Liang and Yang were the names of two commanderies to the southwest of Ch'ang-an; Yang is the modern Yang county, Shensi, and Liang, the administrative center of Shan-nan West circuit, also known as Hsing-yuan, on the borders of Shensi and Szechuan.

The dawn of the oil age was fairly recent. Although the stuff was used to waterproof boats in the Middle East 6,000 years ago, extracting it in earnest began only in 1859 after an oil strike in Pennsylvania.[…]It was used to make kerosene, the main fuel for artificial lighting after overfishing led to a shortage of whale blubber. Other liquids produced in the refining process, too unstable or smoky for lamplight, were burned or dumped.

The Kyoto Protocol proposes other issues, such as adaptation, complementarity, capacity-building and other climatespeak that would boggle people not in the know.

Nor would there be an opportunity for the media's favorite pastime of exposing conflict among his advisors.