On our way back from the Great Wall at Mutianyu, we stopped at a factory and showroom where we learned about the manufacturing techniques for Cloisonné brass vases. First, we went on a tour where we watched men and women creating vases. Once the tour was over, we went into the showroom.
The vases I bought (after negotiating a price) are yellow with a blue trim. One has a blue dragon on it, the second a phoenix beside a chariot, and the third running horses. Each one is about the size of my hand.
The cloisonné process is enamel on copper craftwork. It first appeared in Beijing in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and continued during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Cloisonné vases are crafted by using a copper porcelain process. The vase is made from copper with brass wires soldered to the body. Then a porcelain glaze is applied to cells between the brass wires.
After a series of complex procedures, such as burning, burnishing and gilding, the cloisonné vase is done.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author ofMy Splendid Concubine[3rd edition].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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Everywhere you go in China, there is something new to see and do. Disneyland is planning to build a theme park near Shanghai.
The sections of the Great Wall we have visited are an hour out of Beijing. The most popular site is at Badaling. The second choice, Mutianyu, is more dramatic. This portion of the Great Wall runs along the ridge of a mountain range. Badaling, meanwhile, is in a mountain pass.
The best way to reach the Great Wall is by taxi or bus. After you get there, you will discover the usual tourist shops. Since I enjoy haggling, I spend time shopping.
Great Wall at Mutianyu
At Badaling, there were camels and horses you could pay a fee to sit on while having your picture taken.
Once you reach Mutianyu, you have a choice—take a few hours to climb the mountain or ride a ski lift to the top in fifteen minutes. Getting back is easy. Take the toboggan seen during the 2008 Beijing Olympics on network TV and ride down.
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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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Mao Weitao is considered a living treasure in China. She imitates men in the opera roles she plays—a reversal from Imperial China when women were not allowed on stage so men played female roles.
Mao Weitao is on the left
I was introduced to Yue Opera in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province about a decade ago. Mao Weitao and her husband have their own theater company near the shores of the famous Westlake. My wife translated while I watched the live-opera performance in fascination.
The costumes were lavish and the acting and opera was dramatic with a backdrop of classical Chinese music.
The challenge today is to keep this form of Chinese opera alive. The audience for opera is shrinking dramatically in China while remaining popular with the older generation. Television, movies and the Internet are claiming the shorter attention spans of the younger people.
Mao Weitao, considered an innovative genius on stage, adapts and works to keep the art form alive. According to her husband, no two performances are exactly alike.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. 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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During the Copenhagen Climate Summit, China was criticized for not signing a pledge to reduce carbon emissions. I don’t think China’s was ready to sign and had to go home to study the situation to see what they could do before they made a commitment. All (take a look) of China’s politburo members, the top government body in China, are scientist or engineers.
On March 10, China told the United States to make stronger commitments on climate change and provide environmental expertise and financing to developing nations. That was a few days after China announced it was planning to reduce its carbon footprint by 40-45% (from 2005 levels) and generate 15% of its electricity from renewable technologies by 2020.
Solar Cells
Obama, on the other hand, only pledged reducing green house gas emissions “in the range of 17%” by 2020.
This is what I think happened after China’s representatives left Copenhagen. Those scientists and engineers that make up China’s ruling body gathered facts, discovered what China could achieve, then formulated long-range goals. Most scientists and engineers think that way.
President Obama is a lawyer. Most of the elected representatives in America’s two houses of congress are lawyers.
“From the bestselling author of Red Azalea and Empress Orchid comes the powerful story of the friendship of a lifetime, based on the life of Pearl S. Buck.”
“In this ambitious new novel (Pearl of China), Anchee Min brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who is now hailed in China as a modern heroine. Like nothing before it, Pearl of China tells the story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, from the perspective of the people she loved and of the land she called home.” Source Bookbrowse
At Bookbrowse, thirty-five early, reader reviews rated Pearl of China an average 4.5/5 stars.
In the southern town of Chin-kiang, in the last days of the nineteenth century, two girls bump heads and become thick as thieves. Willow is the only child of a destitute local family. Pearl, the headstrong daughter of zealous Christian missionaries, will become Pearl S. Buck, Nobel Prize-winning writer and activist. Their friendship will be tested during decades of great tumult, by imprisonment and exile, bloody civil war and Mao’s repressive Communist regime.
Pearl S. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, the Howells Medal in 1935, and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.
Read International Women’s Day where Anchee Min was a guest speaker http://wp.me/pN4pY-ft
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