Seven Wonders of China (2/5)

August 9, 2010

2. Hanging Monastery

Another popular tourist site is the fifteen-hundred year old wooden Hanging Monastery.   The monastery is suspended fifteen stories above the valley floor on the side of a sheer cliff.  It is a mystery why the monastery was built there and why.

One reason might be the floods that once plagued the valley. Today, a dam controls the water. The monastery was built in an indentation in the cliff below an overhand.

What cannot be seen from the valley floor is the Hanging Monastery was built into the cliff’s face. More than forty caves and rooms were dug into the rock.  This process allowed supports to be built into the cliff.  The thin wooden pillars are only there for decoration and were added in the last century.

3. The Great Wall

One of the world’s greatest treasures is the almost four-thousand mile Great Wall, which took two-thousand years to complete.

The early great wall was made of layers of pressed earth and straw. The Qin Dynasty completed the first wall.  The Han Dynasty extended the wall toward Mongolia.  The Ming Dynasty built the wall stronger of stone and mortar.  The Chinese used smoke and fire to send messages over long distances to warn of enemy attacks.

See Traveling the Great Wall or return to The Seven Wonders of China – Part 1

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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

The Real Police State (1/4)

August 9, 2010

China is a culture that has never gone easy on convicted criminals. When I was researching 19th Century China for Robert Hart’s Concubine Saga, there was an incident in Canton that Hart wrote about where the Chinese Imperial government had fifty Chinese randomly selected from a street near a gate where rebels had broken into the city. 

Those fifty were beheaded without a trial to show others what would happen if a similar incident took place. The heads were put in cages where the people could see them as a reminder.

More than a century later, the BBC and Wondering China reported that China’s highest law-making body would debate a draft amendment to criminal law soon to reduce the number of crimes that carry the death penalty.

A brief history of China’s legal system shows that when Mao died, there was no legal system in place at the time. In the 1980s, during the infancy of China’s legal system, the lower courts could apply the death penalty, but the numbers executed caused Westerners to protest the inhumanity of such acts.

As a result, in 2007, the law changed and death sentences had to be reviewed by a higher court before gaining approval.  Without giving the exact numbers, the Chinese report that the number of executions is down.

See China Law and Justice System

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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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Seven Wonders of China (1/5)

August 9, 2010

1. Xian, the first emperor and the Terra Cotta Warriors

From this Discovery Channel program on the Seven Wonders of China, we learn that there are 55 ethnic groups and 235 living languages. The first of the seven wonders is near Xian, which was the capital of 13 of China’s Dynasties.

In 1974, Chinese farmers digging a well near Xian discovered the first of the terra cotta warriors guarding China’s first emperor, Shi Huangdi, of the Qin Dynasty (221 – 207 BC).

The terra cotta warriors are one of China’s most popular tourist attractions. About 10 million tourists visit annually.  No two terra cotta soldiers look alike.

The first emperor centralized the government, standardized the written language, currency, and weights and measures. With these changes, he created China’s national identity.  Forcing hundreds of thousands of workers, he also had The Great Wall completed.

Most Chinese believe in the immortality of the spirit and life after death.

It is tradition that the Chinese believe there is continuity between life and death, and people may take things with them for comfort in the spiritual world, which explains why the first emperor had such an elaborate tomb built.

Discover more about The First Emperor: The Man Who Made China

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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

Vestiges of China’s Early Empires

August 8, 2010

 David Frum writes about China’s Early Empires referring to Belknap’s six-volume history of Imperial China. Frum says, “There is no Chinese equivalent of the Parthenon or the Roman Forum, no Pantheon or Coliseum.  For all its overpowering continuity, China does not preserve physical remains of the past… Lewis offhandedly mentions at one point that there remains not a single surviving house or palace from Han China. There are not even ruins,” which is wrong.

I recently wrote a three-part series about Han Dynasty tombs discovered in Xuzhou, which was the location of the capital of the Han Dynasty. The tombs, which had not been destroyed or looted, are now tourist attractions. A museum was built to house artifacts that were discovered. One tomb has a living room and a bedroom before the coffin chamber.  Since the tomb was built inside a hollowed-out mountain and made of rock, it survived more than two millennia with evidence of how the Han Dynasty lived then.

In fact, I’ve toured the Ming tombs, seen the graves of heroes from the Song Dynasty near the West Lake in Hangzhou, south of Shanghai.  Also, let’s not forget that the Grand Canal, which was started five centuries before the birth of Christ and is still in use today.

In fact, the Nationalists fled to Taiwan in 1949 with much of China’s imperial treasures.

Then, if you visit Tibet, there’s the Potala Palace, which was first built in 637 AD and is still lived in. Although much of ancient China has vanished, there are still vestiges that equal or surpass what the Roman and Greek civilizations left behind.

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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 Fat Camps

August 7, 2010

The battle of the bulge has been launched in China. The overweight children of the Chinese rich are paying as much as $1,000 American dollars a month to lose weight at fat camps, which are appearing across China and this is taking place in a culture where, historically, being overweight was and sometimes still is considered a sign of wealth and success.

However, many Chinese are learning that being overweight will cause health problems such as obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease and high blood pressure. For women, obesity may affect pregnancy

China’s single children, an urban product of China’s one-child policy to control population growth, have been indulged and spoiled leading to an obesity epidemic.

Many Chinese in urban areas have lived sedentary lifestyles leading to serious health problems and weight issues.

At the Fat camps, these overweight Chinese spend several hours a day involved in sports activities. Meng Qing Gang, one fat camp participant, says, “We are in a health conscious era and are here to lose weight.”

See The Challenge of Rural Health Care in America and China

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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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