title: Human vestigiality

text: The pyramidalis muscle of the abdomen is a small and triangular muscle, anterior to the rectus abdominis, and contained in the rectus sheath. It is absent in 20% of humans and when absent, the lower end of the rectus then becomes proportionately increased in size. Anatomical studies suggest that the forces generated by the pyramidalis muscles are relatively small.


title: Human vestigiality

text: The latissimus dorsi muscle of the back has several sporadic variations. One particular variant is the existence of the dorsoepitrochlearis or latissimocondyloideus muscle which is a muscle passing from the tendon of the latissimus dorsi to the long head of the triceps brachii. It is notable due to its well developed character in other apes and monkeys, where it is an important climbing muscle, namely the dorsoepitrochlearis brachii. This muscle is found in ≈5% of humans.


title: Human vestigiality

text: The plantaris muscle is composed of a thin muscle belly and a long thin tendon. The muscle belly is approximately long, and is absent in 7–10% of the human population. It has some weak functionality in moving the knee and ankle but is generally considered redundant and is often used as a source of tendon for grafts. The long, thin tendon of the plantaris is humorously called "the freshman's nerve", as it is often mistaken for a nerve by new medical students.


title: Human vestigiality

text: Another example of human vestigiality occurs in the tongue, specifically the chondroglossus muscle. In a morphological study of 100 Japanese cadavers, it was found that 86% of fibers identified were solid and bundled in the appropriate way to facilitate speech and mastication. The other 14% of fibers were short, thin and sparse – nearly useless, and thus concluded to be of vestigial origin.


title: Human vestigiality

text: Extra nipples or breasts sometimes appear along the mammary lines of humans, appearing as a remnant of mammalian ancestors who possessed more than two nipples or breasts. One recent report demonstrated that all healthy young men and women who participated in an anatomic study of the front surface of the body exhibited 8 pairs of focal fat mounds running along the embryological mammary ridges from axillae to the upper inner thighs. These were always located in the same relative anatomic sites – analogous to the loci of breasts in other placental mammals – and often had nipple-like moles or extra hairs located atop the mounds. Therefore, focal fatty prominences on the fronts of human torsos likely represent chains of vestigial breasts composed of primordial breast fat.


title: Human vestigiality

text: The formation of goose bumps in humans under stress is a vestigial reflex; a possible function in the distant evolutionary ancestors of humanity was to raise the body's hair, making the ancestor appear larger and scaring off predators. Raising the hair is also used to trap an extra layer of air, keeping an animal warm. Due to the diminished amount of hair in humans, the reflex formation of goose bumps when cold is also vestigial.


title: Human vestigiality

text: The palmar grasp reflex is thought to be a vestigial behavior in human infants. When placing a finger or object to the palm of an infant, it will securely grasp it. This grasp is found to be rather strong. Some infants—37% according to a 1932 study—are able to support their own weight from a rod, although there is no way they can cling to their mother. The grasp is also evident in the feet too. When a baby is sitting down, its prehensile feet assume a curled-in posture, similar to that observed in an adult chimp. An ancestral primate would have had sufficient body hair to which an infant could cling, unlike modern humans, thus allowing its mother to escape from danger, such as climbing up a tree in the presence of a predator without having to occupy her hands holding her baby.


title: Human vestigiality

text: It has been proposed that the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant of earlier amphibian respiration. Amphibians such as tadpoles gulp air and water across their gills via a rather simple motor reflex akin to mammalian hiccuping. The motor pathways that enable hiccuping form early during fetal development, before the motor pathways that enable normal lung ventilation form. Additionally, hiccups and amphibian gulping are inhibited by elevated CO and may be stopped by GABA receptor agonists, illustrating a possible shared physiology and evolutionary heritage. These proposals may explain why premature infants spend 2.5% of their time hiccuping, possibly gulping like amphibians, as their lungs are not yet fully formed. Fetal intrauterine hiccups are of two types. The physiological type occurs before 28 weeks after conception and tend to last five to ten minutes. These hiccups are part of fetal development and are associated with the myelination of the phrenic nerve, which primarily controls the thoracic diaphragm. The phylogeny hypothesis explains how the hiccup reflex might have evolved, and if there is not an explanation, it may explain hiccups as an evolutionary remnant, held-over from our amphibious ancestors.


title: Human vestigiality

text: This hypothesis has been questioned because of the existence of the afferent loop of the reflex, the fact that it does not explain the reason for glottic closure, and because the very short contraction of the hiccup is unlikely to have a significant strengthening effect on the slow-twitch muscles of respiration.


title: Human vestigiality

text: There are also vestigial molecular structures in humans, which are no longer in use but may indicate common ancestry with other species. One example of this is L-gulonolactone oxidase, a gene that is functional in most other mammals and produces an enzyme that synthesizes vitamin C. In humans and other members of the suborder Haplorrhini, a mutation disabled the gene and made it unable to produce the enzyme. However, the remains of the gene are still present in the human genome as a vestigial genetic sequence called a pseudogene.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: The Shunzhi Emperor (15 March 1638 – 5 February 1661) was the second emperor of the Qing dynasty of China, and the first Qing emperor to rule over China proper, reigning from 1644 to 1661. A committee of Manchu princes chose him to succeed his father, Hong Taiji (1592–1643), in September 1643, when he was five years old. The princes also appointed two co-regents: Dorgon (1612–1650), the 14th son of the Qing dynasty's founder Nurhaci (1559–1626), and Jirgalang (1599–1655), one of Nurhaci's nephews, both of whom were members of the Qing imperial clan.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: From 1643 to 1650, political power lay mostly in the hands of Dorgon. Under his leadership, the Qing Empire conquered most of the territory of the fallen Ming dynasty (1368–1644), chased Ming loyalist regimes deep into the southwestern provinces, and established the basis of Qing rule over China proper despite highly unpopular policies such as the "hair cutting command" of 1645, which forced Qing subjects to shave their forehead and braid their remaining hair into a queue resembling that of the Manchus. After Dorgon's death on the last day of 1650, the young Shunzhi Emperor started to rule personally. He tried, with mixed success, to fight corruption and to reduce the political influence of the Manchu nobility. In the 1650s, he faced a resurgence of Ming loyalist resistance, but by 1661 his armies had defeated the Qing Empire's last enemies, seafarer Koxinga (1624–1662) and the Prince of Gui (1623–1662) of the Southern Ming dynasty, both of whom would succumb the following year. The Shunzhi Emperor died at the age of 22 of smallpox, a highly contagious disease that was endemic in China, but against which the Manchus had no immunity. He was succeeded by his third son Xuanye, who had already survived smallpox, and who reigned for sixty years under the era name "Kangxi" (hence he was known as the Kangxi Emperor). Because fewer documents have survived from the Shunzhi era than from later eras of the Qing dynasty, the Shunzhi era is a relatively little-known period of Qing history.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: "Shunzhi" was the name of this ruler's reign period in Chinese. This title had equivalents in Manchu and Mongolian because the Qing imperial family was Manchu and ruled over many Mongol tribes that helped the Qing to conquer the Ming dynasty. The emperor's personal name was Fulin, and the posthumous name by which he was worshipped at the Imperial Ancestral Temple was Shizu (Wade–Giles: Shih-tsu; Chinese: 世祖).


