Video: Chinese calligraphy in Xi'an

Many Chinese artists are as famous for their calligraphy as for their landscapes and poetry. Actually, they are all mixed together in many paintings.

In Xi'an, we got a demonstration of traditional writing with a brush. One of the characters, "guo", means country or kingdom and is still used today in the name of China: Zhong Guo, or middle kingdom. The U.S. is Mei Guo, or beautiful kingdom. France is Fa Guo, Germany De Guo and so on.

The guide also did a lovely rendering of Cindy's name in Chinese. Watch:


Connoisseurs of Chinese calligraphy may have some critical comments about our guide's skill.

Related:

China is opening up, slowly, by fits and starts

Guangxi: Terraced rice paddies, sugarloaf mountains
Three days on the Yangtze River
The madding crowd in the Forbidden City
Why the Chinese will never drop their written language
Impressions of China
A little tour of Tsinghua University campus
Deciphering China, ideograms to menus

The madding crowd in the Forbidden City

Bernardo Bertolucci's 1987 film "The Last Emperor" had some great
shots of the enormous plazas within the Forbidden City.

Beijing's winter wears you down. Every day the high temperature is around 30 degrees, at night it goes down into the teens and the wind from the north can freeze your eyeballs. As recently as last week, there was still some ice on parts of the canals that never get sun on the Tsinghua University campus. 

Lately though, we began to feel spring in the air and now it is in full bloom. The warm weather makes it more inviting to get out and around. Last Saturday we went to the Forbidden City, which was built 600 years ago and was the palace for the Ming and Qing dynasty emperors.

Lining up for tickets. They cost $10.

People had warned us not to go on a weekend because of the crowds. They were right. You get pushed and shoved a lot more in China than you might somewhere else. People don't speak to strangers, so it is rare to hear someone say, "Pardon me" or "sorry."

This couple asked to have their picture taken with us
 outside the Forbidden City. I said we were "meiguo ren"(Americans)
 and they said something back that sounded friendly. Mao's
 huge portrait is just behind my head. 

The scale of the place is breathtaking. Inside the 26-foot-high walls are some 900 buildings on a rectangular site the covers the equivalent of 170 football fields. This was the home of the last emperor, Pu Yi, who abdicated in 1911 and then was permitted to stay until he was evicted in 1924. The site was then converted into a museum.

When I visited Beijing in 1988 with a group of journalists, we were taken to meet the brother of Pu Yi. Evidently the government brought him out to meet foreigners. He talked about how it was good that the empire was overthrown and the people were running the country.

All the roofs have golden tiles, the color of the emperor.

Lots of parents lifted their kids over the railings to touch the lion's head on this bronze water cistern. The woman wearing an army cap with a red star is probably not making a political statement. The caps are a nostalgia item for tourists. You never see them on the streets. Only at tourist sites. 

Tour groups from all over China come to see the old palace.
Most groups don identical hats to keep track of each other.

Related:

China is opening up, slowly, by fits and starts

Guangxi: Terraced rice paddies, sugarloaf mountains
Three days on the Yangtze River
Video: Chinese calligraphy in Xi'an
Why the Chinese will never drop their written language
Impressions of China
A little tour of Tsinghua University campus
Deciphering China, ideograms to menus

Sitting on top of a volcano

Steam vents at the Craters of the Moon, Taupo

Here in New Zealand we are perched on a land mass where two continental plates collide. Below us, the friction and fracturing create tremendous heat and release the molten rock that lies beneath the crust.

When that magma contacts groundwater, the steam finds its way up to the surface in the form of vents and geysers and bubbling hot springs. They make up one of the tourist attractions around the two big islands. The Earth here shudders and moves. A year ago, hundreds of people were killed in Christchurch on the South Island when a major earthquake struck.

How to speak Kiwi in New Zealand

At the moment, the New Zealand accent sounds the same to me as Australian, and its most notable distinguishing features are:

The short-e is pronounced like a short-i. "Yes, we expect to visit that section of town" is pronounced "Yiss, we expict to visit that siction of town." If you're good you go to hivven.

