China’s Ancient Chimes

July 17, 2012

In 1977, a discovery was made in China—a complete set of chime bells were unearthed from the tomb of Marquis Yi, who lived during the Warring States Period (475 to 221 BC). These chimes were older than the Qin Dynasty’s famous Terra Cotta warriors (221 to 206 B.C.) were.

When the chimes were discovered in Hubei Province (located in Central China), a plot of land was being leveled to build a factory.  The Red Army officer in charge of the work had an interest in archeology.

The officer discovered that the workers were selling the ancient bronze and iron artifacts they were digging up. He convinced local authorities there might be an ancient tomb buried below the site.

When the tomb was unearthed, a set of chime bells was found.  These musical instruments were an important part of ritual and court music going back to ancient times. An American professor in New York City even called these chimes the eighth wonder of the ancient world.

The sixty-five chime bells weighed about 5 tons.

No other set of chimes like this had been discovered in China before and this set was in excellent condition.

A project was launched in 1979 to duplicate four sets of these chimes. More than a 100 scientists and technicians were recruited.  In 1998, twenty years after the discovery, the project was completed. One of the sets was sent to Taiwan as a gift.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Note: This post originally appeared September 2010

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Vampires in China

May 1, 2012

Belief in vampires is not confined to the people of Transylvania, and half humans able to transform themselves into monsters are no strangers to Chinese folklore. Some tales may be traced back to the third century AD.

Since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897, this makes a case that vampire folklore may have originated in China and traveled west along the Silk Road almost two thousand years ago.

The Chinese vampire is called a Jiang-shi (also spelled Kaing-shi or Chiang-shih). However, Chinese vampires are different from Dracula or Anne Rice’s vampires.

Chinese folklore says the Jiang-shi is stiffened by rigor mortis and these vampires have to hop to get around. The Jiang-shi also finds its victims by smelling your breath, so if a hungry Jiang-shi is about, it is best to stop breathing.

In the 1980s, there was a series of vampire movies produced in Hong Kong. The first in the series was Mr. Vampire (you may watch Mr. Vampire here. For parts two through ten, scroll down to the embedded YouTube series at the bottom of this post).


Mr. Vampire – Part 1/10
with English subtitles

Ricky Lau directed Mr. Vampire and the producer was Sammo Hung.

Chopper Time says, “Almost all of these movies are pretty watchable, but the best of the bunch was the first one, an expert horror-comedy called Mr. Vampire.”

There were a few Taiwanese vampire films, which include The Vampire Shows His Teeth (a series of three films (1984-1986), New Mr. Vampire (1985), Elusive Song of the Vampire (1987) and Spirit versus Zombie (1989).

Today, Vampires stories are becoming popular in mainland China. Tom Carter, an American author and expatriate living in China, says Twilight is a popular pirated novel and some Twilight fans are now writing their own fan-fiction and vampire stores in Chinese on their Blogs.

In fact, a shop called the Vampire opened its doors recently in Beijing to sell vampire, zombie, and werewolf blood along with Satan poison and UFO fuel.

In November 2010, the China Daily reported Blood Shop drawing a thirsty Crowd.

“The shop, which opened September 20, is reportedly the first of its kind in Beijing. The storefront also has a stained-glass window adorned with a miniature vampire model sucking blood from a cup held in his skeletal hand.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Mr. Vampire continued
with English subtitles


Mr. Vampire – Part 2/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 3/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 4/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 5/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 6/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 7/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 8/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 9/10


Mr. Vampire – Part 10/10

Note: This post first appeared December 25, 2010

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Going to School with Dad on My Back – Part 1/3

December 25, 2011

This post started out as a movie review and a recommendation of Going to School with Dad on My Back (1998), but recent criticism on the Internet and in the media of China’s central government giving twenty-three 35-seat school busses to “tiny Macedonia”—in addition to a school bus accident in China—added a twist to this series of three posts.

In the UK, the Guardian left out crucial information from an Associated Press news release of the accident and focused on the 500,000 comments posted on China’s popular Twitter-like micro-blog Monday criticizing the donation “given the poor quality school buses many Chinese children ride in”.

Yahoo News also used the AP news release and mentioned the 500,000 complaints and then pointed out the deaths of 19 Chinese preschoolers in an unrelated school bus crash two weeks earlier in addition to another bus crash in rural China where a bus rolled over injuring students.

It’s what these two Western media sources do not say that may mislead people’s opinions astray.

Since I have learned that much of what we hear of China in the west often doesn’t tell half the story, I turned to the People’s Daily to discover “Parents of students at the [private] kindergarten said school bus overloading has been a problem for years, despite repeated complaints.”

The school bus that crashed belonged to a private school that had removed most of the seats and safety gear to make room for more kids—I imagine the resulting school bus was sort of like the cattle trucks I was transported in when I served in the United States Marines in the late 1960s, where there was standing room only and no safety gear.

The People’s Daily also reported the owner of the private school had been arrested and would be tried in court for what he/she had done to cut corners and boost profits.

In addition, last year we learn from the “China Daily” that it is not the lack of a standard for school busses in China, but “the rampant use of illegal vehicles” like the van involved in the crash.

In fact, accidents happen to school busses in America too and the laws and safety equipment found in US school busses are because of those early accidents.

For example, the private school bus crash in China that killed preschool children occurred nearly five years to the day of the Nov. 20, 2006 school bus crash in Huntsville, Alabama that killed five high school students after the vehicle plunged off a freeway overpass.