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In the 1580s, when China was ruled by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a number of Jurchen tribes lived in Manchuria. In a series of campaigns from the 1580s to the 1610s, Nurhaci (1559–1626), the leader of the Jianzhou Jurchens, unified most Jurchen tribes under his rule. One of his most important reforms was to integrate Jurchen clans under flags of four different colors—yellow, white, red, and blue—each further subdivided into two to form an encompassing social and military system known as the Eight Banners. Nurhaci gave control of these Banners to his sons and grandsons. Around 1612, Nurhaci renamed his clan Aisin Gioro ("golden Gioro" in the Manchu language), both to distinguish his family from other Gioro lines and to allude to an earlier dynasty that had been founded by Jurchens, the Jin ("golden") dynasty that had ruled northern China from 1115 to 1234. In 1616 Nurhaci formally announced the foundation of the "Later Jin" dynasty, effectively declaring his independence from the Ming. Over the next few years he wrested most major cities in Liaodong from Ming control. His string of victories ended in February 1626 at the siege of Ningyuan, where Ming commander Yuan Chonghuan defeated him with the help of recently acquired Portuguese cannon. Probably wounded during the battle, Nurhaci died a few months later.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Nurhaci's son and successor Hong Taiji (1592–1643) continued his father's state-building efforts: he concentrated power into his own hands, modeled the Later Jin's government institutions on Chinese ones, and integrated Mongol allies and surrendered Chinese troops into the Eight Banners. In 1629 he led an incursion to the outskirts of Beijing, during which he captured Chinese craftsmen who knew how to cast Portuguese cannon. In 1635 Hong Taiji renamed the Jurchens the "Manchus", and in 1636 changed the name of his polity from "Later Jin" to "Qing". After capturing the last remaining Ming cities in Liaodong, by 1643 the Qing were preparing to attack the struggling Ming dynasty, which was crumbling under the combined weight of financial bankruptcy, devastating epidemics, and large-scale bandit uprisings fed by widespread starvation.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: When Hong Taiji died on 21 September 1643 without having named a successor, the fledgling Qing state faced a possibly serious crisis. Several contenders—namely Nurhaci's second and eldest surviving son Daišan, Nurhaci's fourteenth and fifteenth sons Dorgon and Dodo (both born to the same mother), and Hong Taiji's eldest son Hooge—started to vie for the throne. With his brothers Dodo and Ajige, Dorgon (31 years old) controlled the Plain and Bordered White Banners, Daišan (60) was in charge of the two Red Banners, whereas Hooge (34) had the loyalty of his father's two Yellow Banners.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: The decision about who would become the new Qing emperor fell to the Deliberative Council of Princes and Ministers, which was the Manchus' main policymaking body until the emergence of the Grand Council in the 1720s. Many Manchu princes argued that Dorgon, a proven military leader, should become the new emperor, but Dorgon refused and insisted that one of Hong Taiji's sons should succeed his father. To recognize Dorgon's authority while keeping the throne in Hong Taiji's descent line, the members of the council named Hong Taiji's ninth son, Fulin, as the new emperor, but decided that Dorgon and Jirgalang (a nephew of Nurhaci who controlled the Bordered Blue Banner) would act as the five-year-old child's regents. Fulin was officially crowned emperor of the Qing dynasty on 8 October 1643; it was decided that he would reign under the era name "Shunzhi." Because the Shunzhi reign is not well documented, it constitutes a relatively little-known period of Qing history.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: On 17 February 1644, Jirgalang, who was a capable military leader but looked uninterested in managing state affairs, willingly yielded control of all official matters to Dorgon. After an alleged plot by Hooge to undermine the regency was exposed on 6 May of that year, Hooge was stripped of his title of Imperial Prince and his co-conspirators were executed. Dorgon soon replaced Hooge's supporters (mostly from the Yellow Banners) with his own, thus gaining closer control of two more Banners. By early June 1644, he was in firm control of the Qing government and its military.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In early 1644, just as Dorgon and his advisors were pondering how to attack the Ming, peasant rebellions were dangerously approaching Beijing. On 24 April of that year, rebel leader Li Zicheng breached the walls of the Ming capital, pushing the Chongzhen Emperor to hang himself on a hill behind the Forbidden City. Hearing the news, Dorgon's Chinese advisors Hong Chengchou and Fan Wencheng (范文程; 1597–1666) urged the Manchu prince to seize this opportunity to present themselves as avengers of the fallen Ming and to claim the Mandate of Heaven for the Qing. The last obstacle between Dorgon and Beijing was Ming general Wu Sangui, who was garrisoned at Shanhai Pass at the eastern end of the Great Wall. Himself caught between the Manchus and Li Zicheng's forces, Wu requested Dorgon's help in ousting the bandits and restoring the Ming. When Dorgon asked Wu to work for the Qing instead, Wu had little choice but to accept. Aided by Wu Sangui's elite soldiers, who fought the rebel army for hours before Dorgon finally chose to intervene with his cavalry, the Qing won a decisive victory against Li Zicheng at the Battle of Shanhai Pass on 27 May. Li's defeated troops looted Beijing for several days until Li left the capital on 4 June with all the wealth he could carry.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: After six weeks of mistreatment at the hands of rebel troops, the Beijing population sent a party of elders and officials to greet their liberators on 5 June. They were startled when, instead of meeting Wu Sangui and the Ming heir apparent, they saw Dorgon, a horseriding Manchu with his shaved forehead, present himself as the Prince Regent. In the midst of this upheaval, Dorgon installed himself in the Wuying Palace (), the only building that remained more or less intact after Li Zicheng had set fire to the palace complex on 3 June. Banner troops were ordered not to loot; their discipline made the transition to Qing rule "remarkably smooth." Yet at the same time as he claimed to have come to avenge the Ming, Dorgon ordered that all claimants to the Ming throne (including descendants of the last Ming emperor) should be executed along with their supporters.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: On 7 June, just two days after entering the city, Dorgon issued special proclamations to officials around the capital, assuring them that if the local population accepted to shave their forehead, wear a queue, and surrender, the officials would be allowed to stay at their post. He had to repeal this command three weeks later after several peasant rebellions erupted around Beijing, threatening Qing control over the capital region.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Dorgon greeted the Shunzhi Emperor at the gates of Beijing on 19 October 1644. On 30 October the six-year-old monarch performed sacrifices to Heaven and Earth at the Altar of Heaven. The southern cadet branch of Confucius' descendants who held the title Wujing boshi 五經博士 and the sixty-fifth generation descendant of Confucius to hold the title Duke Yansheng in the northern branch both had their titles reconfirmed on 31 October. A formal ritual of enthronement for Fulin was held on 8 November, during which the young emperor compared Dorgon's achievements to those of the Duke of Zhou, a revered regent from antiquity. During the ceremony, Dorgon's official title was raised from "Prince Regent" to "Uncle Prince Regent" ("Shufu shezheng wang" 叔父攝政王), in which the Manchu term for "Uncle" ("ecike") represented a rank higher than that of imperial prince. Three days later Dorgon's co-regent Jirgalang was demoted from "Prince Regent" to "Assistant Uncle Prince Regent" ("Fu zheng shuwang" 輔政叔王). In June 1645, Dorgon eventually decreed that all official documents should refer to him as "Imperial Uncle Prince Regent" ("Huang shufu shezheng wang" 皇叔父攝政王), which left him one step short of claiming the throne for himself.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: One of Dorgon's first orders in the new Qing capital was to vacate the entire northern part of Beijing to give it to Bannermen, including Han Chinese Bannermen. The Yellow Banners were given the place of honor north of the palace, followed by the White Banners east, the Red Banners west, and the Blue Banners south. This distribution accorded with the order established in the Manchu homeland before the conquest and under which "each of the banners was given a fixed geographical location according to the points of the compass." Despite tax remissions and large-scale building programs designed to facilitate the transition, in 1648 many Chinese civilians still lived among the newly arrived Banner population and there was still animosity between the two groups. Agricultural land outside the capital was also marked off ("quan" 圈) and given to Qing troops. Former landowners now became tenants who had to pay rent to their absentee Bannermen landlords. This transition in land use caused "several decades of disruption and hardship."


