Ming Dynasty (1368-1643 AD) – Part 1, 2/3

November 21, 2010

China had been developing shipbuilding technologies and seafaring skills since the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 219 AD). This meant China had been the world’s leader in shipbuilding and navigation for more than fifteen hundred years by the time of the Ming Dynasty.

The shipyard responsible for building Zheng He’s “treasure boats”, as they were called, was in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. What’s left of those shipyards may be seen on the video embedded in this post.

Those dry docks were used six hundred years ago to build China’s giant fleet. 

Since the Song Dynasty had invented the Pound lock in the 10th century to be used along the Grand Canal, China had the technology to build dry docks.

When the ships were ready, the Pound Lock would open and the dry dock would flood then the ship sailed into the Yangtze River.

Zheng He sailed from China in July 1405 with a fleet of about 300 ships.

Kong Yuanzhi, a professor at Peking University says, Compared with the ships of Western explorers during the 15th and 16th centuries, the size of Zheng He’s fleet was unmatched.

Christopher Columbus had just 88 men in three boats, Ferdinand Magellan had 260 in five boats and Vasco de Gama had 160 in 4 ships.

However, Zheng He had 27,000 for seven voyages. According to historical records, the largest ship was over 10 thousand tons —120 times larger than the largest of Vasco de Gama’s ships.

While the Ming Dynasty’s great fleet was sailing halfway around the world, the Forbidden City was being built — another marvel of architectural technology.

The dark-red palace walls and golden yellow tiles of the roofs set the Forbidden City apart from the rest of Beijing.

Return to Ming Dynasty (1368-1643 AD) – Part 1, 1/3

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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.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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China’s Stonehenge

November 21, 2010

 In August 2008, The Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco sent a team to China to film a total-solar eclipse.

While in China, Pauld Doherty, a physicist, teacher, author and rock climber, visited China’s Stonehenge of the Gobi Desert, a Stonehenge like structure in Xinjiang Province.

Pauld says, “The Gobi Stonehenge is made with a central pillar where a viewer stands and 6 pillars that mark the positions of sunrise and sunset on the equinoxes and the solstices. There are also pillars to mark due north and south. When the sun passes over the south pillar, it marks local-solar noon.”

“The shape of an observatory like this one depends upon the latitude,” he says, “and my calculations show that the excellent Chinese astronomer who designed this one did a superb job.”

Patsy Burns left a comment, “The Stonehenge and center of Asia markers note Chinese have long been studying the skies…. Have you been to the remnants of the Emperor’s observatory just east of Tiananmen Sq by the Gloria Plaza hotel…if it is still there? Supposedly Marco Polo’s star gazing Jesuits matched calculations with the Emperor’s people there and that knowledge gave Marco Polo guanxi, credibility.”

To answer Patsy’s question, yes, the Ming Emperor’s observatory is still there and a planetarium was added.

To study astronomy, the Ming Dynasty built an observatory in Beijing in 1442. The observatory covers 1,000 square meters (more than 10,000 square feet).

Eight bronze astronomical instruments stand on a platform. The design of the instruments reflects both the influence of oriental craftsmanship and the European Renaissance demonstrating an understanding of measurements and physics.

In 1955, a new hall covering 7,000 square meters (more than 75,000 square feet) was built, and it opened to the public two years later. It has an exhibition hall, a video projection room and observatory for everyone. 

In 2004, a new hall covering about 20,000 square meters (more than 215,000 square feet) was added.

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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.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1643 AD) – Part 1, 1/3

November 21, 2010

The Red Turban Rebellion was started in the middle of the fourteenth century by Chinese peasants against the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty.

The Red Turban ideology included elements from White Lotus, a Buddhist sect from the late Southern Song Dynasty.

Soon, the White Lotus Society, led by Han Shantong, became the center of anti-Mongol sentiment. After Han Shantong was caught and executed, his son, Han Liner, came to power claiming to be the incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha.

When the Yung Dynasty fell in August 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang was the leader of the White Lotus Society (also known as the The Millennium Cult, with similarities to today’s Falun Gong religious cult).

Yuanzhang came from a poor background and did not trust the educated elite. He created an extremely authoritarian regime with harsh policies and ruled China from the city of Nanjing.

It would take several years before China recovered from the destruction caused by the rebellion.

