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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: though the very devil was after him.
He has been variously rated as a genius, an imbecile and a fool.
Let us grant that he was not brilliant. Let us rate him as an
imbecile, and then let us try to account for his having brought
into the palace every ingenious toy and every wonderful and
useful invention and discovery of the past twenty or thirty years
with the exception of the X-rays and liquid air. Let us try to
explain why it was that an imbecile would purchase every book
that had been printed in the Chinese language, concerning foreign
subjects of learning, up to the time when he was dethroned. Let
us tell why it was that an imbecile would study all those foreign
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