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In 1646, Dorgon also ordered that the civil examinations for selecting government officials be reestablished. From then on they were held regularly every three years as under the Ming. In the very first palace examination held under Qing rule in 1646, candidates, most of whom were northern Chinese, were asked how the Manchus and Han Chinese could be made to work together for a common purpose. The 1649 examination inquired about "how Manchus and Han Chinese could be unified so that their hearts were the same and they worked together without division." Under the Shunzhi Emperor's reign, the average number of graduates per session of the metropolitan examination was the highest of the Qing dynasty ("to win more Chinese support"), until 1660 when lower quotas were established.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: To promote ethnic harmony, in 1648 an imperial decree formulated by Dorgon allowed Han Chinese civilians to marry women from the Manchu Banners, with the permission of the Board of Revenue if they were registered daughters of officials or commoners, or the permission of their banner company captain if they were unregistered commoners. Only later in the dynasty were these policies allowing intermarriage rescinded.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Under the reign of Dorgon—whom historians have variously called "the mastermind of the Qing conquest" and "the principal architect of the great Manchu enterprise"—the Qing subdued almost all of China and pushed loyalist "Southern Ming" resistance into the far southwestern reaches of China. After repressing anti-Qing revolts in Hebei and Shandong in the Summer and Fall of 1644, Dorgon sent armies to root out Li Zicheng from the important city of Xi'an (Shaanxi province), where Li had reestablished his headquarters after fleeing Beijing in early June 1644. Under the pressure of Qing armies, Li was forced to leave Xi'an in February 1645, and he was killed—either by his own hand or by a peasant group that had organized for self-defense in this time of rampant banditry—in September 1645 after fleeing though several provinces.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: From newly captured Xi'an, in early April 1645 the Qing mounted a campaign against the rich commercial and agricultural region of Jiangnan south of the lower Yangtze River, where in June 1644 a Ming imperial prince had established a regime loyal to the Ming. Factional bickering and numerous defections prevented the Southern Ming from mounting an efficient resistance. Several Qing armies swept south, taking the key city of Xuzhou north of the Huai River in early May 1645 and soon converging on Yangzhou, the main city on the Southern Ming's northern line of defense. Bravely defended by Shi Kefa, who refused to surrender, Yangzhou fell to Manchu artillery on 20 May after a one-week siege. Dorgon's brother Prince Dodo then ordered the slaughter of Yangzhou's entire population. As intended, this massacre terrorized other Jiangnan cities into surrendering to the Qing. Indeed, Nanjing surrendered without a fight on 16 June after its last defenders had made Dodo promise he would not hurt the population. The Qing soon captured the Ming emperor (who died in Beijing the following year) and seized Jiangnan's main cities, including Suzhou and Hangzhou; by early July 1645, the frontier between the Qing and the Southern Ming had been pushed south to the Qiantang River.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: On 21 July 1645, after Jiangnan had been superficially pacified, Dorgon issued a most inopportune edict ordering all Chinese men to shave their forehead and to braid the rest of their hair into a queue identical to those of the Manchus. The punishment for non-compliance was death. This policy of symbolic submission helped the Manchus in telling friend from foe. For Han officials and literati, however, the new hairstyle was shameful and demeaning (because it breached a common Confucian directive to preserve one's body intact), whereas for common folk cutting their hair was the same as losing their virility. Because it united Chinese of all social backgrounds into resistance against Qing rule, the hair cutting command greatly hindered the Qing conquest. The defiant population of Jiading and Songjiang was massacred by former Ming general Li Chengdong (李成東; d. 1649), respectively on 24 August and 22 September. Jiangyin also held out against about 10,000 Qing troops for 83 days. When the city wall was finally breached on 9 October 1645, the Qing army led by Ming defector Liu Liangzuo (劉良佐; d. 1667) massacred the entire population, killing between 74,000 and 100,000 people. These massacres ended armed resistance against the Qing in the Lower Yangtze. A few committed loyalists became hermits, hoping that for lack of military success, their withdrawal from the world would at least symbolize their continued defiance against foreign rule.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: After the fall of Nanjing, two more members of the Ming imperial household created new Southern Ming regimes: one centered in coastal Fujian around the "Longwu Emperor" Zhu Yujian, Prince of Tang—a ninth-generation descendant of Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang—and one in Zhejiang around "Regent" Zhu Yihai, Prince of Lu. But the two loyalist groups failed to cooperate, making their chances of success even lower than they already were. In July 1646, a new Southern Campaign led by Prince Bolo sent Prince Lu's Zhejiang court into disarray and proceeded to attack the Longwu regime in Fujian. Zhu Yujian was caught and summarily executed in Tingzhou (western Fujian) on 6 October. His adoptive son Koxinga fled to the island of Taiwan with his fleet. Finally in November, the remaining centers of Ming resistance in Jiangxi province fell to the Qing.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In late 1646 two more Southern Ming monarchs emerged in the southern province of Guangzhou, reigning under the era names of Shaowu () and Yongli. Short of official costumes, the Shaowu court had to purchase robes from local theater troops. The two Ming regimes fought each other until 20 January 1647, when a small Qing force led by Li Chengdong captured Guangzhou, killed the Shaowu Emperor, and sent the Yongli court fleeing to Nanning in Guangxi. In May 1648, however, Li mutinied against the Qing, and the concurrent rebellion of another former Ming general in Jiangxi helped Yongli to retake most of south China. This resurgence of loyalist hopes was short-lived. New Qing armies managed to reconquer the central provinces of Huguang (present-day Hubei and Hunan), Jiangxi, and Guangdong in 1649 and 1650. The Yongli emperor had to flee again. Finally on 24 November 1650, Qing forces led by Shang Kexi captured Guangzhou and massacred the city's population, killing as many as 70,000 people.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Meanwhile, in October 1646, Qing armies led by Hooge (the son of Hong Taiji who had lost the succession struggle of 1643) reached Sichuan, where their mission was to destroy the kingdom of bandit leader Zhang Xianzhong. Zhang was killed in a battle against Qing forces near Xichong in central Sichuan on 1 February 1647. Also late in 1646 but further north, forces assembled by a Muslim leader known in Chinese sources as Milayin () revolted against Qing rule in Ganzhou (Gansu). He was soon joined by another Muslim named Ding Guodong (). Proclaiming that they wanted to restore the Ming, they occupied a number of towns in Gansu, including the provincial capital Lanzhou. These rebels' willingness to collaborate with non-Muslim Chinese suggests that they were not only driven by religion. Both Milayin and Ding Guodong were captured and killed by Meng Qiaofang (孟喬芳; 1595–1654) in 1648, and by 1650 the Muslim rebels had been crushed in campaigns that inflicted heavy casualties.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Dorgon's unexpected death on 31 December 1650 during a hunting trip triggered a period of fierce factional struggles and opened the way for deep political reforms. Because Dorgon's supporters were still influential at court, Dorgon was given an imperial funeral and was posthumously elevated to imperial status as the "Righteous Emperor" ("yi huangdi" 義皇帝). On the same day of mid-January 1651, however, several officers of the White Banners led by former Dorgon supporter Ubai arrested Dorgon's brother Ajige for fear he would proclaim himself as the new regent; Ubai and his officers then named themselves presidents of several Ministries and prepared to take charge of the government.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Meanwhile, Jirgalang, who had been stripped of his title of regent in 1647, gathered support among Banner officers who had been disgruntled during Dorgon's rule. In order to consolidate support for the emperor in the two Yellow Banners (which had belonged to the Qing monarch since Hong Taiji) and to gain followers in Dorgon's Plain White Banner, Jirgalang named them the "Upper Three Banners" ("shang san qi" 上三旗; Manchu: "dergi ilan gūsa"), which from then on were owned and controlled by the emperor. Oboi and Suksaha, who would become regents for the Kangxi Emperor in 1661, were among the Banner officers who gave Jirgalang their support, and Jirgalang appointed them to the Council of Deliberative Princes to reward them.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: On 1 February, Jirgalang announced that the Shunzhi Emperor, who was about to turn thirteen, would now assume full imperial authority. The regency was thus officially abolished. Jirgalang then moved to the attack. In late February or early March 1651 he accused Dorgon of usurping imperial prerogatives: Dorgon was found guilty and all his posthumous honors were removed. Jirgalang continued to purge former members of Dorgon's clique and to bestow high ranks and nobility titles upon a growing number of followers in the Three Imperial Banners, so that by 1652 all of Dorgon's former supporters had been either killed or effectively removed from government.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: On 7 April 1651, barely two months after he seized the reins of government, the Shunzhi Emperor issued an edict announcing that he would purge corruption from officialdom. This edict triggered factional conflicts among literati that would frustrate him until his death. One of his first gestures was to dismiss grand academician Feng Quan (馮銓; 1595–1672), a northern Chinese who had been impeached in 1645 but was allowed to remain in his post by Prince Regent Dorgon. The Shunzhi Emperor replaced Feng with Chen Mingxia (ca. 1601–1654), an influential southern Chinese with good connections in Jiangnan literary societies. Though later in 1651 Chen was also dismissed on charges of influence peddling, he was reinstated in his post in 1653 and soon became a close personal advisor to the sovereign. He was even allowed to draft imperial edicts just as Ming Grand Secretaries used to. Still in 1653, the Shunzhi Emperor decided to recall the disgraced Feng Quan, but instead of balancing the influence of northern and southern Chinese officials at court as the emperor had intended, Feng Quan's return only intensified factional strife. In several controversies at court in 1653 and 1654, the southerners formed one bloc opposed to the northerners and the Manchus. In April 1654, when Chen Mingxia spoke to northern official Ning Wanwo (; d. 1665) about restoring the style of dress of the Ming court, Ning immediately denounced Chen to the emperor and accused him of various crimes including bribe-taking, nepotism, factionalism, and usurping imperial prerogatives. Chen was executed by strangulation on 27 April 1654.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In November 1657, a major cheating scandal erupted during the Shuntian provincial-level examinations in Beijing. Eight candidates from Jiangnan who were also relatives of Beijing officials had bribed examiners in the hope of being ranked higher in the contest. Seven examination supervisors found guilty of receiving bribes were executed, and several hundred people were sentenced to punishments ranging from demotion to exile and confiscation of property. The scandal, which soon spread to Nanjing examination circles, uncovered the corruption and influence-peddling that was rife in the bureaucracy, and that many moralistic officials from the north attributed to the existence of southern literary clubs and to the decline of classical scholarship.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: During his short reign, the Shunzhi Emperor encouraged Han Chinese to participate in government activities and revived many Chinese-style institutions that had been either abolished or marginalized during Dorgon's regency. He discussed history, classics, and politics with grand academicians such as Chen Mingxia (see previous section) and surrounded himself with new men such as Wang Xi (王熙; 1628–1703), a young northern Chinese who was fluent in Manchu. The "Six Edicts" ("Liu yu" 六諭) that the Shunzhi Emperor promulgated in 1652 were the predecessors to the Kangxi Emperor's "Sacred Edicts" (1670): "bare bones of Confucian orthodoxy" that instructed the population to behave in a filial and law-abiding fashion. In another move toward Chinese-style government, the sovereign reestablished the Hanlin Academy and the Grand Secretariat in 1658. These two institutions based on Ming models further eroded the power of the Manchu elite and threatened to revive the extremes of literati politics that had plagued the late Ming, when factions coalesced around rival grand secretaries.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: To counteract the power of the Imperial Household Department and the Manchu nobility, in July 1653 the Shunzhi Emperor established the Thirteen Offices (), or Thirteen Eunuch Bureaus, which were supervised by Manchus, but manned by Chinese eunuchs rather than Manchu bondservants. Eunuchs had been kept under tight control during Dorgon's regency, but the young emperor used them to counter the influence of other power centers such as his mother the Empress Dowager and former regent Jirgalang. By the late 1650s eunuch power became formidable again: they handled key financial and political matters, offered advice on official appointments, and even composed edicts. Because eunuchs isolated the monarch from the bureaucracy, Manchu and Chinese officials feared a return to the abuses of eunuch power that had plagued the late Ming. Despite the emperor's attempt to impose strictures on eunuch activities, the Shunzhi Emperor's favorite eunuch Wu Liangfu (吳良輔; d. 1661), who had helped him defeat the Dorgon faction in the early 1650s, was caught in a corruption scandal in 1658. The fact that Wu only received a reprimand for his accepting bribes did not reassure the Manchu elite, which saw eunuch power as a degradation of Manchu power. The Thirteen Offices would be eliminated (and Wu Liangfu executed) by Oboi and the other regents of the Kangxi Emperor in March 1661 soon after the Shunzhi Emperor's death.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In 1646, when Qing armies led by Bolo had entered the city of Fuzhou, they had found envoys from the Ryūkyū Kingdom, Annam, and the Spanish in Manila. These tributary embassies that had come to see the now fallen Longwu Emperor of the Southern Ming were forwarded to Beijing, and eventually sent home with instructions about submitting to the Qing. The King of the Ryūkyū Islands sent his first tribute mission to the Qing in 1649, Siam in 1652, and Annam in 1661, after the last remnants of Ming resistance had been removed from Yunnan, which bordered Annam.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Also in 1646 sultan Abu al-Muhammad Haiji Khan, a Moghul prince who ruled Turfan, had sent an embassy requesting the resumption of trade with China, which had been interrupted by the fall of the Ming dynasty. The mission was sent without solicitation, but the Qing agreed to receive it, allowing it to conduct tribute trade in Beijing and Lanzhou (Gansu). But this agreement was interrupted by a Muslim rebellion that engulfed the northwest in 1646 (see the last paragraph of the "Conquest of China" section above). Tribute and trade with Hami and Turfan, which had aided the rebels, were eventually resumed in 1656. In 1655, however, the Qing court announced that tributary missions from Turfan would be accepted only once every five years.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In 1651 the young emperor invited to Beijing the Fifth Dalai Lama, the leader of the Yellow Hat Sect of Tibetan Buddhism, who, with the military help of Khoshot Mongol Gushri Khan, had recently unified religious and secular rule in Tibet. Qing emperors had been patrons of Tibetan Buddhism since at least 1621 under the reign of Nurhaci, but there were also political reasons behind the invitation. Namely, Tibet was becoming a powerful polity west of the Qing, and the Dalai Lama held influence over Mongol tribes, many of which had not submitted to the Qing. To prepare for the arrival of this "living Buddha," the Shunzhi Emperor ordered the building of the White Dagoba ("baita" 白塔) on an island on one of the imperial lakes northwest of the Forbidden City, at the former site of Qubilai Khan's palace. After more invitations and diplomatic exchanges to decide where the Tibetan leader would meet the Qing emperor, the Dalai Lama arrived in Beijing in January 1653. The Dalai Lama later had a scene of this visit carved in the Potala Palace in Lhasa, which he had started building in 1645.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Meanwhile, north of the Manchu homeland, adventurers Vassili Poyarkov (1643–1646) and Yerofei Khabarov (1649–1653) had started to explore the Amur River valley for Tzarist Russia. In 1653 Khabarov was recalled to Moscow and replaced by Onufriy Stepanov, who assumed command of Khabarov's Cossack troops. Stepanov went south into the Sungari River, along which he exacted "yasak" (fur tribute) from native populations such as the Daur and the Duchers, but these groups resisted because they were already paying tribute to the Shunzhi Emperor ("Shamshakan" in Russian sources). In 1654 Stepanov defeated a small Manchu force that had been despatched from Ningguta to investigate Russian advances. In 1655 another Qing commander, the Mongol Minggadari (d. 1669), defeated Stepanov's forces at fort Kumarsk on the Amur, but this was not enough to chase the Russians. In 1658, however, Manchu general Šarhūda (1599–1659) attacked Stepanov with a fleet of 40 or more ships that managed to kill or capture most Russians. This Qing victory temporarily cleared the Amur valley of Cossack bands, but Sino-Russian border conflicts would continue until 1689, when the signature of the Treaty of Nerchinsk fixed the borders between Russia and the Qing.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Though the Qing under Dorgon's leadership had successfully pushed the Southern Ming deep into southern China, Ming loyalism was not dead yet. In early August 1652, Li Dingguo, who had served as general in Sichuan under bandit king Zhang Xianzhong (d. 1647) and was now protecting the Yongli Emperor of the Southern Ming, retook Guilin (Guangxi province) from the Qing. Within a month, most of the commanders who had been supporting the Qing in Guangxi reverted to the Ming side. Despite occasionally successful military campaigns in Huguang and Guangdong in the next two years, Li failed to retake important cities. In 1653, the Qing court put Hong Chengchou in charge of retaking the southwest. Headquartered in Changsha (in what is now Hunan province), he patiently built up his forces; only in late 1658 did well-fed and well-supplied Qing troops mount a multipronged campaign to take Guizhou and Yunnan. In late January 1659, a Qing army led by Manchu prince Doni took the capital of Yunnan, sending the Yongli Emperor fleeing into nearby Burma, which was then ruled by King Pindale Min of the Toungoo dynasty. The last sovereign of the Southern Ming stayed there until 1662, when he was captured and executed by Wu Sangui, the former Ming general whose surrender to the Manchus in April 1644 had allowed Dorgon to start the Qing conquest of China.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Zheng Chenggong ("Koxinga"), who had been adopted by the Longwu Emperor in 1646 and ennobled by Yongli in 1655, also continued to defend the cause of the Southern Ming. In 1659, just as the Shunzhi Emperor was preparing to hold a special examination to celebrate the glories of his reign and the success of the southwestern campaigns, Zheng sailed up the Yangtze River with a well-armed fleet, took several cities from Qing hands, and went so far as to threaten Nanjing. When the emperor heard of this sudden attack he is said to have slashed his throne with a sword in anger. But the siege of Nanjing was relieved and Zheng Chenggong repelled, forcing Zheng to take refuge in the southeastern coastal province of Fujian. Pressured by Qing fleets, Zheng fled to Taiwan in April 1661 but died that same summer. His descendants resisted Qing rule until 1683, when the Kangxi Emperor successfully took the island.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: After Fulin came to rule on his own in 1651, his mother the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang arranged for him to marry her niece, but the young monarch deposed his new Empress in 1653. The following year Xiaozhuang arranged another imperial marriage with her Khorchin Mongol clan, this time matching her son with her own grand-niece. Though Fulin also disliked his second empress (known posthumously as Empress Xiaohuizhang), he was not allowed to demote her. She never bore him children. Starting in 1656, the Shunzhi Emperor lavished his affection on Consort Donggo, who, according to Jesuit accounts from the time, had first been the wife of another Manchu noble. She gave birth to a son (the Shunzhi Emperor's fourth) in November 1657. The emperor would have made him his heir apparent, but he died early in 1658 before he was given a name.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: The Shunzhi Emperor was an open-minded emperor and relied on the advice of Johann Adam Schall von Bell, a Jesuit missionary from Cologne in the Germanic parts of the Holy Roman Empire, for guidance on matters ranging from astronomy and technology to religion and government. In late 1644, Dorgon had put Schall in charge of preparing a new calendar because his eclipse predictions had proven more reliable than those of the official astronomer. After Dorgon's death Schall developed a personal relationship with the young emperor, who called him "grandfather" ("mafa" in Manchu). At the height of his influence in 1656 and 1657, Schall reports that the Shunzhi Emperor often visited his house and talked to him late into the night. He was excused from prostrating himself in the presence of the emperor, was granted land to build a church in Beijing, and was even given imperial permission to adopt a son (because Fulin worried that Schall did not have an heir), but the Jesuits' hope of converting the Qing sovereign to Christianity was crushed when the Shunzhi Emperor became a devout follower of Chan Buddhism in 1657.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: The emperor developed a good command of Chinese that allowed him to manage matters of state and to appreciate Chinese arts such as calligraphy and drama. One of his favorite texts was "Rhapsody of a Myriad Sorrows" ("Wan chou qu" 萬愁曲), by Gui Zhuang (歸莊; 1613–1673), who was a close friend of anti-Qing intellectuals Gu Yanwu and Wan Shouqi (萬壽祺; 1603–1652). "Quite passionate and attach[ing] great importance to "qing" (love)," he could also recite by heart long passages of the popular "Romance of the Western Chamber".