This brings me back to the movie, Going to School with Dad on My Back (1998).

Continued on December 20, 2011 in Going to School with Dad on My Back – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Ah Bing and “Reflection of the Moon”

October 26, 2011

To understand another country’s history and culture, one should listen to the music, read that country’s novels and watch its films.

This summer, my wife and daughter returned from China with dozens of original Chinese films on DVD.

Then I saw Reflection of the Moon, (ISBN: 7-88054-168-3), which is about Ah Bing (1893 – 1950), a famous master of the Chinese Erhu, who overnight—in 1950 shortly before his death—became a national sensation as radios throughout China played his music.

Fortunate for me, Ah Bing’s story had English subtitles, which were not of the best quality and true to form for a Chinese movie filmed in 1979 (shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976), the plot was melodramatic with traces of propaganda that favored the Chinese Communists.

However, to be fair, in 1950, the Civil War was over and the Communists, with support from several hundred million peasants, had won.

Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution would not begin for years and for those that survived the purges in 1949 and 1950 (mostly abusive land owners and drug dealers accused of crimes by the people they may have abused and victimized), Mao fulfilled his promises of land reforms.

To understand the era of Ah Bing’s life, much of China (including Tibet) was still feudal in nature, and the upper classes often took advantage of the peasants and workers as if they were beasts of burden treated as slaves.


This is one of Ah Bing’s masterpieces for the Erhu—Moon Reflected in the Second Spring (二泉映月)

Ah Bing’s real name was Hua Yanjun. His knowledge of traditional Chinese music and his talent as a musician went mostly unnoticed until the last year of his life in 1950, shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

In 1950, two musicologists were sent to his hometown of Wuxi to record and preserve his music. At the time, he was ill and hadn’t performed for about two years. Six of his compositions were recorded that are considered masterpieces. It is said that he knew more than 700 pieces—and most were his compositions.

As “Reflection of the Moon” shows, the lyrics of some of his music criticized the KMT (Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government), and he was often punished for speaking out through his music. If you have read of The Long March, you know that the peasants did not trust the KMT, but they did trust the Communists and that trust was earned between 1926 and 1949—a period covering twenty-three years, and most rural Chinese of that era still think of Mao as China’s George Washington.

Before the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China’s Communist Party treated the peasants and workers with respect while the KMT did not earn that trust.

In fact, Ah Bing’s story and music is still so popular that the Performing Arts Company of China’s Air Force performed Er Quan Yin, an original Western-style Chinese opera, in 2010. Source: China Daily

To discover more of the time-period that Ah Bing lived, see The Roots of Madness.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Dance of the Thousand-Hand Guan Yin

September 21, 2011

In the United States, if a government run school were to attempt teaching young, deaf and/or disabled students in the art of an intricate dance and required them to drill, drill, drill as if they were in the Marine Corps, humanitarians and feminists (due to the scantily clad pretty women) would cry foul and soon there might be pressure to make it illegal and hold investigations. There might even be boycotts and protests.

Then, similar to a recent rail accident in China, other critics of China infected with the Racist Sinophobia Virus (RSV), which is a learned mental illness, might chime in to crucify the Middle Kingdom once again for crimes against humanity reminding us (with lies and exaggerations) of Tibet, censorship, etc.


From China (Thousand-hand ~ Guan Yin ~ 千手观音 )

However, when it was established in 1987, the China Disabled People’s Art Troupe (CDPAT) was an amateur performance troupe supported by the government with members recruited from around the country.

That changed in 2002, after the troupe’s first commercial performance. The China Daily said, “After its first commercial performance. In 2004, the troupe made 10 million yuan (US$1.21 million).”

Tai Lihua, the lead dancer and chairman of the CDPAT, has visited many countries with her troupe. They have performed at the John F. Kennedy Centre in New York City and the Teatro alla Scala in Venice, two of the world’s most prestigious theatres.

The dance of the Thousand-Hand Guan Yin is named after the Bodhisattva of compassion, revered by Buddhists as the Goddess of Mercy, who is a compassionate being that watches for and responds to the people in the world who cry out for help such as the deaf and disabled members of the CDPAT.

Being deaf and mute, these disabled performers endured pain and suffering in vigorous training simply to deliver a message of love, and when you watch the embedded videos and see close ups of the performers’ faces, you will see the dedication.

When I first watched this video, I was reminded of Amy Chua, the Tiger Mother, and how she relentlessly drilled her daughters in piano and violin. US critics raged at this after Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published.  However, the oldest daughter, Sophia, now attends Harvard and still enjoys playing the piano.

In fact, if you click on Sophia’s name and visit her Blog Post for August 25, 2011, you would discover, “When I practiced piano yesterday, I worked on cadences.”

Often, the rewards of enduring the pain and suffering it takes to achieve near perfection in an art such as playing piano or learning intricate dances comes only after years of challenging and demanding repetition.

What’s amazing about the dance troupe is that all the performers are deaf, making the choreography to the music even more incredible, and the difficulties encountered in training are beyond imagining.

However, four instructors, who can hear and speak, signal the rhythm of the music from four corners of the stage/room, and with repetition and diligent practice, the performance is nearly flawless.

Discover more in Silence to Beauty, which is about the art of graduates from China’s Shandong Provincial Rehabilitation and Career School.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

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