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.
A Qing dynasty hard painted scroll has set a new record at auction. It's a long scroll measuring 61 feet [19 meters] long and was painted by Imperial court painter Xu Yang in the 1750s. The scroll commemorates Emperor Qianlong's military campaigns in Myanmar / Western China to try to capture jade mines as he had a major fixation with this semi-precious stone. It fetched $65million (414 million yuan) at a Beijing auction. Other examples of Xu Yang's work can be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
A local entrepreneur has turned his love for chocolate into a thriving business. Mo Xuefeng from Jiaxing (conveniently halfway between Shanghai and Hangzhou) became a huge fan as a boy and has been able to create a chocolate themed village; it attracted 50,000 visitors on the May 1st holiday. China imports most of its chocolate few people having the expertise to create a local chocolate industry.
A CNN report describes how a local area in Jiangsu (south-eastern China) has become famous for its double yolk duck eggs. A double yolk is quite rare normally but this particular county has ducks laying double yolk eggs one in twenty times. Over many generations ducks have been selected that are more likely to produce the double form. The double yolk commands a much higher price and many are preserved in salt water and eaten as a delicacy. The famous county is 高邮 Gāo yóu near Yangzhou. Local salt has been produced for many centuries making a wealthy area.
The first commercial driver-less taxi service has been launched in China by Baidu.
Although no-one sits in the driver's seat currently there is a ‘safety monitor’ in the front passenger seat.
It is running within Shouqing Park, Beijing which will be a venue for the winter Olympics next year and is not part of the main road network.
A robotaxi can be summoned by an app called ‘Apollo Go’ and costs around $5 a trip.
Many people are fascinated by the novelty of the robotaxi service and so it is having to frequently stop as people get a little bit too close to take a a good look at the driver-less vehicles.
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.
Modern Chinese Dushan jade sculpture from central China.
It shows the variability of color within a block of jade. Here the artist has used the variation to exquisite effect.
Image by Artfiber ➚ available under a Creative Commons license ➚
Conventions
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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