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: In September 1660, Consort Donggo, the Shunzhi Emperor's favourite consort, suddenly died as a result of grief over the loss of a child. Overwhelmed with grief, the emperor fell into dejection for months, until he contracted smallpox on 2 February 1661. On 4 February 1661, officials Wang Xi (王熙, 1628–1703; the emperor's confidant) and Margi (a Manchu) were called to the emperor's bedside to record his last will. On the same day, his seven-year-old third son Xuanye was chosen to be his successor, probably because he had already survived smallpox. The emperor died on 5 February 1661 in the Forbidden City at the age of twenty-two.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: The Manchus feared smallpox more than any other disease because they had no immunity to it and almost always died when they contracted it. By 1622 at the latest, they had already established an agency to investigate smallpox cases and isolate sufferers to avoid contagion. During outbreaks, royal family members were routinely sent to "smallpox avoidance centers" ("bidousuo" 避痘所) to protect themselves from infection. The Shunzhi Emperor was particularly fearful of the disease, because he was young and lived in a large city, near sources of contagion. Indeed, during his reign at least nine outbreaks of smallpox were recorded in Beijing, each time forcing the emperor to move to a protected area such as the "Southern Park" (Nanyuan 南苑), a hunting ground south of Beijing where Dorgon had built a "smallpox avoidance center" in the 1640s. Despite this and other precautions—such as rules forcing Chinese residents to move out of the city when they contracted smallpox—the young monarch still succumbed to that illness.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: The emperor's last will, which was made public on the evening of 5 February, appointed four regents for his young son: Oboi, Soni, Suksaha, and Ebilun, who had all helped Jirgalang to purge the court of Dorgon's supporters after Dorgon's death on the last day of 1650. It is difficult to determine whether the Shunzhi Emperor had really named these four Manchu nobles as regents, because they and Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang clearly tampered with the emperor's testament before promulgating it. The emperor's will expressed his regret about his Chinese-style ruling (his reliance on eunuchs and his favoritism toward Chinese officials), his neglect of Manchu nobles and traditions, and his headstrong devotion to his consort rather than to his mother. Though the emperor had often issued self-deprecating edicts during his reign, the policies his will rejected had been central to his government since he had assumed personal rule in the early 1650s. The will as it was formulated gave "the mantle of imperial authority" to the four regents, and served to support their pro-Manchu policies during the period known as the Oboi regency, which lasted from 1661 to 1669.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Because court statements did not clearly announce the cause of the emperor's death, rumors soon started to circulate that he had not died but in fact retired to a Buddhist monastery to live anonymously as a monk, either out of grief for the death of his beloved consort, or because of a coup by the Manchu nobles his will had named as regents. These rumors seemed not so incredible because the emperor had become a fervent follower of Chan Buddhism in the late 1650s, even letting monks move into the imperial palace. Modern Chinese historians have considered the Shunzhi Emperor's possible retirement as one of the three mysterious cases of the early Qing. But much circumstantial evidence—including an account by one of these monks that the emperor's health greatly deteriorated in early February 1661 because of smallpox, and the fact that a concubine and an Imperial Bodyguard committed suicide to accompany the emperor in burial—suggests that the Shunzhi Emperor's death was not staged.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: After being kept in the Forbidden City for 27 days of mourning, on 3 March 1661 the emperor's corpse was transported in a lavish procession to Jingshan 景山 (a hillock just north of the Forbidden City), after which a large amount of precious goods were burned as funeral offerings. Only two years later, in 1663, was the body transported to its final resting place. Contrary to Manchu customs at the time, which usually dictated that a deceased person should be cremated, the Shunzhi Emperor was buried. He was interred in what later came to be known as the Eastern Qing Tombs, 125 kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Beijing, one of two Qing imperial cemeteries. His tomb is part of the Xiao () mausoleum complex (known in Manchu as the Hiyoošungga Munggan), which was the first mausoleum to be erected on that site.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: The fake will in which the Shunzhi Emperor had supposedly expressed regret for abandoning Manchu traditions gave authority to the nativist policies of the Kangxi Emperor's four regents. Citing the testament, Oboi and the other regents quickly abolished the Thirteen Eunuch Bureaus. Over the next few years, they enhanced the power of the Imperial Household Department, which was run by Manchus and their bondservants, eliminated the Hanlin Academy, and limited membership in the Deliberative Council of Princes and Ministers to Manchus and Mongols. The regents also adopted aggressive policies toward the Qing's Chinese subjects: they executed dozens of people and punished thousands of others in the wealthy Jiangnan region for literary dissent and tax arrears, and forced the coastal population of southeast China to move inland in order to starve the Taiwan-based Kingdom of Tungning run by descendants of Koxinga.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: After the Kangxi Emperor managed to imprison Oboi in 1669, he reverted many of the regents' policies. He restored institutions his father had favored, including the Grand Secretariat, through which Chinese officials gained an important voice in government. He also defeated the rebellion of the Three Feudatories, three Chinese military commanders who had played key military roles in the Qing conquest, but had now become entrenched rulers of enormous domains in southern China. The civil war (1673–1681) tested the loyalty of the new Qing subjects, but Qing armies eventually prevailed. Once victory had become certain, a special examination for "eminent scholars of broad learning" ("Boxue hongru" 博學鴻儒) was held in 1679 to attract Chinese literati who had refused to serve the new dynasty. The successful candidates were assigned to compile the official history of the fallen Ming dynasty. The rebellion was defeated in 1681, the same year the Kangxi Emperor initiated the use of variolation to inoculate children of the imperial family against smallpox. When the Kingdom of Tungning finally fell in 1683, the military consolidation of the Qing regime was complete. The institutional foundation laid by Dorgon, and the Shunzhi and Kangxi emperors allowed the Qing to erect an imperial edifice of awesome proportion and to turn it into "one of the most successful imperial states the world has known." Ironically, however, the prolonged "Pax Manchurica" that followed the Kangxi consolidation made the Qing unprepared to face aggressive European powers with modern weaponry in the nineteenth century.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Although only nineteen empresses and consorts are recorded for the Shunzhi Emperor in the Aisin Gioro genealogy made by the Imperial Clan Court, burial records show that he had at least thirty-two of them. Twelve bore him children. There were two empresses in his reign, both relatives of his mother the empress dowager. After the 1644 conquest, imperial consorts and empresses were usually known by their titles and by the name of their patrilineal clan.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Eleven of the Shunzhi Emperor's 32 spouses bore him a total of fourteen children, but only four sons (Fuquan, Xuanye, Changning, and Longxi) and one daughter (Princess Gongque) lived to be old enough to marry. Unlike later Qing emperors, the names of the Shunzhi Emperor's sons did not include a generational character.


