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.
Analysis of a partial skull is changing people’s ideas of human evolution, The discovery of Peking Man back in 1926 caused a stir as the conventional view was that humans evolved in Africa and moved north into Europe before spreading out. Over the last hundred years it is clear that there were several species of humans and it is certainly not a case of simply following back to an original ‘Adam and Eve’. The new skull, although discovered in 1933 has only recently been studied and suggests a new species of humans from Asia which adds further complexity to the story of human evolution. The new ‘species’ has been called Homo longi, because (龙 lóng) represents the Chinese dragon. It gives further evidence that ancient Chinese culture developed independently from the rest of the world.
A reconstruction of the whole human from the skull fragment.
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A group of migrating elephants are being closely followed on Chinese social media.
They set off from the nature reserve at Xishuangbanna in the remote south-western part of Yunnan province. They have traveled about 311 miles [500 kms] and are now quite close to Kunming, the provincial capital. One 'rogue' male has broken away from the group and is 10 miles [16 kms] away.
China used to have elephants roaming over a good deal of the country, for a long time there was an elephant stable at the Forbidden City Beijing as they were used for ceremonial parades, but the Asian elephants rapidly reduced in numbers and by the 1970s there were only 193 of them restricted to the far south-west. They are rarer in China than the Giant Panda and have been given top protection status. Numbers have risen to just 300 so this group of 15 have been given aid to prevent as much interaction with humans as possible. Roads are blocked and the animals receive daily food drops to encourage them to keep away, not always successfully, from farmer's crops.
It is hoped that the group can eventually be enticed back to their original home at Xishuangbanna but many followers on social media may like to see them set up a new home elsewhere.
Drone footage of the elephant group sleeping. Courtesy China Central Television (CCTV)
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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.
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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