The first hundred and fifty years of the Ming Dynasty saw an improvement in agricultural technology never before seen in China, which encouraged the development of the handicrafts industry and commerce.

Since the Roman Empire, products from China had already been known for their high quality and craftsmanship. During the Ming, these products reached even higher qualities.

The Yongle Emperor (1402 – 1424) moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing where he built a new city.

In fact, after being neglected for decades, the Yongle Emperor had the Grand Canal restored.

The Yongle Emperor also send the Muslim, eunuch Admiral Zheng He with a huge fleet across the oceans to Africa and possibly to the Americas well before Columbus set sail. The emperor’s goal was to gain respect from distant foreign nations.

To build the Ming fleet required techniques and technologies never seen in the world. To achieve this feat, the Chinese invented what has been credited to Ford Motor Company between 1908 and 1915 — an assembly line five centuries before Ford.

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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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Hong Kong Triads

November 19, 2010

After China lost the first Opium War, started by Britain and France, Hong Kong was awarded to the British in January 1841.

Soon after the British established Hong Kong as a colony, the number of Triad members grew considerably.

In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion even had allies among some of the Hong Kong Triads.

Britain returned Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997.

Today, Hong Kong, like Macao, is a Special Administrative Region and Hong Kong basic law runs the region instead of the law of the People’s Republic of China.

Beijing calls it the most democratic legal system in the PRC. Pro-democracy activists say it is not democratic enough.

As in Macao, the Chinese Triads have been very active for more than a century.

In fact, when China fell to the Chinese Communists in 1949, hordes of Shanghai triads fled for their lives to Hong Kong, establishing the British colony as the world headquarters of Chinese organized crime. Source: Partners in Crime

Chinese Triads have members in nearly every country in the world and are especially strong in China, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

In the early 1980s, when China opened to global trade, the Triads started to return to the mainland.

Triad criminal activity includes but is not limited to street-level crime such as gambling, extortion and prostitution, and international activities such as narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting and smuggling goods and people.

It is estimated that there are 50 Triad societies in Hong Kong with a total membership of about 80,000.

Of these societies, about fifteen are criminally active… Sun Yee On is the largest Triad in Hong Kong with an estimated 25,000 members. In addition to criminal activities in Hong Kong, intelligence reports since 1994 indicate Triads dominate the government of Guangdong Province on the mainland. Source: Illuminated Lantern.com

Learn more about organized crime in Macao

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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.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Macao – Organized Crime in China or Not

November 19, 2010

The Chicago Sun–Times published news that MGM picks reputed China crime family over N.J.

Most Westerns, specifically Americans, when he or she sees the word “China” in the Chicago Sun-Times headline will believe this is another example of China’s corruption and that impression will continue after reading the piece.

In fact, the headline should have read, “MGM picks reputed Macao crime family over N.J.”

Macao is not China even though it technically belongs of the People’s Republic. The World History Blog provides a short history of the former Portuguese colony, which is a Special Administrative Region in China today but has more in common with the Principality of Monaco or Las Vegas.

Macao’s location was first settled by members of the South Sung Dynasty escaping invading Mongols in 1277. Later, in 1516, Portuguese traders built a staging port there, the oldest European settlement in the Far East.

The Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1643) did not recognize that Portugal ruled over Macao and collected rent until 1849 when the Portuguese, taking advantage of China’s defeat during the first opium war with England and France, declared Macau’s independence from China.


Old Macau in 1960

Britannica tells us that Macao was returned to China in 1999. However, the transfer agreement allowed Macao to govern itself with a one-house legislature and a legal system based on Portuguese law — not China’s legal system.

Macao has a small security force to protect the 11.3 square mile (29.2 square kilometer) area, but defense is the responsibility of the central government in Beijing.

Since 2000, the gambling and tourist industry has been increasingly important to Macao’s economy and the city has become the playground of global tourists, nearby Hong Kong and wealthy mainland Chinese.

David Campion says, “As in Havana and Las Vegas, the gambling economy in Macau was first built up and its rules enforced by clever and well-organized gangsters, here called Triads. Once a date was set for the departure of the Portuguese, the Triads fought amongst each other viciously for greater control over the territory before the PRC was due to come in and rain on their parade (which it didn’t, as it turned out).”

Discover more about Organized Crime in 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.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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