title: Shunzhi Emperor

text: Before the Qing court moved to Beijing in 1644, Manchu women used to have personal names, but after 1644 these names "disappear from the genealogical and archival records." Only after their betrothal were imperial daughters given a title and rank, by which they then became known. Although five of the Shunzhi Emperor's six daughters died in infancy or childhood, they all appear in the Aisin Gioro genealogy.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts is an international semi-luxury hotel chain owned by Marriott International. As of June 30, 2020, Sheraton operates 446 hotels with 155,617 rooms globally, including locations in North America, Africa, Asia Pacific, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East and the Caribbean, in addition to 84 hotels with 23,092 rooms in the pipeline.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: The origins of Sheraton Hotels date to 1933, when Harvard classmates Ernest Henderson and Robert Moore purchased the Continental Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1937, Henderson and Moore purchased the Standard Investing Corporation and the International Equities Corporation, combining them into the Standard Equities Corporation, the company through which they would run their hotels. Also in 1937, they purchased their second hotel, and the first as part of the new company, the Stonehaven Hotel in Springfield, Massachusetts, a converted apartment building. Sheraton dates its founding to that year and considers that property its first hotel.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: The chain got its name from the third hotel the pair acquired, in Boston, in 1939. It had a large lighted sign on the roof saying "Sheraton Hotel," which was too expensive to change. Instead, Henderson and Moore decided to call all of their hotels by that name.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: Henderson and Moore purchased Boston's famed Copley Plaza Hotel in 1941, and continued expanding rapidly, buying existing properties along the East Coast from Maine to Florida.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1946, the Standard Equities Corporation merged with the United States Realty and Improvement Corporation, forming the Sheraton Corporation of America, which became the first hotel chain to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1947.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1949, Sheraton expanded internationally, buying the Ford Hotels chain, with three properties in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. They quickly resold the Toronto and Ottawa properties to finance their continued Canadian expansion in 1950, paying $4.8 million to purchase Cardy Hotels, a chain of six properties in Ontario and Quebec.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1956, Sheraton paid $30 million to buy the Eppley Hotel Company, which was then the largest privately held hotel business in the United States, with 22 properties across six Midwestern states. Sheraton retained ten of the largest hotels and immediately resold the other twelve. That same year, Sheraton acquired its first motels, purchasing two properties in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1957, Sheraton, which had previously focused on acquiring existing hotels, opened its first newly built hotel, the Philadelphia Sheraton Hotel.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1958, Sheraton became the first hotel chain to centralize and computerize its reservations when it introduced "Reservatron", the hotel industry's first automatic electronic reservations system.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1959, Sheraton acquired its first properties outside North America, purchasing four hotels owned by the Matson Lines on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii - the Moana Hotel, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the SurfRider Hotel, and the Princess Kaiulani Hotel. That same year Sheraton opened its first newly built motel, marketed as a "Highway Hotel," the Sheraton Inn, located in Binghamton, New York.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: The early 1960s saw the arrival of the first Sheraton hotels outside the US and Canada, with the opening of the Sheraton-Tel Aviv Hotel in Israel in March 1961 and two Caribbean properties in 1962 - the Sheraton-Kingston Hotel in Jamaica and the Sheraton-British Colonial Hotel in Nassau, Bahamas.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1962, Sheraton created a franchise division, primarily to operate Sheraton Motor Inns, large highway motels providing free parking.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1963, Sheraton opened its first hotel in South America, the Macuto-Sheraton Hotel, outside Caracas, Venezuela.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1967, Sheraton unveiled "Reservatron II", a computer system for personalized reservations. That same year, Sheraton opened its first hotel in Asia, the Sheraton-Philippines Hotel in Manila; its first hotel in Europe, the Sheraton-Du Cap Hotel on the island of Corsica in France; and its first hotels in Australia, two Sheraton Motor Hotels in Melbourne and Sydney.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: The multinational conglomerate ITT purchased the chain in 1968. That same year, ITT sold eighteen aging Sheraton properties. Under ITT's ownership, Sheraton quickly moved away from ownership and operation of its properties to a new model of franchising and management, as the chain expanded greatly both in the US and abroad.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In late 1969, Sheraton introduced the hotel industry's first nationwide toll-free number, which displaced two hundred local Sheraton reservation numbers. The radio jingle for "Eight-Oh-Oh, Three-Two-Five, Three-Five Three-Five" "ran throughout the decade and into the eighties" but the jingle's lifespan went even beyond.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1970, Sheraton introduced the Sheraton Towers concept, a line of luxury "hotel-within-a-hotel" facilities designed for business travelers and located within Sheraton's largest and most exclusive hotels. The first Sheraton Towers to open was in the chain's flagship Sheraton-Boston Hotel. That same year, Sheraton opened its first hotel in North Africa, the Cario-Sheraton Hotel & Casino.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1971, Sheraton opened its first hotels in Continental Europe, the Sheraton-Stockholm Hotel and the Sheraton-Copenhagen Hotel.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1972, Sheraton opened its first hotel in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Sheraton-Mont Febe Palace in Yaounde, Cameroon.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1985, Sheraton became the first western chain to operate a hotel bearing the name of an international companyin the People's Republic of China, when it assumed management of the Great Wall Hotel in Beijing, a financially troubled two-year-old Chinese-American joint venture, which became the Great Wall Sheraton.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: By 1987, "The New York Times" described it as "50 years old, the world's largest hotel chain, and .. consumer-driven."


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: On January 13, 1992, ITT Sheraton designated 28 of its premier hotels and 33 of the Sheraton Towers as the ITT Sheraton Luxury Collection. The flagship of the division was The St Regis in New York City.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1994, ITT Sheraton purchased a controlling interest in the Italian CIGA chain, the Compagnia Italiana Grandi Alberghi, or Italian Grand Hotels Company. The chain had begun by operating hotels in Italy, but over-expanded across Europe just as a recession hit, and had been seized from its previous owner, the Aga Khan, by its creditors. The majority of these hotels were placed in the ITT Sheraton Luxury Collection, though a few were placed in the Sheraton division.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In April 1995, ITT Sheraton introduced a new, mid-range hotel brand, Four Points by Sheraton, to replace the designation of certain hotels as Sheraton Inns.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 1998, Starwood acquired ITT Sheraton for $13.3 billion, topping an offer by rival Hilton. Under Starwood's leadership, Sheraton began renovating many hotels and expanding the brand's footprint.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: Starwood also began marketing The Luxury Collection as a completely separate brand, even though it contained a large number of hotels still named Sheraton. Most of those properties have since been renamed. Only three such hotels remain today - Sheraton Addis in (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit in (Bangkok, Thailand), and Sheraton Kuwait in (Kuwait City, Kuwait).


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: Also in 1998, Sheraton joined with the Arabella Hospitality Group in Germany to create ArabellaSheraton, a joint venture under which 14 Arabella Hotels in Germany, Switzerland and Spain were rebranded as ArabellaSheraton Hotels.


title: Sheraton Hotels and Resorts

text: In 2016, Marriott International purchased Starwood Hotels, and the newly merged company again became the world's largest hotel and resort company. Although the Sheraton brand expresses quality in Asia, aging properties have made the US market more problematic.


title: Lipid profile

text: A lipid profile or lipid panel is a panel of blood tests used to find abnormalities in lipids, such as cholesterol and triglycerides. The results of this test can identify certain genetic diseases and can determine approximate risks for cardiovascular disease, certain forms of pancreatitis, and other diseases.


title: Lipid profile

text: Lipid panels are usually ordered as part of a physical exam, along with other panels such as the complete blood count (CBC) and basic metabolic panel (BMP).


title: Lipid profile

text: Recommendations for cholesterol testing come from the Adult Treatment Panel (ATP) III guidelines, and are based on many large clinical studies, such as the Framingham Heart Study.


title: Lipid profile

text: For healthy adults with no cardiovascular risk factors, the ATP III guidelines recommend screening once every five years. A lipid profile may also be ordered at regular intervals to evaluate the success of lipid-lowering drugs such as statins.


title: Lipid profile

text: In the pediatric and adolescent population, lipid testing is not routinely performed. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) recommend that children aged 9–11 be screened once for severe cholesterol abnormalities. This screening can be valuable to detect genetic diseases such as familial hypercholesterolemia that can be lethal if not treated early.


