We're building an exciting information source all about China. We found other sites were poorly structured, too detailed (such as Wikipedia) or just too old-fashioned. What we thought was needed was a carefully constructed set of pages with strict editorial control so that links and pages are consistent, up-to-date and easy to navigate without clutter.
The name “Chinasage” came about because this can be read as either “china sage” (中国英明zhōng guó yīng míng) or “china's age” (中国时代zhōng guó shí dài) , which promotes our new knowledge resource at a time when China has come of age in the World.
China Sage News
We keep track of news reports from China but steer clear of the headlines that are well reported elsewhere. Here are the latest news stories, for more visit our news page.
The effects of long term soil degradation by inappropriate farming and tree felling had turned the Saihanba area in northernmost Hebei into a desert of dust of little value to anyone.
Efforts to keep back the Gobi desert in north China began as early as 1962 with the planting of trees as a shelter belt. The efforts of nearly 60 years of continuous management are now bearing fruit. It has become national forest park and nature reserve and received an international ‘Champions of the Earth’ award in 2017. It is the world's largest planted forest and absorbs over 860,000 tons of CO2 each year.
The foresters have developed skills in nurturing tree seedlings and claim a 98.9% survival rate compared to about 8% in the early years. Trees are still being planted and by 2030 should cover over 309 sq miles [800 sq kms]. As well as trees the park is home to 610 species of plants and 261 species of animals. The park should have a noticeable effect on the air quality as far away as Beijing.
Universal Studios makers of such films as Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, Transformers, Minions, The Great Wall and Warcraft have chosen Beijing for their fifth theme park.
It has 37 different rides including the popular Harry Potter rides found elsewhere in the
world but also new ones like ‘Kung Fu Panda Land of Awesomeness’.
It is jointly run by Beijing International Resort Co. and Universal Parks and Resorts and cost about $7.7 billion to build. It is located 20 miles east from the city center but does have its own subway station at the end of the Batong line.
China has announced completion of a new railway link to Russia.
The traditional route of the Trans-Siberian railway has a link into China through Ulan Bator in Mongolia and also links through Harbin in Heilongjiang province. The new bridge over the mighty Heilongjian/Amur river is further east linking Tongjiang and Nizhneleninskoye. The link joins the Trans-Siberian railway to Vladivostok at Birobidzhan. The bridge is 7,267 feet [2,215 meters] long and has taken seven years to build. It was financed as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
This year Chinese valentine's day falls on Saturday 14th August - precisely six months after the western version.
In China the festival is a moveable festival as it falls on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month [Qīxìjié 七夕节 means seventh night festival]. It commemorates the love between a Zhinu, weaver and the cowherd Niulang. The gods separated them and they were only allowed to meet on one night each year. The husband and wife are represented by the stars Vega and Altair and a bridge of magpies is made over the Milky Way which runs between them in the sky to allow them to meet. The magpies will only come if it was dry so she earnestly prayed for rain to keep away on this day.
It has now become a day for lovers to have a romantic evening and exchange gifts.
We continue to improve the web site as you can see from these updates and upgrades, for older entries please visit our site news page.
Thu 10th Jun
Larger images
We've spent quite a bit of time maing the web site look better and load up quicker. You won't see much different as it is all behind the scenes. The iamges associated with promoting other pages has moved from 150px to 400px and this should make the pages more graphically attractive as lets face it 150px is a little too small to appreciate an image. If you spot any problems, as ever please let us know.
As books were first printed in China it is not surprising that China has a long history of literature.
There are a handful of classic literature that everyone has read - or seen as they have all had several TV versions prodcued.
Our new, short survey looks at the development of the Classics and the novels that make up Chinese literature.
We use a consistent style for links within Chinasage. An internal link taking you to another page within our site is shown like this while a link to a page on any other web site is shown like this ➚.
We use Chinese characters wherever appropriate. Most browsers should display both the characters and the pinyin correctly. We highlight any use of the older Wade Giles system. Except where stated all characters are the modern simplified form used in the People's Republic rather than the traditional ones (pre-1970s). To help you learn Chinese characters many of the very common characters are highlighted thus: 中 hovering the mouse over the character pops up a box showing further information about the character.
Dates are given using the BCE/CE ➚ (Before Common Era and in Common Era) year convention rather than BC/AD. If a date is not followed by BCE or CE it should be taken as CE.
Authorship
All the text on the Chinasage web site is our own, we do not copy and paste from other web sites. We research each topic from a number of sources. The only exception to this are quotations and image credits. All text is our copyright and can not be used/copied without our permission. We are independent of any other company or government, the opinions expressed are our own. We do not receive funding from any external agency or organization.
Teacup Media (China History Podcast)
We are delighted to be able to promote links to Laszlo Montgomery's excellent Teacup Media ➚ series created over the last ten years. Laszlo Montgomery ➚ has in depth knowledge of building commercial contacts with China over 30 years. The set of 250 podcasts totals 130 hours of audio commentary which covers every conceivable topic in Chinese history. Highly recommended.
Acknowledgments
We are extremely grateful to the many people who have put their photographs online for anyone to adapt and use. Without them our site would be very drab. If we are not using the image license correctly please let us know. We are grateful to Kim Dramer ➚ for permission to use her short videos all about Chinese culture and traditions. Some pages use Javascript ➚ to create special effects such as our airport table and calendar. We are grateful to the original authors for providing their code to be used and adapted by anyone else. The online Chinese dictionary uses the definition from the CC-CEDICT project ➚ for which we are grateful for a generous free license. Sound files kindly provided by shtooka.net ➚ under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.
Feel free to contact Chinasage to point out any errors, omissions or suggestions on how to improve this web site.
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