Nanpu Bridge
The Nanpu Bridge, in Shanghai, sister bridge to the Yangpu Bridge, is one of the main bridges in Shanghai. The cable-stayed bridge was designed by the Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute, Shanghai Urban Construction College, Shanghai Urban Construction Design Institute, with assistance from Holger S. Svensson, it has a main span of 428 meters, shorter than its sister bridge. It is the 57th longest cable-stayed bridge in the world, opened to the public in 1991. Media related to Nanpu Bridge at Wikimedia Commons
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese known as Modern Standard Mandarin, Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese, or Mandarin, is a standard variety of Chinese, the sole official language of China, the de facto official language of Taiwan and one of the four official languages of Singapore. Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese. Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a tonal language with topic-prominent organization and subject–verb–object word order, it has more initial consonants but final consonants and tones than southern varieties. Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words. There are two standardised forms of the language, namely Putonghua in Mainland China and Guoyu in Taiwan. Aside from a number of differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Putonghua is written using simplified Chinese characters, Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters.
Many characters are identical between the two systems. In Chinese, the standard variety is known as: 普通话 in the People's Republic of China, as well as Hong Kong and Macau. Standard Chinese is commonly referred to by generic names for "Chinese", notably 中文. In total, there have been known over 20 various names for the language; the term Guoyu had been used by non-Han rulers of China to refer to their languages, but in 1909 the Qing education ministry applied it to Mandarin, a lingua franca based on northern Chinese varieties, proclaiming it as the new "national language". The name Putonghua has a long, albeit unofficial, history, it was used as early as 1906 in writings by Zhu Wenxiong to differentiate a modern, standard Chinese from classical Chinese and other varieties of Chinese. For some linguists of the early 20th century, the Putonghua, or "common tongue/speech", was conceptually different from the Guoyu, or "national language"; the former was a national prestige variety. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different.
Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called "the common speech of the modern man", the spoken language adopted as a national lingua franca by conventional usage; the use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun influenced the People's Republic of China government to adopt that term to describe Mandarin in 1956. Prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably. In Taiwan, Guoyu continues to be the official term for Standard Chinese; the term Guoyu however, is less used in the PRC, because declaring a Beijing dialect-based standard to be the national language would be deemed unfair to speakers of other varieties and to the ethnic minorities. The term Putonghua, on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca. During the government of a pro-Taiwan independence coalition, Taiwan officials promoted a different reading of Guoyu as all of the "national languages", meaning Hokkien and Formosan as well as Standard Chinese.
Huayu, or "language of the Chinese nation" simply meant "Chinese language", was used in overseas communities to contrast Chinese with foreign languages. Over time, the desire to standardise the variety of Chinese spoken in these communities led to the adoption of the name "Huayu" to refer to Mandarin; this name avoids choosing a side between the alternative names of Putonghua and Guoyu, which came to have political significance after their usages diverged along political lines between the PRC and the ROC. It incorporates the notion that Mandarin is not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live. Hanyu, or "language of the Han people", is another umbrella term used for Chinese. However, it has confusingly two different meanings: Standard Chinese; this term, as well as Hànzú, is a modern concept. A related concept is Hànzì; the term "Mandarin" is a translation of Guānhuà, which referred to the lingua franca of the late Chinese empire. The Chinese term is obsolete as a name for the standard language, but is used by linguists to refer to the major group of Mandarin dialects spoken natively across most of northern and southwestern China.
In English, "Mandarin" may refer to the standard language, the dialect group as a whole, or to historic forms such as the late Imperial lingua franca. The name "Modern Standard Mandarin" is sometimes used by linguists who wish to distinguish the current state of the shared language from other northern and historic dialects; the Chinese have different languages in different provinces, to such an extent
Simplified Chinese characters
Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters for use in mainland China. Along with traditional Chinese characters, they are one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language; the government of the People's Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s to encourage literacy. They are used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong and the Republic of China. While traditional characters can still be read and understood by many mainland Chinese and the Chinese community in Malaysia and Singapore, these groups retain their use of simplified characters. Overseas Chinese communities tend to use traditional characters. Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name colloquially; the latter refers to simplifications of character "structure" or "body", character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, more complicated forms.
