We're building an exciting new information source all about China. We found other sites were poorly structured, too detailed (such as Wikipedia) or just too old-fashioned. What we thought was needed was a carefully constructed set of pages with strict editorial control so that links and pages are consistent, up-to-date and easy to navigate without clutter.
The name “Chinasage” came about because this can be read as either “china sage” (中国英明zhōng guó yīng míng) or “china's age” (中国时代zhōng guó shí dài) , which promotes our new knowledge resource at a time when China has come of age in the World.
China Sage News
We keep track of news reports from China but steer clear of the headlines that are well reported elsewhere. Here are the latest news stories, for more visit our news page.
The largest palace complex in the world marks its 600th birthday this year. The Forbidden City (as only the privileged few had any access) took 14 years to build at great expense. The Ming dynasty Emperor Yongle had decided in 1406 hat he must move his capital further north towards the still troubled northern frontier. The Forbidden City is the largest and best preserved collection of ancient buildings in China. 200,000 worked on the immense project including thousands of families who were forcibly uprooted and moved from the former capital of Nanjing, 600 miles away, to build the new capital. The buildings have only a few levels as they are built of wood making them less prone to damage by earthquake. The use of wood has required a continuous cycle of renovation over the intervening centuries. The Forbidden City remained in use up to the forced removal of Emperor Puyi in 1924.
The modern center of Chinese government has not moved far from the Forbidden City - the government buildings of the People's Republic are located immediately to its west at Zhongnanhai. Although completed in 1420, it was officially inaugurated on Chinese New Year 1421 so we can expect many more stories about it before February 12th 1421.
All nations are looking at ways to make our cities greener, but the experience in Chengdu might give pause for thought.
The vertical style urban jungle has been used on a large scale in the Qiyi City Forest Garden, Chengdu, Sichuan. The eight apartment blocks were built in 2018 and all 826 of them were quickly snapped up when put on the market.
Image credit: European Pressphoto Agency
However the development has hit an unforeseen problem. The new green spaces on every balcony have found insect tenants too, and so the few residents have to fight a battle with clouds of mosquitoes. The planners forgot that jungles are not only full of lush vegetation but a whole range of insect life that is not quite so welcome.
Only ten families have so far braved the insect menace to take up permanent residence.
Another threat that seems inevitable is that over time the plants will become both large and old. So branches and whole plants are at increasing risk of tumbling down from a great height.
You can also watch a short video about this story here.
A new adaptation of the acclaimed sci-fi book by Chinese author Cixin Liu is to be made for Netflix by joint US - China production teams.
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss who brought Game of Thrones to our screens will write and produce the epic story in an English adaptation.
It is set at the time of the cultural revolution in China (1966-75) and concerns scientists discovering a sophisticated alien menace.
In this time of increased U.S. - China tensions it's heartening to see a new collaboration being forged.
Over the last few years the Chinese government has supported the astonishing growth of Confucius Institutes over the world. By the end of 2019 there were 541 institutes in 162 countries. Their aim is to promote the teaching of the Chinese language and learning about Chinese culture. They arrange classes in Mandarin, Taichi, calligraphy, painting, dance, opera and other cultural pursuits. With the cold war between China and the US under President Trump these have been seen by many as a sinister attempt to foster a pro-Chinese movement - a development of Chinese soft power. To counter this criticism they are now being re-branded as 'Chinese language learning centers'. This is a less contentious title because just learning the language does not imply any loyalty to the country of China; as even hostile news reporters need to learn the language.
The U.S. government has reclassified the institutes as 'foreign missions' and that has led to similar circumspection in other countries include the UK, Australia and India. There is some basis behind these suspicions because each Confucius Institute is controlled by Hanban ➚ (汉办 Hàn bàn) in Beijing. This Chinese administrative center chooses who is funded and who is employed as well as the texts used in classes. As a result many academic institutions are reviewing their relationship with Confucian Institutes and many in the U.S. have now shut down. Many students and teachers are lamenting the suppression of interest in foreign cultures. Surely it should be possible to separate learning about another country from supporting a foreign government?
We continue to improve the web site as you can see on these descriptions of updates and upgrades, for older entries please visit our site news page.
Thu 24th Sep
The Chinese Leonardo da Vinci
A full 500 years before Leonardo da Vinci worked on various ingenious inventions and developed new theories, Shen Kuo had produced a similar range of ground-breaking discoveries. The contributions of China to scientific discovery is little known so we have added a short summary of the life of this great polymath from the early Song dynasty. Had his ideas been followed up in succeeding generations world history would look very different.
Shen Kuo. A prominent scientist and astronomer of the Song Dynasty. Image by Hans A. Rosbach available under a Creative Commons License ➚
We've added a few more topics to the web site. The first is the success story that is the city state of Singapore, run primarily by people of Chinese descent. We've also added more about the early legendary gods and emperors that are much mentioned in myths and legends. Finally, again in the area of ancient China history we've added information about the small states that existed before the first Qin Emperor unified China.
HSBC Rain Vortex inside the "Jewel" area at Singapore Changi Airport (SIN). SkyTrain connecting Terminal 2 and 3 is visible in the photo. Image by Matteo Morando available under a Creative Commons License ➚
We use a consistent style for links within Chinasage. An internal link taking you to another page within our site is shown like this while a link to a page on any other web site is shown like this ➚.
We use Chinese characters wherever appropriate. Most browsers should display both the characters and the pinyin correctly. We highlight any use of the older Wade Giles system. Except where stated all characters are the modern simplified form used in the People's Republic rather than the traditional ones (pre-1970s). To help you learn Chinese characters many of the very common characters are highlighted thus: 中 hovering the mouse over the character pops up a box showing further information about the character.
Dates are given using the BCE/CE ➚ (Before Common Era and in Common Era) year convention rather than BC/AD. If a date is not followed by BCE or CE it should be taken as CE.
Authorship
All the text on the Chinasage web site is our own, we do not copy and paste from other web sites. We research each topic from a number of separate sources. The only exception to this are quotations and image credits. All text is our copyright and can not be used/copied without our permission. We are independent of any other company or government, the opinions expressed are our own. We do not receive funding from any external agency or organization.
Teacup Media (China History Podcast)
We are delighted to be able to promote links to Laszlo Montgomery's excellent Teacup Media ➚ series created over the last ten years. Laszlo Montgomery ➚ has in depth knowledge of building commercial contacts with China over 30 years. The set of 250 podcasts totals 130 hours of audio commentary which covers every conceivable topic in Chinese history. Highly recommended.
Acknowledgments
We are extremely grateful to the many people who have put their photographs online for anyone to adapt and use. Without them our site would be very drab. If we are not using the image license correctly please let us know. Some pages use Javascript ➚ to create special effects such as our airport table and calendar. We are grateful to the original authors for providing their code to be used and adapted by anyone else. The online Chinese dictionary uses the definition from the CC-CEDICT project ➚ for which we are grateful for a generous free license. Sound files kindly provided by shtooka.net ➚ under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.
Feel free to contact Chinasage to point out any errors, omissions or suggestions on how to improve this web site.
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