Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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Spring Festival


2010
04.16

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Far and away the most important holiday in China is Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year. To the Chinese people it is as important as Christmas to people in the West. The dates for this annual celebration are determined by the lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar, so the timing of the holiday varies from late January to early February.

To the ordinary Chinese, the festival actually begins on the eve of the lunar New Year’s Day and ends on the fifth day of the first month of the lunar calendar. But the 15th of the first month, which normally is called the Lantern Festival, means the official end of the Spring Festival in many parts of the country.

Preparations for the New Year begin the last few days of the last moon, when houses are thoroughly cleaned, debts repaid, hair cut and new clothes purchased. Houses are festooned with paper scrolls bearing auspicious antithetical couplet (as show on both side of the page) and in many homes, people burn incense at home and in the temples to pay respects to ancestors and ask the gods for good health in the coming months.

“Guo Nian,” meaning “passing the year,” is the common term among the Chinese people for celebrating the Spring Festival. It actually means greeting the new year. At midnight at the turn of the old and new year, people used to let off fire-crackers which serve to drive away the evil spirits and to greet the arrival of the new year. In an instant the whole city would be engulfed in the deafening noise of the firecrackers.

On New Year’s Eve, all the members of families come together to feast. Jiaozi, a steamed dumpling as pictured below, is popular in the north, while southerners favor a sticky sweet glutinous rice pudding called nian gao.

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The Moon Festival


2010
04.16

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On the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar, the moon is round and the Chinese people mark their Moon (or Mid-autumn) Festival. The round shape to a Chinese means family reunion. Therefore the Moon Festival is a holiday for members of a family to get together wherever it is possible.

On that day sons and daughters will bring their family members back to their parents’ house for a reunion. Sometimes people who have already settled overseas will come back to visit their parents on that day.

As every Chinese holiday is accompanied by some sort of special food. On the Moon Festival, people eat moon cakes, a kind of cookie with fillings of sugar, fat, sesame, walnut, the yoke of preserved eggs, ham or other material. In Chinese fairy tales, there live on the moon the fairy Chang E, a wood cutter named Wu Gang and a jade rabbit which is Chang E’s pet. In the old days, people paid respect to the fairy Chang E and her pet the jade rabbit.

The custom of paying homage to the fairy and rabbit is gone, but the moon cakes are showing improvement every year. There are hundreds of varieties of moon cakes on sale a month before the arrival of the Moon Festival this year. Some moon cakes are of very high quality and very delicious. An overseas tourist is advised not to miss it if he or she happens to be in China during the Moon Festival.

Poems on Moon and Home
The Mid-Autumn Moon
by Li Qiao
A full moon hangs high in the chilly sky,
All say it’s the same everywhere, round and bright.
But how can one be sure thousands of li away
Wind and perhaps rain may not be marring the night?

The Yo-Mei Mountain Moon
by Li Bai
The autumn moon is half round above the Yo-mei Mountain;
The pale light falls in and flows with the water of the Ping-chiang River.
Tonight I leave Ching-chi of limpid stream for the three Canyons.
And glide down past Yu-chow, thinking of you whom I can not see.

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Chinese Bells


2010
03.22

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The bell has a long history in China. It is an embodiment of Chinese culture and science, and testifies to the wisdom of Chinese people.

As early as in the Shang Dynasty single hand－bells were used. Later the hand－bell evolved into series of bells in different sizes. At the early Zhou Dynasty emerged the bell－chime hanging on a frame. In the middle part of Zhou Dynasty, the bell－chime became musical instruments for rituals and played an important role in political affairs.

The bell－chime unearthed from the tomb of Yi, the Marquis of State Zeng in Suixian County, Hubei Province in 1978 is an exemplar. It has 65 bronze bells. Those beautiful bells are of excellent workmanship. Because of the cultural and scientific and technical information contained in them, their excellent musical quality, and the profound acoustic principle adopted in them, those bells amazed the archaeologists, music historians and science historians.

With decline of the ritual of the Zhou Dynasty, the bell－chime gradually stepped down because of the complicated manufacture process and high cost they evolved.

