Paris
Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion and the arts; the City of Paris is the centre and seat of government of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an estimated official 2019 population of 12,213,364, or about 18 percent of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €681 billion in 2016, accounting for 31 percent of the GDP of France, was the 5th largest region by GDP in the world. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey in 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world, after Singapore, ahead of Zurich, Hong Kong and Geneva. Another source ranked Paris as most expensive, on a par with Singapore and Hong-Kong, in 2018; the city is a major rail and air-transport hub served by two international airports: Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly.
Opened in 1900, the city's subway system, the Paris Métro, serves 5.23 million passengers daily, is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro. Gare du Nord is the 24th busiest railway station in the world, the first located outside Japan, with 262 million passengers in 2015. Paris is known for its museums and architectural landmarks: the Louvre was the most visited art museum in the world in 2018, with 10.2 million visitors. The Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie are noted for their collections of French Impressionist art, the Pompidou Centre Musée National d'Art Moderne has the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe; the historical district along the Seine in the city centre is classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site. Popular landmarks in the centre of the city include the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and the Gothic royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, both on the Île de la Cité. Paris received 23 million visitors in 2017, measured by hotel stays, with the largest numbers of foreign visitors coming from the United States, the UK, Germany and China.
It was ranked as the third most visited travel destination in the world in 2017, after Bangkok and London. The football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris; the 80,000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros. Paris will host the 2024 Summer Olympics; the 1938 and 1998 FIFA World Cups, the 2007 Rugby World Cup, the 1960, 1984, 2016 UEFA European Championships were held in the city and, every July, the Tour de France bicycle race finishes there. The name "Paris" is derived from the Celtic Parisii tribe; the city's name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. Paris is referred to as the City of Light, both because of its leading role during the Age of Enlightenment and more because Paris was one of the first large European cities to use gas street lighting on a grand scale on its boulevards and monuments.
Gas lights were installed on the Place du Carousel, Rue de Rivoli and Place Vendome in 1829. By 1857, the Grand boulevards were lit. By the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps. Since the late 19th century, Paris has been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in French as Parisiens, they are pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the area's major north–south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité; the Parisii minted their own coins for that purpose. The Romans began their settlement on Paris' Left Bank; the Roman town was called Lutetia. It became a prosperous city with a forum, temples, an amphitheatre. By the end of the Western Roman Empire, the town was known as Parisius, a Latin name that would become Paris in French. Christianity was introduced in the middle of the 3rd century AD by Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris: according to legend, when he refused to renounce his faith before the Roman occupiers, he was beheaded on the hill which became known as Mons Martyrum "Montmartre", from where he walked headless to the north of the city.
Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. As the Frankish domination of Gaul began, there was a gradual immigration by the Franks to Paris and the Parisian Francien dialects were born. Fortification of the Île-de-la-Citie failed to avert sacking by Vikings in 845, but Paris' strategic importance—with its bridges prevent
Malay Peninsula
The Malay Peninsula is a peninsula in Southeast Asia. The land mass runs north-south and, at its terminus, is the southernmost point of the Asian mainland; the area contains Peninsular Malaysia, Southern Thailand, the southernmost tip of Myanmar as well as the city state Singapore, indigenous to or inhabited by the Malays, an Austronesian people. The Titiwangsa Mountains are part of the Tenasserim Hills system, form the backbone of the Peninsula, they form the southernmost section of the central cordillera which runs from Tibet through the Kra Isthmus into the Malay Peninsula. The Strait of Malacca separates the Malay Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra while the south coast is separated from the island of Singapore by the Straits of Johor; the Malay term Tanah Melayu is derived from the word Tanah and Melayu, thus it means "the Malay land". The term can be found in various Malay texts, of which the oldest dating back to the early 17th century, it is mentioned in the Hikayat Hang Tuah, a well known classic tales associated with the legendary heroes of Malacca Sultanate.