The short-a sound, as in, "The fact is, it's a hard task," sounds like a short-e: "The fect is, it's a hahd tesk."

Long-a becomes long-e in New Zealand, so "Be careful in that area" comes out "Be keerful in that eerea."

And you park your car here with a Boston accent: "Hey, mate, don't park your car there" comes out, "Hye, myte, don't pahk ya cah theah."

New Zealand chicken is where you go in the airport before you get on the plane.

That's half of it. With a day's practice, you could pass for a Kiwi in the U.S.

New Zealand was one of the last places settled by Polynesian peoples,
probably around 1250-1300 A.D. Map from Wikipedia. 

Recent settlement

Because of its isolation, the land we now call New Zealand developed thousands of unique species of birds and plants. The history of human habitation here is very short. Eastern Polynesians were the first humans to visit the islands, and they arrived a mere 800 years ago. They were also the first mammals. [Correction: there were three species of small bats when humans arrived.] They brought mice and pigs with them.

New Zealand's long isolation is remarkable given that Australia, the nearest large land mass only 900 miles to the west, has 40,000 years of human habitation. But the Polynesians had a great tradition of seafaring, and the aborigines who settled Australia did not.

Today the Maori people, descendants of the original settlers of New Zealand, represent about 15% of the population, and about one-fourth of them speak the Maori language. Maori is taught in the schools, but use of the language does not appear to be growing.

A grain of geology

Mount Ruapehu is one of the most active volcanoes in New Zealand.
It last erupted in 1995-96, but there are ski resorts on its slopes anyway.

On our bus ride today from Ohakune, we passed a number of volcanic cones. We will spend the next few days at Lake Taupo, new Zealand's largest lake, which fills an enormous volcanic crater. When the volcano erupted some 26,000 years ago, its dust clouds spread around the world and may have contributed to the last ice age.

New Zealand: air and space

Cindy and I have some friends in New Zealand, Daniela Cavallaro, who is a professor of Italian language and literature at the University of Auckland, and Dan Stollenwerk, a theology teacher at St. Peter's College. At various times they have asked us when we would come to visit, and it seemed like now was a good time, when we were in the same hemisphere. 

Dan and son Stefano at Karekare beach, where some scenes
from the movie "Piano" were filmed.

Why the Chinese will never drop their written language

As I scratch the surface of Chinese, I now understand why the language cannot be simply converted to the Roman alphabet. They have to keep the ideograms, and we will never see newspapers or books written in the Romanized version of Chinese. Too bad. That would make learning the language easier.

This biography is supposed
to be flattering. I don't know.

Chinese does not have that many sounds. Many words are just one or two syllables. The problem is that you can have a syllable like shi which means different things in the four different tones for that syllable. But beyond that, each of those four tones may represent many different words and meanings.

One sound for 11 words

When you look in a Chinese-English dictionary for definitions for just the fourth tone of the syllable shì (the accent means falling tone) you find 11 different words with 11 different ideograms. This one sound  represents city, market, vow, matter, power, family name, to be, to try and more. Neither the sound nor the Romanized written form gives you a clue to the difference. You have to see the ideogram. (Context helps, of course.) 

Contrast that with English where homonyms like too, two and to are spelled differently. Or hoard, horde and whored; or palate, pallet and palette. At least in the written form, you can see that they are all different.

Impressions of China

Pickup games at Tsinghua, from October.

A couple of times a week I go to the Olympic-size pool on campus to swim. There are a dozen outdoor basketball courts adjacent, and on class days, the students have pickup games. Even when I go swimming at night, there will be some guys still out on the courts in the dark, playing by the weak light seeping in from the street. The ball rings off the cement, the shadowy figures move around, the ball planks off the backboard. The game goes on even when the temperatures are in the 40s. I have never seen a girl on the courts or in a game on the many soccer fields.