In the Eastern Han Dynasty, from AD 25 to 220, Buddhism was introduced into China and the native Chinese religion Taoism came into being. Bells began to be used in Buddhist and Taoist monasteries as musical instruments for religious ceremonies.

The bells in Buddhist monasteries are used in prayer and ceremonies of edification and expiation of the sins of the deceased. The sound of the bells may give people different suggestions such as sublimity, benevolence and auspices. As for the response the bell may arouse, different people have different reactions. For example, hearing the bell the poet Zhang Ji sang,

“At midnight from the distance echoes come along

By my boat the temple bell tolls

ting－tong!

ting－tong!”

The depressing tone suggests a traveler’s homesickness. But Dai Shulun sang a flamboyant melody, “At the jingling bell from the royal gardens / On the capital outskirts the morning glows.”

The most famous Buddhist bell is the Yongle Bell in the Dazhong Si or Big Bell Temple in Beijing. It was produced when the emperor Zhu Di named his reign Yongle and moved the national capital to Beijing. The 46－ton bell is 5.56 metres high and 3.3 metres in its outer diameter. The bell with clear patterns is covered with passages from Buddhist scriptures inside and outside. The passages are in neat and clear characters without any error. The bell gives booming, lasting emotive sound.

After the Tang Dynasty court audience bells and watch bells came into use. The court audience bell is used to announce the dignitaries’ merits. The watch bells are used to tell the time at night. Beijing has a Bell Tower and a Drum Tower. Over the centuries in the Ming and Qing dynasties, people used to hear 108 bell－tolls and drum－beats every other hour at night. In those days Beijing people slept to the accompaniment of bell and drum sounds.

The bell in China bespeaks a long－standing tradition. Chinese people are proud of these rare ancient bells. The bell offers artistic and scientific treatment to generations of people.

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Zhang Heng – Historical Celebrity


2010
03.22

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“Bamboo Book Annals”, written in ancient times, recorded a strong earthquake happened in the 12 century BC in China. The Chinese people always wanted to observe this disastrous phenomenon of nature. Zhang Heng, a scientist of the Eastern Han period （25－220）, carried out scientific experiments and in 123 invented a seismograph, the first of its kind in the world, that was able to record earthquakes happened hundreds of kilometers away.

According to “Biography of Zhang Heng” in “History of Later Han”, this seismograph had a diameter of 1.8 meters. Made of bronze it had 8 dragon figures facing 8 directions. There was mechanism in the head of each dragon. When seismic waves were felt, a rod in the center of the seismograph called “duzhu” would incline to the direction of the earthquake and trigger the lever in the dragon head, opening its mouth and releasing a bronze ball. The ball fell into the mouth of a toad, thus enabling people to know the time and direction of the quake.

Zhang Heng’s invention came into being 1,700 years before that in Europe. Joseph Needham of Britain claimed that it was a doubtless fact that China was the earliest inventor of seismograph； and that it was a contribution of the distinguished mathematician, astrologer and geographer Zhang Heng.

Zhang Heng grew up in a scholarly family. He was a literati and a man with rare interdisciplinary talents. He constructed the south－pointing carriage and the odometer. No matter which direction the south－pointing carriage moved, the wooden human figure standing in the carriage would always point to the south due to the gear system. As for the odometer, after each li it covered, the wooden human figure on it will strike a drum. It is quite similar to present－day taximeter.

This instrument in Beijing Ancient Observatory was constructed in the Qing Dynasty （1644－l9ll） in imitation of Zhang Heng’s celestial globe.

According to the theory of sphere－heavens Zhang Heng constructed a celestial globe, which was a hollow ball covered with stars. His device was operated by water whose flow was regulated by a clepsydra. The daily revolution of the device corresponded to the position of stars in the celestial. Zhang Heng also discovered that the moon reflected the light of the sun, and that it eclipsed when sunlight was blocked. This was man’s first explanation of lunar eclipse. Owing to his great astronomical achievement, the international astronomy organization decided to name a lunar crater at the back of the moon and a small planet of the No. 1802 in his name. This great scientist will live forever with the sun, the moon and the stars.