Tanah Melayu in the text is employed to refer to the area under Malaccan dominance. In the early 16th century, Tomé Pires, a Portuguese apothecary who stayed in Malaca from 1512 to 1515, writes an identical term, Terra de Tana Malaio which he referred to the southeastern part of Sumatra, where the deposed Sultan of Malacca, Mahmud Shah established his exiled government; the 17th century's account of Portuguese historian, Emanuel Godinho de Erédia, noted on the region of Malaios surrounded by the Andaman Sea in the north, the entire Malacca Strait in the centre, a part of Sunda Strait in the south, the western part of South China Sea in the east. Prior to the foundation of Malacca and medieval references to a Malay peninsula exist in various foreign sources. According to several Indian scholars, the word Malayadvipa, mentioned in the ancient Indian text, Vayu Purana, may refer to the Malay peninsula. Another Indian source, an inscription on the south wall of the Brihadeeswarar Temple, recorded the word Malaiur, referring to a kingdom in Malay peninsula that had "a strong mountain for its rampart".
The Greek source, written by Ptolemy, labelled a geographical part of Golden Chersonese as Maleu-kolon, a term thought to derive from Sanskrit malayakolam or malaikurram. While the Chinese chronicle of Yuan dynasty mentioned the word Ma-li-yu-er, referring to a nation of Malay peninsula that threatened by the southward expansion of Sukhothai Kingdom under King Ram Khamhaeng. During the same era, Marco Polo made a reference to Malauir in his travelogue, as a kingdom located in the Malay peninsula similar to the one mentioned in Yuan chronicle. In the early 20th century, the term Tanah Melayu was used by the Malays of the peninsula during the rise of Malay nationalism to describe uniting all Malay states on the peninsula under one Malay nation, although this ambition was realised with the formation of Persekutuan Tanah Melayu in 1948. Malay Archipelago Media related to Malay Peninsula at Wikimedia Commons "Malakka"; the New Student's Reference Work. 1914
Java
Java is an island of Indonesia, bordered by the Indian Ocean on the south and the Java Sea on the north. With a population of over 141 million or 145 million, Java is the home to 56.7 percent of the Indonesian population and is the world's most populous island. The Indonesian capital city, Jakarta, is located on its northwestern coast. Much of Indonesian history took place on Java, it was the center of powerful Hindu-Buddhist empires, the Islamic sultanates, the core of the colonial Dutch East Indies. Java was the center of the Indonesian struggle for independence during the 1930s and 1940s. Java dominates Indonesia politically and culturally. Four of Indonesia's eight UNESCO world heritage sites are located in Java: Ujung Kulon National Park, Borobudur Temple, Prambanan Temple, Sangiran Early Man Site. Formed as the result of volcanic eruptions from geologic subduction between Sunda Plate and Australian Plate, Java is the 13th largest island in the world and the fifth largest in Indonesia by landmass at about 138,800 square kilometres.
A chain of volcanic mountains forms an east–west spine along the island. Three main languages are spoken on the island: Javanese and Madurese, where Javanese is the most spoken. Furthermore, most residents are bilingual, speaking Indonesian as their second language. While the majority of the people of Java are Muslim, Java's population comprises people of diverse religious beliefs and cultures. Java is divided into four administrative provinces, West Java, Central Java, East Java, Banten, two special regions and Yogyakarta; the origins of the name "Java" are not clear. One possibility is that the island was named after the jáwa-wut plant, said to be common in the island during the time, that prior to Indianization the island had different names. There are other possible sources: the word jaú and its variations mean "beyond" or "distant". And, in Sanskrit yava means barley, a plant for which the island was famous. "Yavadvipa" is mentioned in the Ramayana. Sugriva, the chief of Rama's army dispatched his men to Yavadvipa, the island of Java, in search of Sita.
