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.
A literature professor has become a surprising online hit. Dai Jianye of Central China Normal University, Wuhan posts regular videos of readings of ancient poetry which now has over 2,000,000 followers and has also written best-selling poetry books.
Classical poems often a thousand years old seem to be ideal for the short attention span of modern audiences. They are often concise and with only a few characters bring to mind complex notions.
Dai Jianye has been quoted as saying "The Chinese are wise and the language is beautiful. Ancient poetry combines both and should be studied and shared". A recent survey of 100,000 millennials has put classical poetry as their most popular traditional art-form. Chinasage has popular pages introducing poetry and also the Three Character classic.
A famous Tang Dynasty poem by Li Bai, wishing farewell to a friend in both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.
A year ago we reported the case of a dedicated 8 year old schoolboy who trudged through nearly 3 miles of ice and snow to get school each day. The picture of his ice covered hair 'went viral'. Since that time things have changed. His family have relocated to a house just 10 minutes walk from the school in rural Yunnan. Wang Fuman is one of the millions of 'left-behind' children who live in villages. Both his parents have moved away to work in the cities and so he is looked after by an older sister and his grandmother. Not just the Wang family have benefited from the publicity; the school has been given extra funds for classroom heaters. Other schoolchildren has benefited too as the school has built a dormitory so they no longer need to trek long distances each day. The ice-boy's ambition remains to become a policeman when he grows up.
Each year in the depth of winter an Ice Sculpture festival is held in the far north of China. In Harbin, the provincial capital of northernmost province Heilongjiang, the temperature reaches its annual minimum (typically -22 ° F [-30 ° C]).
In this Guardian gallery of really impressive photographs by Kevin Frayer the toil of the local ice sculptors is followed as they prepare for the opening of the sculpture park on 5th January (it lasts until 28th February).
Impressive structures are built out of ice blocks cut from the frozen Songhua River. An incredible 200,000 tons [181,437,000 kgs] of ice are used. Chainsaws cut the blocks into rough shape and finished with hand saws and special chisels. A sculpted tongue and groove allow high walls to be constructed by locking the ice layers together. They are built up into towering skyscrapers, pagodas, minarets and bridges spread over 180 acres [728,434 sq meters]. It is the world's largest ice sculpture fair. Each structure is festooned with thousands of LED lights.
Here are the last few news updates about our web site. For older entries please visit our site news section.
Tue 1st Jan
Dances, Puppetry and Theater in China
The performing arts in China have a long history. Although modern media has reduced audiences there are still dedicated practitioners who spend their lives honing their skills at puppetry, story-telling, street theater, lion and dragon dancing.
We have added a page describing these art forms and by using a dozen carefully selected YouTube videos you can see these art-forms brought to life.
Our page on Chinese opera has proven very popular and we hope this new page will bring the less well known performing arts to wider attention.
The stimulus to writing this brief survey was the recent death of the noted Pingshu story-teller Shan Tianfang.
We've completed our one month fund raiser. Thanks for everyone who donated. However as there was only ten donations in all we can't consider it a success. This represents a donation from about 0.01% of our site visitors. We would receive about ten times that donation amount from advertisements so we will now experiment with targeted adverts again.
Celestial Buddhas and Deities of the Northern, Western, and Central Dipper Constellations. c.1500CE. Image by LACMA ➚ available under a Creative Commons License ➚
Conventions
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.
