Links to the Stars – Ancient Astronomy – Part 2/2

September 5, 2010

The Milky Way Maid says that the (ancient) Chinese focused more on the constellations, creating one of the earliest star maps ever found.

Chinese astronomers gave distinctive names to familiar Western constellations. For example, the Big Dipper was called The Plow. The North Star was Bei Ji. Another constellation was called the Winnowing Basket.

From the 16th century B.C. to the end of the 19th Century A.D., almost every (Chinese) dynasty appointed officials who were charged with the sole task of observing and recording the changes in the heavens.

However, the Chinese were not alone in mapping the heavens. 

Ancient cultures in the West studied the skies too. The “Nebra Sky Disc”, discovered in Europe, dates to about 1,600 BC. 

National Geographic says the Nebra Sky Disc is the oldest depiction of the night sky in history.  It is a hundred years older than the oldest images found in ancient Egypt.

The Nebra Sky Disc may be the first representation of the universe in human history.

However, in China about 4,000 years ago, the oldest astronomical instrument known to man appeared. It was merely a bamboo pole planted in the ground so that the movement of the sun could be observed from the direction and length of the shadow of the pole. Source: China.org – Astronomy and Mathematics

Historians consider that the Chinese were the most persistent and accurate observers of celestial phenomena.

Return to Ancient Astronomy – Part 1 or discover Chinese inventions.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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Links to the Stars – Ancient Astronomy – Part 1/2

September 5, 2010

For thousands of years, Chinese astronomers have studied the stars and planets moving in their endless travels across the night sky.

Oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty (1766 – 1122 B.C.) recorded eclipses and as many as 90 novae (exploding stars).

For about two thousand years, the Chinese used the North Star (which remains constant). The Chinese used that star to map the location of every other star in the sky.

This method of mapping stars is called the equatorial system. The West would not use this method to map the heavens for almost two thousand years after the Chinese invented it.

In early 1980s, a tomb was found at Xi Shui Po (西水坡) in Pu Yang, Henan Province. There were some clamshells and bones forming the images of the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger and the Northern Dipper.

It is believed that the tomb belongs to the Neolithic Age, about 6,000 years ago.

Star names relating to the 28 lunar mansions were found on oracle bones dating back to the Wuding Period (about 3,200 years ago). Source: New World Encyclopedia

See Shang Dynasty (1766 – 1122 B.C.)

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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China’s Stand-Up Comedy

September 5, 2010

People laugh in China. There’s even humor, jokes and comedy. However, I often don’t see the humor in a Chinese joke while a Chinese audience roars with laughter.

Part of the joy of humor in America is when you discover the shocking meaning behind the punch line.

John Pasden, who has lived in China for more than 10 years, writes Sinosplice. John has been interested in Chinese humor for a while.

He points out that Chinese stand-up comedians follow the punch line with an explanation of why the joke is funny.

  • Zhou LiBo’s Chinese stand-up comedy “war story” with English subtitles

A popular stand-up comic in Shanghai, Zhou Libo, provides an example.  He jokes about China’s massive purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds, “I am really confused about why a poor guy lends money to the rich. We should just divide the money amongst ourselves,” he says. “But on a second thought, each of us would only get a couple of dollars!”

Then Zhou LiBo adds the explanation, “Because the population is so big.”

Although Zhou LiBo is a stand-up comedian in China, his reputation reached the Los Angeles Times, which reported that the government in Beijing can’t understand him while his fan base continues to grow.

The Times says, “Zhou is Shanghai’s homegrown rock star. Born and raised there, he began his career with a local comedy troupe before taking the stage on his own. His routines are filled with local humor and performed mainly in ‘Shanghainese’ — a local dialect with only a passing resemblance to Mandarin.”

In fact, China has more than 56 spoken languages and a flock of dialects while having one written language.

See Four Equals One China—Minority China – Part 5 and Part 6

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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Middle Kingdom on Fashion Fast Track

September 4, 2010

Three decades ago, blue, black, gray and green clothing dominated Chinese streets. Today, individuality is the rule.

Since China is the hub of worldwide manufacturing, it is no surprise that fashion is alive and well there too. In fact, urban Chinese consumers are highly brand conscious. Even luxury brands like Christian Dior are in demand.

Fashion in China is more than a 40 billion (in US) dollar growing industry.

Forbes’ China Tracker, Avery Booker, writes about the fashion competition in China and points out that foreign retailers like H&M are wading into the Chinese market and doing well.

Meanwhile, Chinese retailers find innovative ways to compete with foreign companies by going into Chinese markets that foreign companies have not reached.

Attitudes to domestic brands have changed because state owned companies have been privatized and are producing better quality products. 

What’s interesting are the foreign faces Chinese retailers are using to sell their fashions—like Wentworth Miller of “Prison Break” as well as actor Orlando Bloom and model Agyness Dyn.

In order to promote the development of China’s fashion industry, super-model beauty contests have also blossomed.

See Disneyland Chinese Style

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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The Sky is Falling but only in China

September 4, 2010

The Los Angeles Times published a piece that says, “Airline crash shows China safety standards have fallen, critics say.”

In the lead paragraph, the Times mentioned that China’s overall air safety record has been one of the best in the world for six years.

In China, “State media said Wednesday that the plane carrying 96 people overshot the runway on a fog-shrouded night…”

Let’s put this crash in perspective by looking at a list Wikipedia provides of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft around the globe.  

Remember US Airways flight 1549 on January 15, 2009, which ditched in the Hudson River with no fatalities, or Cogan Air flight 3407 on February 12 that hit a house in Clarence, New York killing all 49 passengers on board.

Then there is Southwest Airlines Flight 2294 on July 13, 2009, that made an emergency landing in Charleston, West Virginia with no injuries.

How about October 21, 2009, when the pilot of Northwest Airlines flight 188 was distracted by his personal laptop computer and missed his destination in San Diego by 150 miles.

On December 22, American Airlines flight 331 overruns the runway in Kingston, Jamaica and there are 40 injuries and no fatalities.

If you visit the List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft, scroll from 2004 to 2010 to see how long that global list is.  Then there is the list of accidents and incidents involving military aircraft.

Yet a crash in China, with a great safety record for six years, has Sinophobes leaping out of their swamps shouting in morbid joy as if they are celebrating.

An excellent post on Telos does a good job explaining why so many hate China. “China-bashing is the new anti-capitalism.”

See Dragon Air

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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