It was hence referred to in India by the Sanskrit name "yāvaka dvīpa". Java is mentioned in the ancient Tamil text Manimekalai by Chithalai Chathanar that states that Java had a kingdom with a capital called Nagapuram. Another source states that the "Java" word is derived from a Proto-Austronesian root word, Iawa that meaning "home"; the great island of Iabadiu or Jabadiu was mentioned in Ptolemy's Geographia composed around 150 CE in the Roman Empire. Iabadiu is said to mean "barley island", to be rich in gold, have a silver town called Argyra at the west end; the name indicates Java, seems to be derived from the Sanskrit name Java-dvipa. The annual news of Songshu and Liangshu referred Java as She-po, He-ling called it She-po again until the Yuan dynasty, where they began mentioning Zhao-Wa. According to Ma Huan's book, the Chinese call Java as Chao-Wa, the island was called She-pó in the past; when John of Marignolli returned from China to Avignon, he stayed at the Kingdom of Saba for a few months, which he said had many elephants and led by a queen.
Java lies between Sumatra to Bali to the east. Borneo lies to the north and Christmas Island is to the south, it is the world's 13th largest island. Java is surrounded by the Java Sea to the north, Sunda Strait to the west, the Indian Ocean to the south and Bali Strait and Madura Strait in the east. Java is entirely of volcanic origin; the highest volcano in Java is Mount Semeru. The most active volcano in Java and in Indonesia is Mount Merapi. In total, Java boast more than 150 mountains. More mountains and highlands help to split the interior into a series of isolated regions suitable for wet-rice cultivation. Java was the first place where Indonesian coffee was grown, starting in 1699. Today, Coffea arabica is grown on the Ijen Plateau by larger plantations; the area of Java is 150,000 square kilometres. It is up to 210 km wide; the island's longest river is the 600 km long Solo River. The river rises from its source in central Java at the Lawu volcano flows north and eastward to its mouth in the Java Sea near the city of Surabaya.
Other major rivers are Brantas, Citarum and Serayu. The average temperature ranges from 22 °C to 29 °C; the northern coastal plains are hotter, averaging 34 °C during the day in the dry season. The south coast is cooler than the north, highland areas inland are cooler; the wet season ends in April. During that rain falls in the afternoons and intermittently during other parts of the year; the wettest months are February. West Java is wetter than East mountainous regions receive much higher rainfall; the Parahyangan highlands of West Java receive over 4,000 millimetres annually, while the north coast of East Java receives 900 millimetres annually. The natural environment of Jav
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Greater India
The term Greater India is most used to encompass the historical and geographic extent of all political entities of the Indian subcontinent, the regions which are culturally linked to India or received significant Indian cultural influence. These countries have to varying degrees been transformed by the acceptance and induction of cultural and institutional elements of India. Since around 500 BCE, Asia's expanding land and maritime trade had resulted in prolonged socio-economic and cultural stimulation and diffusion of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs into the region's cosmology, in particular in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. In Central Asia, transmission of ideas were predominantly of a religious nature. By the early centuries of the common era most of the principalities of Southeast Asia had absorbed defining aspects of Hindu culture and administration; the notion of divine god-kingship was introduced by the concept of Harihara and other Indian epigraphic systems were declared official, like those of the south Indian Pallava dynasty and Chalukya dynasty.
These Indianized Kingdoms, a term coined by George Cœdès in his work Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d'Extrême-Orient, were characterized by surprising resilience, political integrity and administrative stability. To the north, Indian religious ideas were accepted into the cosmology of Himalayan peoples, most profoundly in Tibet and Bhutan. Buddhist monasticism extended into Afghanistan and other parts of Central Asia, Buddhist texts and ideas were accepted in China and Japan in the east. To the west, Indian culture converged with Greater Persia via the Pamir Mountains. In the 20th century history, art history and allied fields: consisted of "all the Asian lands including Burma, Cambodia and the former Champa and Funan polities of present-day Vietnam," in which Indian culture left an "imprint in the form of monuments and other traces of the historic'Indianising' process." In some accounts, many Pacific societies and "most of the Buddhist world including Ceylon, central Asia and Japan were held to fall within this web of Indianising "culture colonies".
