#sinophile

DRAGON HEAD RAISING DAY: IT’S HAIRCUT TIME

“On the second day of the second month (of the lunar calendar), the dragon raises its head” - so goes the Chinese idiom, 二月二，龙抬头 (èr yuè èr, lóng táitóu).
This year’s Dragon Head Raising Day fell on March 2, 2014.

The most well-known tradition on this day is the cutting of hair and millions of people nationwide will get their haircut on what must be a great day for barbers. On this day, if you cut your hair it is believed you will have good fortune for the rest of the year. In addition, Chinese refrain from getting haircuts during the first lunar month of the year as it is believed that 正月剃头死舅舅 (if you cut your hair in the first month, your uncle will die)–bad news for kindly uncles everywhere.

Read more HERE…..

Chinese Families and Their Possessions

Nearly 20% of the world’s people live in China. That fact makes the country an incredibly diverse place. 

Huang Qingjun travels the expansive nation photographing families alongside all of their possessions. 

viaSmile in Your Face

Makeup Art.
These Chinese New Year celebration pieces by ‘Red’ Hong Yi were completed using only makeup products!

Lion City. 
An amazing ancient Chinese city now completed submerged under the clear waters of Qiandao Lake.

Lost Underwater Lion City:Rediscovery of China’s ‘Atlantis’

Qiandao Lake is a man-made lake located in Chun’an County, China, where archeologists have discovered in 2001 ruins of an underwater city. The city is at a depth of 26-40 meters and was named “Lion City”. There would have been 290,000 people living in this city during more than 1300 years.

Shanghai From A Crane.
Crane operator by day, aerial photographer by day too.

Just glancing at the epic aerial shots above, you’d think they were captured by a professional photographer. 

In fact, these amazing photos were taken by Wei Gensheng, a crane operator currently working in Shanghai. 

Crane Operator Takes Stunning Aerial Photos of Shanghai

viaSLR Lounge

There’s something on my knee……

Giant False Leaf Katydid (Pseudophyllus titan, Pseudophyllinae, Tettigoniidae)

If you have ever travelled or lived in China, you quickly observe that crowds form at the drop of a hat, whether it be to watch a game of chequers, minor domestic arguments, traffic accidents…and for foreigners. This happens in the big cities as much as it does in the more remote provinces, but when you are one of just a handful of 外国人(foreigners) in a third- or fourth-tier Chinese city and you are wielding a big camera with a flash diffuser AND you have China’s largest Orthopteran, P.titan (which very few Chinese people would be even aware exists), performing a threat display on your knee in the local park, the exponentially growing band of onlookers stands and stares in silent and, I will admit, unsettling curiosity.

So picture, if you will, the unseen scene in this image. I politely indicated that the crowd move aside so that I didn’t have them in the background of this shot. Behind and to the sides of me however, is a throng maybe two or three deep slowly creeping closer and closer as new arrivals at the rear of the pack push and strain to see what the commotion is.

I should have put my hat on the ground and collected some change…..

See more images of Pseudophyllus titan in my Flickr photostream HERE.

byitchydogimages on Flickr.
Pu'er, Yunnan, China

See more images from China on my Flickr site HERE…..

ohmyasian:

theworldofchinese:

CHINESE LABOUR CORPS

In the tiny French commune of Noyellessur-Mer, facing the English Channel, a stone Chinese archway rises incongruously at a cemetery entrance. Inside, over 800 graves are marked with Chinese names, birthplaces, death-dates between 1916 and 1920, and Biblical phrases in Chinese and English.

The dead of Noyelles came from the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), a force of 100,000 Chinese who, from 1916 onward, dug many of the trenches that criss-crossed war-torn France. The British-led CLC, and another 40,000 men working for the French, carved out defences, built barricades, fixed railways, and mended telegraph wire. The Chinese Labour Corps was the creation of wily Chinese statesman Liang Shiyi (梁士诒), once the technophile Minister of Railways under the Qing Dynasty (1616-1911). It was an attempt to get on what he saw as the winning side of the war and ultimately better China’s place. Germany, like the other Great Powers, held considerable concessions in China, and siding with the Allies, even if only quietly at first, would position China to reclaim those colonies at war’s end.

