Chinasage : All about China

The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty were not content with just the Summer Palace and Forbidden City in the capital Beijing they also built an even larger extensive pleasure park at Chengde 150 miles further north-east. Here they could escape the summer heat and practice horsemanship out in the hills and mountains. The resort is dotted with impressive replicas of buildings elsewhere in China including the Potala Palace, Lhasa. It was here that the Emperor would hold audience and where on 4th September 1793 Englishman the Earl MacCartney representing the English East India Company had a famous meeting with Emperor Qianlong.

June 21st will be marked by an annular eclipse with 40% of the sun obscured over much of China. It will be annular rather than total eclipse because the moon is slightly further away from the Earth than average and does not quite cover the whole solar disc. It will reach 90% coverage in southern China - from Tibet through to Fujian.

It happens to coincide with the Summer Solstice when the days in the northern hemisphere are at their longest. The Summer solstice is 夏至 xià zhì in Chinese meaning ‘Summer limit’.

The Chinese for a solar eclipse is 日食 rì shí meaning literally ‘Sun eat’ following the ancient tradition that the moon or a celestial dragon (or dog) eats up the sun. The first record of an eclipse in China dates back to at least 1217BCE. China has kept an unbroken set of astronomical observations longer than any other civilizations. The prediction of eclipses became a very important study as the ominous diminution of the sun’s power could be seen as Heaven’s displeasure at the Emperor’s rule. People came out of their houses and stopped work while temples banged gongs and rang bells to scare away the dragon eating the sun.

A new discovery of a small carving (only 0.76 inches [19.2 mms] long and 0.49 inches [12.5 mms] high) has excited an international team of archeologists at a site near Xuchang, Henan province. Professor Li Zhanyang of Shandong University is the lead writer of the report of what was found at the paleolithic site at Lingjing. It is far earlier than any previous bird sculpture to be found in China at 13,500 years old and is carved by hand from a single mammalian bone. The bird is carved so it has a base so it could stand up and be admired.

In recent years a new 'festival' has been added to the calendar. This is on 20th May each year and is the day when young unmarried couples indulge in a little romance. It is all because the number 520 in Chinese (五二零 wǔ èr líng) can sound vaguely like 我爱伱 wǒ ài nǐ 'I love you'. So far this has only really caught on in cities where stores have made it another trading bonanza.

With China just emerged from lock-down, when some couples have been forced to keep apart, it has taken on more importance. Another reason for 2020 being special is that the year expressed as 二零二零 èr líng èr líng sounds a bit like 爱你爱妳ài nǐ ài nǐ 'Love you, love you' particularly on a muffled mobile phone. In Shanghai all available marriage services on this auspicious day have already been snapped up.

Running a web site like this is a continuous process. Just when you think you've got the content looking good either the technology or the search algorithms change. We try to design the pages to work well with smartphones but these continue to develop with new features. In this latest set of changes we've made better use of the new HTML5 tags such as 'aside', 'section', 'figcaption' and 'footer'. This helps browsers and Google work out what bits of a web page are important and which are peripheral.

When you make the changes you can never be sure whether it has improved matters and the web pages will then appear higher on Google searches as a result - you have to wait at least two months for everything to be re-indexed and re-analyzed.

We've also split the Chinese calendar away from the Festivals page as we think people are either interested in one or the other and not both. if you have any views on layout or content we are always delighted to hear from you - just use the envelope icon at the top of any page.

When looking for pages to give a good background to the spectacular tombs of the Ming Emperors we found that there was nothing that really covered the subject in depth. There were inconsistencies and confusion as to what could be found where and had to resort to using Google Earth to locate some of the buildings. We hope that our new page with numerous illustrations will help you appreciate the splendor of these magnificent constructions.