This particular usage does not go back to before the 1920s, lasted well into the 1970s in history and in other fields. The concept of the Three Indias was in common circulation in pre-industrial Europe. Greater India was the southern part of South Asia, Lesser India was the northern part of South Asia, Middle India was the region near the Middle East; the Portuguese form was used at least since the mid-15th century. The term, which seems to have been used with variable precision, sometimes meant only the Indian subcontinent. However, in some accounts of European nautical voyages, Greater India extended from the Malabar Coast to India extra Gangem and India Minor, from Malabar to Sind. Farther India was sometimes used to cover all of modern Southeast Asia; until the fourteenth century, India could mean areas along the Red Sea, including Somalia, South Arabia, Ethiopia In late 19th-century geography, Greater India referred to British India, Hindustan which included the Punjab, the Himalayas, extended eastwards to Indochina, parts of Indonesia, the Philippines."
German atlases distinguished Vorder-Indien as the South Asian peninsula and Hinter-Indien as Southeast Asia. Greater India, or Greater India Basin signifies "the Indian Plate plus a postulated northern extension", the product of the Indian–Asia collision. Although its usage in geology pre-dates Plate tectonic theory, the term has seen increased usage since the 1970s, it is unknown where the India -- Asia convergence occurred, at or before 52 Million years ago. The plates have converged up to 3,600 km ± 35 km; the upper crustal shortening is documented from geological record of Asia and the Himalaya as up to 2,350 km less. Here the use of Greater India refers to a popularization by a network of Bengali scholars in the 1920s who were all members of the Calcutta-based Greater India Society; the movement's early leaders included the historian R. C. Majumdar, the philologists Suniti Kumar Chatterji and P. C. Bagchi, the historians Phanindranath Bose and Kalidas Nag; the term Greater India, whether aligned or separate from the notion of ancient Hindu expansion into Southeast Asia, was linked to both Indian nationalism and Hindu nationalism.
The concept of the Indianized kingdoms, a term coined by George Coedès, describes Southeast Asian principalities that flourished since the early common era as a result of centuries of socio-economic interaction having incorporated central aspects of Indian institutions, statecraft, culture, epigraphy and architecture. Iron Age trade expansion caused regional geostrategic remodeling. Southeast Asia was now situated in the central area of convergence of the Indian and the East Asian maritime trade routes, the basis for economic and cultural growth; the earliest Hindu kingdoms emerged in Sumatra and
Order of the White Elephant
The Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant is an order of Thailand. It was established in 1861 by King Rama IV of the Kingdom of Siam. Along with the Order of the Crown of Thailand, it is awarded to government officials for each five years of service, making it Thailand's most-awarded order; the order consists of eight classes: Plaek Phibunsongkhram - Knight Grand Cordon Sultan Ibrahim of Johor - Knight Grand Cordon Sultan Abdul Hamid Halim Shah of Kedah - Knight Grand Cordon Chavalit Yongchaiyudh - Knight Grand Cordon Alexander I of Yugoslavia - Knight Grand Cordon Albert du Roy de Blicquy Norodom of Cambodia - Knight Grand Cross Pakubuwono X - Knight Grand Cross Miklós Horthy - Knight Grand Cross The Earl Mountbatten of Burma - Knight Grand Cross Foster C. LaHue Sir Samuel Robinson, 1923. Graves B. Erskine - Knight Grand Cross Arne Skaug. Pierra Vejjabul Joseph J. Cappucci - Knight Commander David John Collins Awarded by King Rama V in 1897 Frederick William Verney - Commander Queen Victoria General William Westmoreland - Knight Grand Cross Vice Admiral Józef Unrug Major General Richard Secord Jiri Sitler - Knight Grand Cross Lieutenant Commander Saman Kunan - Knight Grand Cross White elephant § Thailand The Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant, Secretariat to the Cabinet of Thailand
Commander (Third Class) of the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant, a royal decoration in the Honours System of Thailand[5]
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