title: Lipid profile

text: Traditionally, most laboratories have required patients to fast for 9–12 hours before screening. However, studies have questioned the utility of fasting before lipid panels, and some diagnostic labs routinely accept non-fasting samples.


title: Lipid profile

text: Typically the laboratory measures only three quantities: total cholesterol; HDL; Triglycerides. From these three data LDL may be calculated. According to Friedewald's equation:


title: Lipid profile

text: Other calculations of LDL from those same three data have been proposed which yield some significantly different results.


title: Lipid profile

text: VLDL can be defined as the total cholesterol that is neither HDL nor LDL. With that definition, Friedewald's equation yields:


title: Lipid profile

text: This test is used to identify dyslipidemia (various disturbances of cholesterol and triglyceride levels), many forms of which are recognized risk factors for cardiovascular disease and rarely pancreatitis.


title: Lipid profile

text: A total cholesterol reading can be used to assess an individual's risk for heart disease; however, it should not be relied upon as the only indicator. The individual components that make up total cholesterol reading—LDL, HDL, and VLDL—are also important in measuring risk.


title: Lipid profile

text: For instance, someone's total cholesterol may be high, but this may be due to very high HDL ("good cholesterol") cholesterol levels,—which can help prevent heart disease (the test is mainly concerned with high LDL, or "bad cholesterol" levels). So, while a high total cholesterol level may help give an indication that there is a problem with cholesterol levels, the components that make up total cholesterol should also be measured.


title: Evan Dando

text: Evan Griffith Dando (born March 4, 1967) is an American musician and frontman of the Lemonheads. He has also embarked on a solo career and collaborated on songs with various artists. In December 2015 Dando was inducted into the Boston Music Awards Hall of Fame.


title: Evan Dando

text: Dando was born in Essex, Massachusetts, on Boston's North Shore, to Susan, a former fashion model, and Jeffrey, who worked as a real estate attorney. At the age of nine, his family moved from Essex to Boston; his parents divorced two years later. In his teens Dando attended Commonwealth School in Boston. In the fall of 1986 he enrolled at Skidmore College but dropped out after getting "four Fs and a D."


title: Evan Dando

text: While at Commonwealth, Dando met Ben Deily and Jesse Peretz, and in 1986 they formed the Whelps before changing their name to Lemonheads, like that of the candy manufactured by Ferrara Pan. The Lemonheads debuted at the Meltdown House in Cambridge on July 18, 1986, followed by a show at The Rat on August 19. The band recorded an EP, "Laughing All the Way to the Cleaners", which got the attention of Taang! Records, a local label. The Lemonheads' first three albums, "Hate Your Friends", "Creator", and "Lick", were all released on Taang!


title: Evan Dando

text: Following the third album, Dando left the group briefly after some tension with Deily, and joined Juliana Hatfield's band Blake Babies. However, he returned as a drummer when The Lemonheads' cover of Suzanne Vega's song "Luka" became successful, and the group had an opportunity to tour Europe. Deily, however, quit the band shortly before the tour, which placed Dando as the guitarist and lead vocalist. Dando brought in David Ryan on drums, and the group signed with major label Atlantic Records, where it released the album "Lovey" in 1990. The album straddled punk, rock, country, and metal, and sold about 9,000-11,000 copies.


title: Evan Dando

text: Dando spent some time in Australia to write songs with friends Nic Dalton and Tom Morgan, who later started the band Sneeze. Some of his songs formed the basis for The Lemonheads' fifth album, "It's a Shame About Ray". In 1992, The Lemonheads recorded a punk-inflected cover of Simon and Garfunkel's hit "Mrs. Robinson" to help promote the VHS release of "The Graduate" film for its 25th anniversary. The song reached number 19 on the UK Singles Chart in December 1992, and was included in the album's re-release as a bonus track. Dando initially disliked the song inclusion on the album, feeling like he was tricked by his label, who asked him to record it. But after seeing the track being played in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, his opinions towards the track changed. Dando's face appeared on several magazine covers, and "People" listed him among the "50 Most Beautiful People". In an interview with "Q" magazine, he admitted he smoked crack cocaine and regretted it. In late 1993, the group released the album "Come on Feel the Lemonheads", which featured singles "It's About Time", "Big Gay Heart", and "Into Your Arms". During the group's touring in 1994, Dando befriended Oasis and appeared at some of their live shows. He also made a cameo appearance at the end of the 1994 film "Reality Bites" with Karen Duffy.


title: Evan Dando

text: Dando re-formed The Lemonheads with former member John Strohm on guitar, Bill Gibson, former bassist of Australian band The Eastern Dark, and Patrick Murphy, a former member of Dinosaur Jr., on drums. The group released the album "Car Button Cloth" in 1996. The album featured "jangly guitar songs" such as "If I Could Talk I'd Tell You," and some writing that showed off Dando's darker side in "Break Me" and "Losing Your Mind". In 1997 the band went on tour and played its final gig at the Reading Festival, after which the band went on hiatus.


title: Evan Dando

text: In 2005, Dando put together a new lineup for The Lemonheads which included Karl Alvarez and Bill Stevenson, formerly of the pop-punk pioneering band, the Descendents. In April 2006, they signed with Vagrant Records, and released a self-titled album in September. Dando also had a lineup which included bassist Vess Ruhtenberg and drummer Devon Ashley of the Pieces where they toured the UK, Europe and the United States. In late 2007, Alvarez and Stevenson toured with Dando for the first time live on the US tour. In 2008, he toured with Ruhtenberg and Ashley to promote the re-release of a deluxe version of "It's a Shame About Ray", and then toured with Ruhtenberg and drummer P. David Hazel of Beta Male for a European Tour. On April 23, 2008 at the inaugural "NME" US Awards ceremony held at the El Rey in Los Angeles, Dando received a Classic Album award for "It's A Shame About Ray", although "Entertainment Weekly" reported that he threw the award in the garbage offstage, and then returned to perform "Ray" and "My Drug Buddy".


title: Evan Dando

text: In 2009 the Lemonheads released "Varshons", a collection of 11 covers, including tracks originally recorded by Gram Parsons, Wire, GG Allin, Christina Aguilera; the album featured vocal performances by actress Liv Tyler and model Kate Moss. For many of the tours since 2010, The Lemonheads have included the entire "It's a Shame About Ray" album on the setlist.


title: Evan Dando

text: Dando worked with Australian musicians Nic Dalton and Tom Morgan, both of whom have been involved with The Lemonheads. In Sydney, he joined Dalton, Morgan, and a number of Half A Cow artists on a self-titled album by the band Sneeze and the album "Coastal" by Godstar. Dando participated in the Australian band the Givegoods, which featured Paul Dempsey of Something for Kate.


title: Evan Dando

text: Dando has worked regularly with Juliana Hatfield where he appeared on several Blake Babies songs and she in turn played with The Lemonheads. In Blake Babies, Dando wrote on tracks and provided supporting music and vocals on the "Slow Learner" album, released in 1989. He also collaborated on Hatfield's album "Hey Babe", released in 1994. In 1999, he recorded a duet with Hatfield for the 1999 album, "". The two sang Gram Parsons' "$1000 Wedding". Their long-time relationship inspired a line in the Barenaked Ladies' song "Jane": "No promises as vague as heaven. No Juliana next to my Evan". In late 2000, Dando sang with the Blake Babies and played some acoustic shows with them. In 2011, Dando and Hatfield paired up again for a series of live performances.


title: Evan Dando

text: In 1995, he had a small role in James Mangold's indie film "Heavy", and contributed two songs to the soundtrack.


title: Evan Dando

text: During an acoustic world tour in early 2001, Dando garnered renewed interest in his back catalog. With touring musicians Ben Lee and Ben Kweller, he performed a mix of Lemonheads songs and solo songs. His performance at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge on October 18, 2000, was recorded and officially released in the fall of 2001 as "Live at the Brattle Theatre"; the album was packaged with an additional disc, an EP titled "Griffith Sunset" that featured covers of country songs.


title: Evan Dando

text: In February 2003 Dando released his first solo album, "Baby I'm Bored", which reached the top 40 of the UK Albums chart.


title: Evan Dando

text: In 2004, Dando performed as the lead vocalist for the band MC5 on a 41-show tour. He has collaborated with The Dandy Warhols and soundtrack composer Craig Armstrong. At the All Tomorrow's Parties' Don't Look Back festival, Dando played several live dates, including a full performance of the "It's A Shame About Ray" album.


title: Evan Dando

text: While taking a break from making music with/as the Lemonheads, Dando met English model and musician Elizabeth Moses in 1998; they married two years later. Moses contributed photography to Dando's albums "Live at the Brattle Theatre" and "Baby I'm Bored" as well as the Lemonheads' 2006 eponymous album and its 2009 follow-up, "Varshons", on which her backing vocals can be heard on the song "Fragile." Moses and Dando separated in 2010. On February 13, 2019, Dando appeared on an episode of "The Goldbergs" called "My Valentine Boy”. In the episode, he was played by Luke Eisner. In the episode he played guitar with The Dropouts, a band starring Adam Goldberg’s fictional older sister.


title: Augustine Washington

text: Augustine Washington Sr. (November 12, 1694 – April 12, 1743) was the father of the first U.S. president, George Washington. He served as an officer in the British Navy during the War of Jenkin's Ear although he belonged to the Colony of Virginia's landed gentry. Like his father and sons, Washington owned plantations which he operated by the use of enslaved labor, as well as speculated in less developed land and even operated an iron mine. Although Washington did not serve as a legislator (unlike his father and son), he held various offices in the counties in which he held land.


title: Augustine Washington

text: Augustine Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on November 12, 1694, to Mildred Warner and her husband, Capt. Lawrence Washington, a militia captain and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. His paternal grandparents were Lt. Col. John Washington (c. 1631–1677) and his first wife, Anne Pope. His maternal grandparents owned Warner Hall and associated plantations in Gloucester County.


title: Augustine Washington

text: Augustine was four years old when his father died. His mother remarried and moved her family to England, where she died when all were still children; although their mother's will named their stepfather George Gale as their guardian, their cousin John Washington fought to have himself named the children's guardian and brought them back to Virginia.