It was appropriate enough, then, that the majority of the laborers he negotiated to send to France were from Shandong, where the German concessions were sited. The British and French officials involved in negotiating the contracts were looking for strong Northerners, and the men were said to be often “six feet tall”, a striking height at the time.

The legal status of the laborers was somewhat dubious; as, officially, a non-belligerent China could not supply military aid to the Allies without violating its neutrality. The Germans protested against the creation of the labour corps to the Chinese government, which replied by specifying that this was a purely civilian deal, handled through a conveniently created “private company”, the Huimin Company, and if this supply of labor happened to be used for martial purposes, that was nothing to do with them. That the Huimin Company had been brought into existence by Liang Shiyi purely for this purpose was not allowed to trouble this legal fiction. The laborers themselves have left little record. Almost entirely illiterate, their histories were set down by others, whether the British offi cers who dealt with them or the educated Chinese who accompanied them as translators. Farmers and migrants from rural villages, their transition into the war was also a transition into modernity.

As they entered “the sausage machine” of processing, their traditional queues were chopped off; they were washed, fingerprinted, and given a number,not a name. In his book, Strangers on the Western Front, Guoqi Xu demonstrated why this mechanistic process was made necessary; in the book, a British offi cer is recorded saying, “The man didn’t know his own name. If you questioned him, he’d say ‘Well, I come from the Wong family village, so my name is probably Wong.’ You’d say, ‘All right, well what is your personal name?’ and he’d grin and say ‘Wong’. We’d say, ‘Well, what are you called at home?’ and he’d say ‘Well, I’m known as Number Five, or Little Dog, or Big Nose.’

But the conditions were praised by the workers, who enjoyed the food, the hot baths with soap, and the clean housing…

Continue Reading Here……

cultureincart:

Villager Sun Xuetang makes steamed buns with patterns in the Zhuqiao Town, Laizhou City, east #China’s Shandong Province, Jan. 15, 2014. Steamed bun with colourful patterns, listed as an intangible heritage of Shandong, is a traditional staple food during the Spring Festival in Jiaodong.

cultureincart

Mid-instar Chinese Oak Silkmoth Caterpillar (Antheraea pernyi, Saturniidae)

The Chinese (Oak) Tussah Moth (or “Chinese Tasar Moth”) is originally from southern China but as it has been used for tussah silk (a wild silk) production, they have been distributed more widely across subtropical and tropical Asia.

Tussah silk is the best-known and most widely used of all the wild silks. Moths have been raised outdoors on oak trees in China for more than two millennia. The natural color of the silk is a pinkish beige but depends on the climate and soil. In the 1970s and 1980s China expanded tussah sericulture to most of its provinces, but has since abandoned these efforts in the South. Tussah is now primarily grown in the Northeast, in the provinces of Shandong, Liaoning, and Hebei. It was introduced into Japan in 1877 where it was cultivated locally on a small scale in the 20th century. Tussah silk is also raised in both Koreas.

Because it is so easy to rear, Antheraea pernyi has been used in laboratories around the world to study diapause, endocrinology, and other aspects of insect physiology.

The reeled silk has a smooth sheen like domestic silk, but the rougher spun silk is highly favored by designers of high-end fashion to make women’s and men’s suits, blazers, dresses, shirts, scarves, and other garments and accessories. Sometimes tussah is blended with cotton or synthetic fibres. Tussah silk floss is also used in quilting to make duvets.

On a more technical note, Antheraea pernyi silk has more similar sequences to spider dragline silk than the silk from its domestic counterpart, Bombyx mori. Spider dragline silk exhibits exceptional strength, toughness, and resistance to mechanical compression, properties that rival those of synthetic high-performance fibres such as Kevlar. Consequently, there is a wide spread interest in mimicking natural silks in order to produce new classes of high-performance materials and tussah silk has potential as a resource for biospinning spider dragline silk.

bySinobug (itchydogimages) on Flickr.
Pu’er, Yunnan, China

See more Chinese caterpillars on my Flickr site HERE…..

Silhouette of the North-west Guard Tower of the Forbidden City against a Winter Sunset

byitchydogimages on Flickr.
Forbidden City / Palace Museum
Beijing, China

See more images from China on my Flickr site HERE…..