy.
From where I sit, I can see the central square of Istanbul, which is as lively and prosperous as some European cities. And a person who has greatly promoted this prosperity is now looking at me drinking coffee longingly.
In a building in front of me, the entire wall along the street was painted with the face of Turkish President Erdogan. He was looking at me resolutely, and I looked at him too.
Erdogan has been in power for more than ten years and has left a deep imprint on this country. He has promoted economic development and made Turkey one of the most important economies in the world. He also expressed his opposition to Israel at the Davos Summit in Switzerland.
The president's smooth rhetoric has won applause from the Arab world. Now, after years of being a powerful prime minister, he is running for president and has given actual power to this honorary title, endorsing autocracy with his votes.
Like the giant propaganda poster in front of me, although it is just a propaganda work with strong political meaning, if you look at it from the perspective of time, you can see many interesting things. Erdogan is bigger, Kemal is smaller.
Although Erdogan has always held high the flag of Kemal, his strong religious overtones and a series of religious reforms run counter to Kemal's secular path.
Behind this is the ebb and flow of secularity and religion. The military coup on the evening of July 15, 2016 was actually a concentrated expression of this contradiction. However, regarding that coup, it seems that many Chinese people are more concerned about Erdogan
The more dramatic aspect of using Apple's Facetime service to address the nation rather than focusing on the coup itself.
Even after such a fierce secularization process, the Islamic tradition still has strong vitality in this land. This vitality is so strong that it seems to have existed since ancient times and will continue into the eternal future.
However, if we move forward in time, we can't help but lament the cruelty of time. It does have the infinite power to turn the sea into mulberry fields. Just a few hundred years ago, this land was not Istanbul, but Constantine.
Tinburg, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, is an important city of Christianity. The Patriarch of Constantinople has supreme authority in the Christian world, second only to the Pope.
At the beginning of the eighth century AD, the bloody battle under the walls of Constantinople in the Arab Empire lasted for nearly a hundred years, swallowing up countless lives like a meat grinder.
At the same time, in the land of the east, Li Longji finally cleared the obstacles left by Wu Zetian, changed his name to Kaiyuan, worked hard to govern, and ambitiously wanted to lead the Tang Dynasty to create a prosperous age.
At that time, an unknown and secret connection had emerged between Constantinople and the Tang Dynasty. This piece of history, lost under the yellow sand and submerged in history books, may be of unimaginable importance.
What I am going to say next has crossed that red line, but by the time you read these words it will be many years later, and I will probably be gone, so it doesn’t hurt to say it.
After receiving funding from those people, I opened my eyes to a whole new world. My past speculations were no longer the delusions of a madman. Those extraordinary powers really existed in this world. I obtained several copies of long-lost secrets from them.
Taoist literature, I glimpsed a major secret hidden in it. This secret started from Constantinople, crossed the yellow sand of the vast sea, and stirred up the wind and rain of the Tang Dynasty. Can you imagine the infinite joy brought by touching history?
?
And now I am going to start from the source. The reason why I am here is to pursue the largest and most important sacred object in the history of Christianity.