title: Augustine Washington

text: When Washington came of age (and into his inheritance) in 1715, he married Jane Butler, another orphan, who had inherited about from her father, Caleb Butler. The young couple settled on the Bridges Creek property and had four children, only two of whom (Lawrence and Augustine Jr.) lived to adulthood. After Jane's death in November 1728 or 1729, Washington married Mary Ball in 1731, and the couple had five children: George, Betty, Samuel, Charles, and John Augustine.


title: Augustine Washington

text: When he reached legal age in 1715, Augustine Washington inherited about on Bridges Creek in Westmoreland County; his sister Mildred inherited what was called the Little Hunting Creek property; they both inherited slaves. In 1718, Washington purchased land on Pope's Creek, adjoining his property on Bridges Creek, and set about establishing himself. Between 1723 and 1735 he hired a local contractor to build a house, which was probably completed about 1726 despite the contractors death (later called Wakefield). In the same year, Washington purchased the Little Hunting Creek property from his sister Mildred.


title: Augustine Washington

text: In 1725, Augustine Washington entered into an agreement with the Principio Company of England to start an iron works on Accokeek Creek in Stafford County, and he also owned a stake in their Maryland ironworks. In 1735, the family moved to the Little Hunting Creek property, which was closer to the Accokeek Furnace.


title: Augustine Washington

text: In 1738, Augustine Washington purchased the 150-acre Strother property across the Rappahannock River (now known as Ferry Farm) and moved the family there at the end of that same year.


title: Augustine Washington

text: Augustine Washington was active in the Anglican Church, the local militia and politics. He took the oath as justice of the peace for the Westmoreland county court in July 1716, and served as county sheriff.


title: Augustine Washington

text: After Augustine Washington died in 1743 at the age of 48, his 11-year old son George inherited the former Strother property and its slaves. Because he had not reached legal age, his mother Mary managed this property for him until he came of age. She lived on the property until 1772 when she was 64, when George moved her to a house in Fredericksburg.


title: Augustine Washington

text: Lawrence Washington inherited the Little Hunting Creek property and renamed it "Mount Vernon," to honor Admiral Edward Vernon, with whom he had served in the Royal Navy in 1741 during the Battle of Cartagena de Indias during the War of Jenkins' Ear.


title: Augustine Washington

text: According to Augustine Sr's will, if his son Lawrence died without children, the Little Hunting Creek property would go to Augustine Jr. and Augustine Jr, in turn, would have to give up the Popes Creek property to his brother George. If Augustine Jr. did not want the Little Hunting Creek property, it would then be inherited by George. Upon Lawrence's death Augustine Jr. chose Popes Creek and its slaves rather than the former Little Hunting Creek property. Lawrence's only surviving child Sarah only lived until 1754; therefore, George Washington ultimately inherited the Little Hunting Creek property which by that time was known as Mount Vernon. At his death, Augustine Washington Sr. held a total of 64 slaves who were assigned among the various plantations.


title: Augustine Washington

text: Lawrence Washington's widow Ann had a life interest in the Little Hunting Creek plantation. Because she remarried and was not living at Mount Vernon, she leased the property to George beginning in 1754. Upon her death in 1761, George Washington inherited the plantation outright.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is an Inner London borough with royal status. It is the smallest borough in London and the second smallest district in England; it is one of the most densely populated administrative regions in the United Kingdom. It includes affluent areas such as Notting Hill, Kensington, South Kensington, Chelsea, and Knightsbridge.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The borough is immediately west of the City of Westminster and east of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. It contains major museums and universities in Albertopolis, department stores such as Harrods, Peter Jones and Harvey Nichols, and embassies in Belgravia, Knightsbridge and Kensington Gardens. The borough is home to the Notting Hill Carnival, Europe's largest, and contains many of the most expensive residential properties in the world, as well as Kensington Palace, a British royal residence.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The local authority is Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council. Its motto, adapted from the opening words of Psalm 133, is , which translates roughly as 'How good it is to dwell in unity'.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The borough was formed by the merger of the Royal Borough of Kensington and the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea, under the London Government Act 1963, which reorganised 86 boroughs and urban districts into 32 London boroughs on 1 April 1965 together with the creation of the Greater London Council.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The new borough was originally intended to be called only "Kensington", but after protests from thousands of Chelsea residents, the then Minister of Housing and Local Government, Sir Keith Joseph, announced on 2 January 1964 that the name of the new borough would be the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Of its history the council states: "Despite the boroughs being separate originally, Kensington and Chelsea still retain their unique characters. Even the amalgamation of the two boroughs, unpopular as it was at the time, has been accepted. Today conservation combined with the adoption of sympathetic new architecture is seen as a key objective. In every corner of the borough signs of its history can be seen: from Grade 1 listed buildings Kensington Palace and the Royal Hospital, Chelsea to others recalled in street names such as Pottery Lane and Hippodrome Mews."


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: In 200 years the area has been transformed from a "rural idyll" to a thriving part of the modern metropolis. Chelsea had originally been countryside upon which Thomas More built Beaufort House. He came to Chelsea in 1520 and built the house, which in his day had two courtyards laid out between the house and the river, and in the north of the site acres of gardens and orchards were planted. It was from here in 1535 that More was taken to the Tower and beheaded later that year. This area of Cheyne Walk continued its historic significance; nearby Crosby Hall sits on the river near the Church of Thomas More, and what was once Thomas Carlyle's residence remains on Cheyne Row.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Kensington's royal borough status was granted in 1901 as it was the home of Kensington Palace, where Queen Victoria was born in 1819 and lived until her accession in 1837. Commissioned by King William III, Christopher Wren enlarged and rebuilt the original house in 1689, turning it into a fitting royal residence. With the King came many court officials, servants and followers. Kensington Square, until then a failing venture, became a popular residential area. The Palace was regularly used by reigning monarchs until 1760 and since then by members of the Royal family. Kensington's royal borough status was inherited by the new borough.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: In the 19th century, the last emperor of the Sikh Empire, Maharaja Duleep Singh who was brought to England as a child following the Second Anglo-Sikh War, along with the Koh-i-noor diamond, lived in the borough at 53 Holland Park, while his mother Maharani Jind Kaur (wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh) lived at the nearby Abingdon House till her death in 1846.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: During the Second World War, civilians suffered great hardship; there were some 800 deaths and 40,000 injuries. A huge army of civilian volunteers was raised, including Auxiliary Fire Service, Red Cross, Air Raid Wardens and Rescue Services. During the Blitz much damage was caused by explosive and incendiary bombs, especially along Chelsea's riverside. But worse was to come in 1944 with the arrival of the V2 rockets, or flying bombs. Among the buildings either destroyed or seriously damaged, usually with terrible loss of life, were Chelsea Old Church, Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer, Our Lady of Victories, St Mary Abbots, St Stephens Hospital, St Mary Abbots Hospital, Sloane Square tube station, World's End, the Royal Hospital and Holland House.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Kensington and Chelsea is perhaps best known today for two events that demonstrate both their traditional and modern aspects. The Chelsea Flower Show, held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital every May, is attended by Royalty and the "cream of society"; and the Notting Hill Carnival, held every August Bank Holiday on the streets of North Kensington, has grown over the past 30 years from a small community-based event into Europe's biggest and most exuberant street party, attracting a million plus visitors.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The borough may be split into the following districts; these differ from the council's electoral wards:


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: At the 2011 census, the borough had a population of 158,649 who were 71% White, 10% Asian, 5% of multiple ethnic groups, 4% Black African and 3% Black Caribbean. It is the least populated of the 32 London boroughs. Due to its high French population it has long held the unofficial title of the 21st arrondissement of Paris.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: In 2005, the borough had more of its land covered by domestic buildings than anywhere else in England at 19%, over half the national average. It also had the fifth highest proportion of land covered by non-domestic buildings at 12%.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: As of 2010, statistics released by the Office for National Statistics showed that life expectancy at birth for females was 89.8 years in 2008–2010, the highest in the United Kingdom. Male life expectancy at birth for the same period was 85.1 years. The figures in 1991–1993 were significantly lower: 73.0 years for males (ranking 301st in the nation) and 80.0 for females (ranking 129th). Further investigation indicates a 12-year gap in life expectancy between the affluent wards of Chelsea (Royal Hospital, Hans Town) and the most northerly wards of North Kensington (Golborne, Dalgarno), which have high levels of social housing and poverty.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The borough has a higher proportion (16.6%) of high earners (over £60,000 per year) than any other local government district in the country. It has the highest proportion of workers in the financial sector and the lowest proportion working in the retail sector.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: In December 2006, Sport England published a survey which showed that the borough's residents were the fourth most active in England in sports and other fitness activities. 27.9% of the population participate at least three times a week for 30 minutes.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: A 2017 study by Trust for London and the New Policy Institute found that Kensington & Chelsea has the greatest income inequality of any London Borough. Private rent for low earners was also found to be the least affordable in London. However, the borough's poverty rate of 28% is roughly in line with the London-wide average.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The following table shows the ethnic group of respondents in the 2001 and 2011 census in Kensington and Chelsea.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: As of 2018, the council has 36 Conservative, 13 Labour and 1 Liberal Democrat councillors. The first past the post electoral system is used. The Labour or Liberal councillors have tended to represent the economically diverse areas of the borough; some marginal wards are concentrated towards the north, where north Kensington meets Kilburn, Kensal Rise/Green and Ladbroke Grove. Wealthy white areas, including all the wards in Holland Park, (parts of) Notting Hill, Kensington, South Kensington, and Chelsea, have been safe Conservative seats since the council's creation in 1965.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The borough has combined a number of services and departments with its neighbours, Hammersmith & Fulham and Westminster City Council.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The borough is divided between two constituencies represented in the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom:


