The battle of the three Emperors . The Emperors of Russia and Austria were inspecting the allied armies.

I have lived under four great emperors.

Japan did not make transistors then and Emperors did not bow.

In that sense, the concept is circular. It is like the old Chinese concept of the mandate of heaven emperors were said to rule because they had it, and when they were overthrown, it was because they had lost it.

After Augustus, the first Roman princeps, the Senate could vote deceased emperors into divine status. Such an apotheosis, of course, served the political interests of the emperor s successors, who could claim a godly lineage while aspiring to be raised to godlike status themselves.

Wedged awkwardly between China, Russia, and Japan, the Korean Peninsula has long been a bloody battleground for greater powers. Korean rulers only managed to survive by playing one foreign power off against the other, and by offering subservience, mainly to Chinese emperors, in exchange for protection.

We now know that some of these market emperors had no clothes, and that their activities, far from benign, could result in severe financial instability and generate serious losses for taxpayers, not to mention precipitating a global recession. That has been a grave lesson for regulators and central banks.

PARIS In 2005, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, a prestigious exhibit sponsored by the Chinese Government, The Three Emperors, celebrated the greatness of Chinese art. The show s central piece was a giant painting in the European (Jesuit) style depicting the envoys of the Western world lining up to pay respect to the Chinese emperor.

27. In the light of the major changes that have occurred in the past 50 years in the sphere of human rights, it is a little surprising to recall that until very recently, and throughout virtually all mankind apos s history, the absolute power to determine which rights they allowed their subjects and to establish internal mechanisms for protecting them lay with sovereigns (monarchs, emperors, etc.) and later with States.