On the other hand, the official name refers to the modern systematically simplified character set, which includes not only structural simplification but substantial reduction in the total number of standardized Chinese characters. Simplified character forms were created by reducing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of Chinese characters; some simplifications were based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms. Some characters were simplified by applying regular rules, for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simplified version of the component. Variant characters with the same pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character the simplest amongst all variants in form. Many characters were left untouched by simplification, are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies; some simplified characters are dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters in those where a component is replaced by a simple symbol.
This has led some opponents of simplification to complain that the'overall process' of character simplification is arbitrary. Proponents counter that the system of simplification is internally consistent. Proponents have emphasized a some particular simplified characters as innovative and useful improvements, although many of these have existed for centuries as longstanding and widespread variants. A second round of simplifications was promulgated in 1977, but was retracted in 1986 for a variety of reasons due to the confusion caused and the unpopularity of the second round simplifications. However, the Chinese government never dropped its goal of further simplification in the future. In August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters; the new Table of General Standard Chinese Characters consisting of 8,105 characters was implemented for use by the State Council of the People's Republic of China on June 5, 2013. Although most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today are the result of the works moderated by the government of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s and 60s, character simplification predates the PRC's formation in 1949.
Cursive written text always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print are attested as early as the Qin dynasty. One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lufei Kui, who proposed in 1909 that simplified characters should be used in education. In the years following the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many anti-imperialist Chinese intellectuals sought ways to modernise China. Traditional culture and values such as Confucianism were challenged. Soon, people in the Movement started to cite the traditional Chinese writing system as an obstacle in modernising China and therefore proposed that a reform be initiated, it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or abolished. Lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, "If Chinese characters are not destroyed China will die". Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the economic problems in China during that time. In the 1930s and 1940s, discussions on character simplification took place within the Kuomintang government, a large number of Chinese intellectuals and writers maintained that character simplification would help boost literacy in China.
In 1935, 324 simplified characters collected by Qian Xuantong were introduced as the table of first batch of simplified characters, but they were suspended in 1936. The PRC issued its first round of official character simplifications in two documents, the first in 1956 and the second in 1964. Within the PRC, further character simplification became associated with the leftists of the Cultural Revolution, culminating with the second-round simplified characters, which were promulgated in 1977. In part due to the shock and unease felt in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and Mao's death, the second-round of simplifications was poorly received. In 1986 the authorities retracted the second round completely. In the same year, the authorities promulgated a final list of simplifications, identical to the 1964 list except for six changes (including the restoration of three characters, simplified in the First Round: 叠, 覆, 像.
Bank (geography)
In geography, the word bank refers to the land alongside a body of water. Different structures are referred to as banks in different fields of geography. In limnology, a stream bank or river bank is the terrain alongside the bed of a river, creek, or stream; the bank consists of the sides between which the flow is confined. Stream banks are of particular interest in fluvial geography, which studies the processes associated with rivers and streams and the deposits and landforms created by them. Bankfull discharge is a discharge great enough to overtop the banks; the descriptive terms left bank and right bank refer to the perspective of an observer looking downstream, a well-known example of this being the sections of Paris as defined by the river Seine. The shoreline of ponds, estuaries, reservoirs, or lakes are of interest in limnology and are sometimes referred to as banks; the grade of all these banks or shorelines can vary from vertical to a shallow slope. In freshwater ecology, banks are of interest as the location of riparian habitats.
Riparian zones occur along upland and lowland stream beds. The ecology around and depending on a marsh, slough, or estuary, sometimes called a bank, is studied in freshwater ecology. Banks are of interest in navigation, where the term can refer either to a barrier island or a submerged plateau, such as an ocean bank. A barrier island is a long narrow island composed of sand and forming a barrier between an island lagoon or sound and the ocean. A submerged plateau is a flat topped elevation of the sea floor at shallow depth on the continental shelf or near an island
Shanghai
Shanghai is one of the four municipalities under the direct administration of the central government of the People's Republic of China, the largest city in China by population, the second most populous city proper in the world, with a population of 24.18 million as of 2017. It is a transport hub, with the world's busiest container port. Located in the Yangtze River Delta, it sits on the south edge of the estuary of the Yangtze in the middle portion of the East China coast; the municipality borders the provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang to the north and west, is bounded to the east by the East China Sea. As a major administrative and trading city, Shanghai grew in importance in the 19th century due to trade and recognition of its favourable port location and economic potential; the city was one of five treaty ports forced open to foreign trade following the British victory over China in the First Opium War. The subsequent 1842 Treaty of Nanking and 1844 Treaty of Whampoa allowed the establishment of the Shanghai International Settlement and the French Concession.