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Rifkind held the Kensington seat until the 2015 General Election when he stood down after becoming embroiled in a scandal, uncovered by a television investigation, over accepting money in return for access to influential British diplomats and politicians.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Three of the more notable council leaders were Nicholas Freeman, from 1977 until 1989, Sir Merrick Cockell who held the position from 2000 to 2013., and Elizabeth Campbell, from 2017 in the wake of the Grenfell Tower Tragedy to the present day.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: with stations at South Kensington, Gloucester Road, High Street Kensington, Earl's Court, Sloane Square, West Brompton, Notting Hill Gate, Holland Park, Latimer Road, Knightsbridge, Westbourne Park and Ladbroke Grove.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Chelsea (SW3, SW10 and partly SW1) has significantly less Underground access than Kensington, the only station within Chelsea being Sloane Square. There have for some time been long-term plans for a Chelsea-Hackney line, with a station in the King's Road near Chelsea Town Hall, and possibly another at Sloane Square. As of June 2019, the plans for Crossrail 2 materialising show the proposed route tunnelling through Chelsea and featuring a station on the site of Dovehouse Green. The future of this station, being the only fully new station on the proposed line, remains ambiguous; initial scrapping of the station idea have been decried by withstanding placement of the station on official Transport for London information on the route.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: A Crossrail station on the original Crossrail route, from Paddington to Reading, has been proposed and endorsed by the council. This station would be located near the northern end of Ladbroke Grove, and would serve the areas of North Kensington and Kensal. The council supports this station concept as it would renew infrastructure and build regeneration benefits in the area.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Paddington and Victoria are the nearest major railway termini; National Rail stations in the borough are Kensington (Olympia) and West Brompton (and partly Kensal Green), both served by London Overground and Southern.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Many London bus routes pass through the borough, most of them along King's Road, Fulham Road, Kensington High Street and Ladbroke Grove.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Kensington and Chelsea council has been criticised for its lack of support for cycle lanes and active travel in general. In 2019 the council vetoed a flagship programme by TfL for safer walking and cycling in the borough. In 2020 it scrapped a cycle lane along Kensington High Street just seven weeks after it was installed.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: In March 2011, the main forms of transport that residents used to travel to work were: underground, metro, light rail, tram, 23.6% of all residents aged 16–74; driving a car or van, 8.2%; on foot, 8.2%; bus, minibus or coach, 8.0%; work mainly at or from home, 7.0%; bicycle, 3.1%; train, 2.1%.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The RBKC is a major provider of social housing in the borough owning 9,459 properties. Of these over 73% are tenanted, with the remainder being leasehold. The management of this housing was devolved to the Kensington and Chelsea TMO (KCTMO), a tenant management organisation. Properties included Trellick Tower.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, in which a public-housing tower block was completely destroyed, with the loss of 72 lives, drew international attention to the borough. After widespread criticism of the borough council's response to the fire, responsibility for providing services to those affected by the fire was taken away from RBKC. Prime Minister Theresa May previously branded the response to the tragedy "not good enough", with Whitehall civil servants drafted in as part of a beefed-up operation in the local area.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Prof Anna Stec who gave evidence as an expert witness to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has urged the authorities to test rescue workers, nearby residents and survivors for carcinogenic chemicals following the fire.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The following shows the religious identity of residents residing in Kensington and Chelsea according to the 2001, 2011 and the 2021 censuses.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: It is home to a small Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, several mosques and the Sikh Central Gurudwara in Holland Park. There are two Armenian churches - Saint Sarkis Armenian Church and Church of Saint Yeghiche. Westminster Synagogue is also partially located in the borough.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: London's Poverty Profile - a 2017 study by Trust for London and the New Policy Institute - found that 75% of 19-year-olds in Kensington and Chelsea have at least a C in their GCSE English and Maths. This is the highest success rate in London.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: Libraries include the Kensington Central Library, Chelsea Library, Kensal Library, Brompton Library, North Kensington Library and the Notting Hill Gate Library.


title: Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

text: The following people and military units have received the Freedom of Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: She's Funny That Way (originally titled Squirrels to the Nuts) is a 2014 screwball comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and co-written with Louise Stratten. It stars Owen Wilson, Imogen Poots, Kathryn Hahn, Will Forte, Rhys Ifans, and Jennifer Aniston. It marked the first feature film Bogdanovich directed in 13 years since "The Cat's Meow" and the final non-documentary feature he directed before his death in 2022.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: It received a limited release in the United States and was released through video on demand on August 21, 2015, by Lionsgate Premiere.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: Broadway director Arnold Albertson—under the alias "Derek"—hires "Glo Stick", a call girl whose real name is Izzy Finklestein, despite being married with two children. Izzy dreams of becoming an actress, and "Derek" offers her $30,000 to quit being a call girl and pursue her true goal. She is not the first escort he has done this for. Lead actor Seth Gilbert sees Arnold kissing Izzy as she leaves his hotel room.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: Arnold's wife Delta Simmons is the star of his new play "A Grecian Evening". Izzy, keeping her promise to "Derek", shows up to audition for a part in the play as a call girl, unaware that Derek/Arnold is the director. Impressed, playwright Joshua Fleet becomes attracted to Izzy and invites her out to dinner, despite the fact that he is dating Jane Claremont, who happens to be Izzy's therapist. Meanwhile, Judge Pendergast is another client of Izzy's, and also a patient of Jane. He is obsessed with Izzy, and hires private investigator Harold Fleet, who happens to be Joshua's father, to follow her.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: After the auditions, everyone ends up at the same Italian restaurant. Harold sees Izzy with his son Joshua. Jane arrives with her client Judge Pendergast—who both see Joshua with Izzy. Jane punches Joshua in the face and storms out the restaurant, quickly pursued by Judge Pendergast. Izzy sees Arnold and tries to escape out of the bathroom window, but Delta catches her and brings her back into the restaurant. Izzy's cover is almost blown when Seth arrives with a co-worker of Izzy's.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: Although Arnold is initially unsure, Izzy is eventually given the role. While shopping, Delta discovers that Arnold has been hiring escorts when Margie, another former escort Arnold helped, thanks him profusely and indiscreetly. Joshua learns about Izzy when Judge Pendergast confronts the two of them while they are on a date; she runs off before he can talk to her. Arnold invites Izzy back to his hotel room to talk. Delta turns to Seth, who has long professed his love for her, for comfort, but finds another call girl hiding in his bathroom. She then storms into Arnold's room, only to find Izzy hiding in his bathroom.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: Everyone shows up to the first table read the next day, despite the tension. Delta makes a point of kissing Seth passionately while rehearsing. Izzy's father shows up looking for the men who paid his daughter for sex. Jane shows up to cause a scene, and identifies Arnold, Seth, and Joshua as Izzy's clients. During the commotion, Seth and Jane catch each others' eye.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: The play opens to great acclaim. In an interview some time later, Izzy says that it closed in a week because wives from Long Island are not interested in seeing a play about call girls. Nevertheless, she caught the attention of a man from Hollywood, and has achieved success as a film actress since. She and Joshua broke up; she is now dating Quentin Tarantino. Seth and Jane are still dating. Judge Pendergast was arrested for solicitation. His wife is now dating Harold Fleet. Arnold now works for a charity giving large sums of money to women's causes.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: "She's Funny That Way" originated from a script written by director Peter Bogdanovich and ex-wife Louise Stratten around 1999 and 2000. Bogdanovich and Stratten, who were in financial distress at the time trying to buy back "They All Laughed" (1981), decided to write a comedy to uplift their spirits. While writing the script, Bogdanovich was inspired by an incident in Singapore during the time he was filming "Saint Jack" in 1978, where he was able to talk to many prostitutes after hiring them for his film. He would give them more money than their salary for them to leave the prostitution business. The script was originally titled "Squirrels to the Nuts", but due to many people misinterpreting it as a children's film, Bogdanovich changed it to "She's Funny That Way". ("Squirrels to the Nuts" is a line used frequently in the film, lifted from the 1946 film "Cluny Brown".) Bogdanovich originally wrote the role of Arnold Albertson for John Ritter, but due to his death, he shelved the project. Bogdanovich later became friends with Owen Wilson, introduced to him by Wes Anderson, and he decided to change aspects of the character of Albertson: all of the physical gags intended for Ritter were changed to verbal jokes to suit Wilson. In 2010, Bogdanovich's protégés—Anderson and Noah Baumbach—offered their backing to get the film made, agreeing to serve as executive producers.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: When the script was originally written, Bogdanovich envisioned John Ritter, Cybill Shepherd and co-writer Louise Stratten in the lead roles. In 2012, when the film was officially announced, Wilson, Brie Larson, and Olivia Wilde were signed on in lead roles. Larson was to play the call girl-turned-ingenue actress and Wilde would play the role of her therapist. Jason Schwartzman was also rumored to be in negotiations to play Wilde's playwright boyfriend. Due to production delays, Wilson is the only actor to remain with the project. In February 2013, it was announced that Jennifer Aniston would replace Wilde in the role of the therapist, the same time Kathryn Hahn, Cybill Shepherd, and Eugene Levy were announced as cast members. Aniston was initially offered the part of Delta Simmons, Arnold Albertson's wife, but she favored the role of the therapist, in which she was cast. Despite the commencement of filming on July 11, 2013, Imogen Poots and Richard Lewis were announced for roles of the ingenue and her father on July 22, with Will Forte taking the role of a playwright two days later. The same week, the casting of Joanna Lumley, Debi Mazar, Rhys Ifans, Lucy Punch, Ahna O'Reilly, and Jake Hoffman was set.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: On July 15, 2014, Edward Shearmur was hired to score the music for the film, replacing Stephen Endelman, who had already recorded music for the film by the time of the announcement.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: "She's Funny That Way" premiered at the 71st Venice International Film Festival on August 29, 2014. On September 12, it was bought by Clarius Entertainment at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival. A screening at the Tokyo International Film Festival was scheduled for late October. In January 2015, the film was screened to the Palm Springs International Film Festival.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: The film was originally scheduled for a May 1, 2015, release in theaters nationwide, but Clarius Entertainment pulled the film from the schedule. However, on June 2, 2015, Lionsgate Premiere acquired the film after Clarius Entertainment dropped the film for unknown reasons. The film was released in the United States on August 21, 2015, in select theaters and through video on demand.


title: She's Funny That Way (film)

text: In 2020, a copy of Bogdanovich's original cut of the film, still titled "Squirrels to the Nuts," was found on eBay. In the wake of Bogdanovich's death in January 2022, the cut was shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art beginning on March 28, 2022.