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 couple of reports. For more stories visit news section.
To celebrate the start of a new twelve year cycle - the year of the Rat - we've produced a fiendishly difficult New Year Quiz and also a recipe for a very popular New Year treat - jiaozi. The Spring Festival falls on Saturday 25th January and for many people the holiday will last a whole week. Xīn nián kuài lè - Happy New Year!
In the largest annual migration of humanity most people in China will be traveling back to the family home for the Chinese New Year on 25th January. The visit home (拜年 bài nián) will stretch the capacity of China's rail and air networks when up to 3.6 billion trips are made. The improved rail system is built around a grid of eight vertical (north-south) and eight horizontal (east-west) lines linking all parts of the country. About 20 million travel tickets will be bought each day. The latest smartphone tickets and facial recognition should speed up the system somewhat but anyone traveling will have to expect delays and over-crowding.
In the run up to Chinese New Year on 25th January 2020 now is the time get ready for the year of the Rat.
With the ubiquitous mobile phone making access to calendar information instant, it might be thought that traditional printed calendars were only of historical interest. However in the last few years traditional calendars showing one page for each day are making a comeback in China. Many are illustrated and have facts, figures, cultural and historical information; it is far more than just a printed day and date. Du Xin from Tianjin is one person producing these new 'personalized' calendars. One reason that they are popular is that there is a wide range and so the choice made shows individual taste.
Chinasage provides an online calendar of all the Chinese festivals and holidays.
Various 2019 calendars on display at a bookstore. VCG Photo
Read more…
China Sage Site updates
Here are the last few news updates about our web site. For older entries please visit our site news section.
Mon 9th Dec 2019
Quizzes update
Our popular quizzes have had a little bit of a make-over. We found that General quiz 4 had not been functioning properly. We also found that about 1% of answers were marked incorrectly - it indicated an incorrect answer as the correct one.
If you spot a problem with a quiz question or have a suggestion for new questions or whole quizzes please contact us.
Exhibit in the Sichuan University Museum (四川大学博物馆) - Chengdu, Sichuan, China. Photography was permitted in the museum without restriction. Image by Daderot ➚ available under a Creative Commons License ➚
In addition to a guide to the history and gneral form of paper-cuts we have now added step-by-step guides to how to make five paper-cuts. This includes a simple one based on the character for Double Happiness.
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 six years. Lazlo Montgomery ➚ has in depth knowledge of building commercial contacts with China over 25 years. This set of 200 podcasts totals 100 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.
Feel free to contact Chinasage to point out any errors, omissions or suggestions on how to improve this web site.
