The Context

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A Venture with Reasons: Or Without? Nov 29, 2020

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Do people travel just because they got rich enough to afford a trip? “The world is so big, and I want to look at it,” says a middle school teacher from Central China’s Henan Province, in her letter of resignation in 2015. “A person has to be impulsive twice in their life: to fall head over heals in love and to go on a trip without any hesitation,”said another popular online post in 2016. So do we really need a good reason to travel? For ancient Chinese scholars, they did need a good reason to travel. But the most famous ventures in ancient China happened in the dreams of China's great poet and a young lady in a classic drama.

To Be Rich is Glorious: A Short History of Showing off Wealth in China Nov 22, 2020

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A group of young women in Shanghai group-bought luxury bags and booking rooms at five-star hotels just to take photos and pass them off as their own purchases on their WeChat feeds. Netizens mocked them as “fake socialites. Young men are doing something similar. A more humble bragging is, for example, complaining the new Lamborghini your husband gifted to you is "too ugly." The girl who started this traces its origins to the Japanese manga The Rose of Versailles, a story based on the flashy Bourbon Dynasty. In ancient China, competition on flaunting upper class lifestyle and taste was once a fad among the elite group. It finally led to the fall of dynasties and powerful political families during that period.

Food Security in Ancient Times: Power of Dinner Tables Nov 16, 2020

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To a large extent, food supply shaped the development of the world’s early civilizations, including those in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and India. In China, food security was a matter of dynastic survival. Geographic isolation and human influence on nature were decisive factors in the flourishing of Chinese civilization and shaping of Chinese politics.

Ancient Chinese Villages: An Illusion of Shangrila Nov 09, 2020

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There was a lot of imagination in narratives on rural areas in ancient China. For thousands of years, rural villages have existed. Why would they need to be a part of anyone’s imagination? The 2,000-year plus stable centralized imperial system in China underlies the tradition of focusing on imperial rulers and institutions in historical research. The vague picture and difficult academic research set the stage for an idyllic imagining of ancient villages in China. There is a Western voice in this imagining, and the main pushers of this narrative were European missionaries. For both Western elites disappointed with the modern civilization brought about by the Second Industrial Revolution during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and China's rising middle class today, it is a shangrila-style description of the villages that strikes a deep chord. And based on the illusion of a lack of imperial governance in villages, there is another illusion that a village in ancient China was governed by local influential landed gentry.

Child Education in Ancient China: Gentlemen and Scholars Nov 01, 2020

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“Tragic family of origin”, a term taken from family counseling, has become a hashtag in recent years after stories of conflict between parents and children, either real or depicted in TV and film, shocked the public. Some blame traditional views on education, which prioritize academic success and give rigid authority to teachers and parents. This criticism, however, is possibly a misinterpretation of Chinese traditional ideas about education, either in terms of schooling or family education.

Chinese Students in the US: an unaccomplished mission Oct 24, 2020

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The UK replaced the US as the favorite intended destination of Chinese students in 2019, and the gap was even wider in 2020 due to the tension between China and the US. About 150 years ago, the US was the first country in the world to receive the first government-funded students from China. Their average age was 12. They were sent by the imperial Qing government under an initiative promoted by the first Chinese graduate from the United States, Rong Hong, who was known as Yung Wing in the US. Some of these children became Chinese diplomats, engineers and military officers. One of them, Liang Cheng, became the Qing court’s ambassador to the United States. He was knighted as Sir Chentung Liang Cheng by Great Britain. He initiated and facilitated a project in which some of the reparations paid by the Qing to Western powers for losses over the Boxer Rebellion were used to fund the study of Chinese students in the US and other Western countries.

Chinese Students in Japan: Revolutionaries Oct 08, 2020

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Today Japan is the host country of the second largest group of Chinese students abroad, second to the US. Japan hosted the largest number of Chinese students abroad between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Japan used to a student of China. How did it become a teacher of China? Some of the Chinese students, either funded by the imperial Qing government or by themselves, became the major force of overthrowing the Qing and China's imperial system. Why?

Astronomy in Ancient China: Science & Humanity Sep 26, 2020

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The Beidou Satellite Navigation System, the spacecraft Crew Dragon --- while grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic on Earth, humans have made several landmark steps in space in 2020. Many world firsts records of astronomy and sophisticated calendar making systems over thousands of years of history, along with love between a goddess and a human and the fight of the Monkey King against the order in the heaven --- science and humanity are always two sides of the same coin not only in astronomy in China for thousands of years, but also in any science for human today.

Gold, Silver, Wealth and War Sep 15, 2020

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Prices of gold and silver skyrocketed in the first half of the year amid uncertainties of the global economic prospect. China has a long history of using gold. But China has never been on gold standard. Instead, silver dominated the country as a national currency for hundreds of years partly due to silver influx from European colonies in the Americas. Silver also brought wars between China and the world powers.

Wuhan: Rediscovery, Restart Sep 06, 2020

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In the first decade of the 20th century, today’s Hankou District of Wuhan became the second-largest port in China, only following Shanghai and exceeding old big ports like Guangzhou and Tianjin in terms of trade volume. Kokichi Mizuno, the Japanese general consulate in Wuhan, described the city as the “Chicago of China” in his book about Hankou published in 1908. An official of China's last dynasty Qing initiated Wuhan's industrialization process which has also underwritten the fall of Qing.

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