Oracle Turtle Scripts This is Oracle Turtle Script, the early Chinese written language carved on a turtle shell during Shang Dynasty (1600 BC – 1046 BC) – an era ruled by merchants with a social system chiefly based on written business contacts. This script used to be considered as the earliest form of Chinese characters by archaeologists. But the evidence […]
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This more than 3,000-year-old bronze vessel was recovered by a Beijing museum researcher in 2002 from an antique market in Hong Kong. On the bottom of the container, there are 98 Chinese characters with the opening lines praising the legendary Great Yu’s hydraulic projects nearly 5,000 years ago to control the flood from the Yellow River. An Ancient Reference to […]
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This is a stone carving taken from the graveyard of the 2nd Tang Dynasty emperor Li Shimin ( 598-649) in Shaanxi Province. The artefact was smashed into small pieces and smuggled to America in 1914. Now it is used as a room decor in a restaurant in The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These are a pair […]
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The White Deer Plain (白鹿原) is a Chinese TV drama narrating the history of an old village on the conservative Yellow Plateau in Shaanxi Province, the home to First Emperor Qin’s terracotta warriors. The man standing at the door to the main living/bedroom is played by He Bing (何冰), one of China’s best actors who won last year’s major Chinese […]
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White Deer College (白鹿书院), in Jiangxi Province, was a private university established 1,000 years ago with its heyday during Song and Ming dynasties. In classic China (before the middle 17th century), there were two kinds of tertiary education facilities: state-sponsored university and private colleges. The students of the former were selected nationwide. Not only they needed to pay no tuition […]
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During the middle of the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644), there were four men regarded as the top four talented scholars in the region of Jiangnan, the area where Liangzhu Culture developed 5,300 – 4,000 years ago. One of the four in Hangzhou, other three from Suzhou, all were great poets, painters and calligraphers. This calligraphy is the first page […]
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Watching the lanterns on the Lantern Festival — a duet from Yueju Opera “The Legend of Fish” by actress Wang Zhiping (王志萍) as the fish and actress Huang Hui (黄慧) as the scholar. The legendary inter-species romance goes like this: A talented young scholar had no money so he had no honey, and his rich and powerful fiancee’s family wanted to untie […]
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The 9th Fairy’s Platform (九仙女台), a Daoist temple, was initially built during the Tang Dynasty in the middle of a river in Shanxi Province. As legend has it, a female immortal from a celestial world once visited this place in the appearance of a homeless girl and lived on a rock in the river. By then there were two dragons fighting […]
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The Heart Sutra is one of the most important Buddhist classics, while hand-copying Heart Surra is a popular practice among Buddhist followers in China historically, The practice mainly serves two purposes: to help distribute Buddhist classics in an era when printing was expensive, and most importantly, to function as a meditative learning process that allows the message easily entering the […]
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Lyric: 悟妙道好一似春梦乍醒 Suddenly I realised my true self as if waking up from a spring dream 猛然醒又入梦长夜冥冥 Yet soon I became confused again, as though re-entering the dreamland 未修真便言悟终成梦境 Boasting enlightenment while merely knowing what will be the true reality is still an existence in a fantasy 到无梦梦无醒方见性灵 Only when I have no dream to wake up from, I will […]
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Fan Zhongyan (范仲淹, 989-1052), a Suzhou native, was a great statesman, philosopher, writer, educator, military strategist of the Song Dynasty. His most memorable statements include: Be the first to bear the burden for the world and the last to enjoy the fruit of collective achievement. I’d rather speak up for the truth and die than keep silent and live. He did not […]
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More than 3,000 mysterious signs discovered in Mt Juci (具茨山), of Henan Province, China, are believed to be carved in the rocks by ancient Chinese more than 5,000 years ago, according to researchers from Geophysics and Planetary Science Institute of China’s Science Academy. But so far no one can decode their meaning. Some experts suggest they might be the earlier […]
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