The city flourished as a centre of commerce between China and other parts of the world, became the primary financial hub of the Asia-Pacific region in the 1930s. During the World War II, the city was the site of the major Battle of Shanghai. After the war, with the Communist Party takeover of the mainland in 1949, trade was limited to other socialist countries, the city's global influence declined. In the 1990s, the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping resulted in an intense re-development of the city, aiding the return of finance and foreign investment to the city, it has since re-emerged as a hub for international finance. Shanghai has been described as the "showpiece" of the booming economy of mainland China; the two Chinese characters in the city's name are 上 and 海, together meaning "Upon-the-Sea". The earliest occurrence of this name dates from the 11th-century Song dynasty, at which time there was a river confluence and a town with this name in the area. There are disputes as to how the name should be understood, but Chinese historians have concluded that during the Tang dynasty Shanghai was on the sea.
Shanghai is abbreviated 沪 in Chinese, a contraction of 沪渎, a 4th- or 5th-century Jin name for the mouth of Suzhou Creek when it was the main conduit into the ocean. This character appears on all motor vehicle license plates issued in the municipality today. Another alternative name for Shanghai is Shēn or Shēnchéng, from Lord Chunshen, a 3rd-century BC nobleman and prime minister of the state of Chu, whose fief included modern Shanghai. Sports teams and newspapers in Shanghai use Shen in their names, such as Shanghai Shenhua F. C. and Shen Bao. Huating was another early name for Shanghai. In AD 751, during the mid-Tang dynasty, Huating County was established by the Governor of Wu Commandery Zhao Juzhen at modern-day Songjiang, the first county-level administration within modern-day Shanghai. Today, Huating appears as the name of a four-star hotel in the city; the city has various nicknames in English, including "Pearl of the Orient" and "Paris of the East". During the Spring and Autumn period, the Shanghai area belonged to the Kingdom of Wu, conquered by the Kingdom of Yue, which in turn was conquered by the Kingdom of Chu.
During the Warring States period, Shanghai was part of the fief of Lord Chunshen of Chu, one of the Four Lords of the Warring States. He ordered the excavation of the Huangpu River, its former or poetic name, the Chunshen River, gave Shanghai its nickname of "Shēn". Fishermen living in the Shanghai area created a fish tool called the hù, which lent its name to the outlet of Suzhou Creek north of the Old City and became a common nickname and abbreviation for the city. During the Tang and Song dynasties, Qinglong Town in modern Qingpu District was a major trading port. Established in 746, it developed into what contemporary sources called a "giant town of the Southeast", with thirteen temples and seven pagodas; the famous Song scholar and artist Mi Fu served as its mayor. The port had a thriving trade with provinces along the Yangtze River and the Chinese coast, as well as foreign countries such as Japan and Silla. By the end of the Song dynasty, the center of trading had moved downstream of the Wusong River to Shanghai, upgraded in status from a village to a market town in 1074, in 1172 a second sea wall was built to stabilize the ocean coastline, supplementing an earlier dike.
From the Yuan dynasty in 1292 until Shanghai became a municipality in 1927, central Shanghai was administered as a county under Songjiang Prefecture, whose seat was at the present-day Songjiang District. Two important events helped promote Shanghai's development in the Ming dynasty. A city wall was built for the first time in 1554 to protect the town from raids by Japanese pirates, it measured 10 metres high and 5 kilometres in circumference. During the Wanli reign, Shanghai received an important psychological boost from the erection of a City God Temple in 1602; this honour was reserved for prefectural capitals and not given to a mere county seat such as Shang
River
A river is a natural flowing watercourse freshwater, flowing towards an ocean, lake or another river. In some cases a river flows into the ground and becomes dry at the end of its course without reaching another body of water. Small rivers can be referred to using names such as stream, brook and rill. There are no official definitions for the generic term river as applied to geographic features, although in some countries or communities a stream is defined by its size. Many names for small rivers are specific to geographic location. Sometimes a river is defined as being larger than a creek, but not always: the language is vague. Rivers are part of the hydrological cycle. Potamology is the scientific study of rivers, while limnology is the study of inland waters in general. Most of the major cities of the world are situated on the banks of rivers, as they are, or were, used as a source of water, for obtaining food, for transport, as borders, as a defensive measure, as a source of hydropower to drive machinery, for bathing, as a means of disposing of waste.
