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.
Beijing is following Shanghai's example for the management of its annual 9 million ton mountain of garbage. Everyone will now have to sort their garbage so as much can be recycled as possible. People and businesses will now need to sort their waste into dry refuse, wet trash, recyclable waste and hazardous waste. A fine of 200 yuan will be enforced if the new directive is not followed. There will be rewards as well as fines to those who comply. This is all part of the China's aim for 2020 when 35% of household garbage should be recycled.
A widespread view of China is that it is a coal-burning, CO2 generating monster that threatens to make global climate change worse.
That is a misleading simplification, in some areas China leads the world in green, clean energy. As an example Qinghai province has now run on all clean energy for 15 days on the trot beating the previous record of 9 days last year. Admittedly Qinghai is one of less populated provinces (6 million people) but it shows that great efforts are being made - even in the remote areas of China. It's not all gloom and doom.
In a merger of the very old and very new it is now possible to download a computer model of a terracotta warrior and print it out with a 3-D printer. In a scheme to engage youngsters with the Chinese Qin dynasty a miniature plastic model complete with banner engraved with words of your choosing, can be yours for free. A number of different forms are available, the charioteer can be used as a pen holder for instance. It's a novel way to promote an interest in history and archeology.
There are currently no plans for life-size models to be made available.
Here are the last few news updates about our web site. For older entries please visit our site news section.
Mon 15th Jul
1,000 character classic added
To complete the set of three language and calligraphy primers we have added the Thousand Character Classic to the Chinasage web site. As it's name suggests it consists of 1,000 (well 999 actually) unique characters. It was devised as a teaching aid 1,500 years ago. It has a good chance of being the most hated work in world literature because millions of schoolchildren down the centuries have been forced to learn the contrived text by heart and copy it out numerous times.
One Thousand Character classic in Ouyang Xun calligraphy style. Image by 忍海 available under a Creative Commons License ➚
Originally the quizzes wer base on javascript this then changed to PHP with one PHP page per question, now we have gone for a single javascript page. We hope this now gives full compatibility to all mobiles and browsers. Let us know is you experience any difficulties.
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.