A river begins at a source, follows a path called a course, ends at a mouth or mouths. The water in a river is confined to a channel, made up of a stream bed between banks. In larger rivers there is also a wider floodplain shaped by flood-waters over-topping the channel. Floodplains may be wide in relation to the size of the river channel; this distinction between river channel and floodplain can be blurred in urban areas where the floodplain of a river channel can become developed by housing and industry. Rivers can flow down mountains, through valleys or along plains, can create canyons or gorges; the term upriver refers to the direction towards the source of the river, i.e. against the direction of flow. The term downriver describes the direction towards the mouth of the river, in which the current flows; the term left bank refers to the left bank in the direction of right bank to the right. The river channel contains a single stream of water, but some rivers flow as several interconnecting streams of water, producing a braided river.
Extensive braided rivers are now found in only a few regions worldwide, such as the South Island of New Zealand. They occur on peneplains and some of the larger river deltas. Anastamosing rivers are quite rare, they have multiple sinuous channels carrying large volumes of sediment. There are rare cases of river bifurcation in which a river divides and the resultant flows ending in different seas. An example is the bifurcation of Nerodime River in Kosovo. A river flowing in its channel is a source of energy which acts on the river channel to change its shape and form. In 1757, the German hydrologist Albert Brahms empirically observed that the submerged weight of objects that may be carried away by a river is proportional to the sixth power of the river flow speed; this formulation is sometimes called Airy's law. Thus, if the speed of flow is doubled, the flow would dislodge objects with 64 times as much submerged weight. In mountainous torrential zones this can be seen as erosion channels through hard rocks and the creation of sands and gravels from the destruction of larger rocks.
A river valley, created from a U-shaped glaciated valley, can easily be identified by the V-shaped channel that it has carved. In the middle reaches where a river flows over flatter land, meanders may form through erosion of the river banks and deposition on the inside of bends. Sometimes the river will cut off a loop, shortening the channel and forming an oxbow lake or billabong. Rivers that carry large amounts of sediment may develop conspicuous deltas at their mouths. Rivers whose mouths are in saline tidal waters may form estuaries. Throughout the course of the river, the total volume of water transported downstream will be a combination of the free water flow together with a substantial volume flowing through sub-surface rocks and gravels that underlie the river and its floodplain. For many rivers in large valleys, this unseen component of flow may exceed the visible flow. Most but not all rivers flow on the surface. Subterranean rivers flow underground in caverns; such rivers are found in regions with limestone geologic formations.
Subglacial streams are the braided rivers that flow at the beds of glaciers and ice sheets, permitting meltwater to be discharged at the front of the glacier. Because of the gradient in pressure due to the overlying weight of the glacier, such streams can flow uphill. An intermittent river only flows and can be dry for several years at a time; these rivers are found in regions with limited or variable rainfall, or can occur because of geologic conditions such as a permeable river bed. Some ephemeral rivers flow during the summer months but not in the winter; such rivers are fed from chalk aquifers which recharge from winter rainfall. In England these rivers are called bournes and give their name to places such as Bournemouth and Eastbourne. In humid regions, the location where flow begins in the smallest tributary streams moves upstream in response to precipitation and downstream in its absence or when active summer vegetation diverts water for evapotrans
Suzhou Creek
Suzhou Creek called Wusong River, is a river that passes through the Shanghai city center. It is named after the neighbouring city of Suzhou, the predominant settlement in this area prior to the rise of Shanghai as a metropolis. One of the principal outlets of Lake Tai in Wujiang District of Suzhou, Suzhou Creek is 125 km long, of which 54 km are within the administrative region of Shanghai and 24 km within the city's urbanized parts, it flows into the Huangpu River at the northern end of the Bund in Huangpu District. The river was called "Song Jiang"; when the former Huating Fu was renamed Songjiang Fu in 1278, the river's name was changed to "Wusong River". The mouth of the river was known in the 4th or 5th century of Jin as 滬瀆, at which time it was the main conduit into the ocean; the Wusong River entered the mouth of the Yangtze at the same point where today the Huangpu River enters the Yangtze estuary. The first recorded works on the river was the building of levees along part of the river bank in 810AD.
In 1042, the entire course of the river from Lake Tai to the sea was embanked. The river silted up, a series of works were undertaken in the 11th century to eliminate bends in the course of the river, in an attempt to speed up water flow and prevent further silting. However, silting continued, necessitating constant dredging and the periodic cutting of new channels. In 1109, 12 sluice gates were completed in the lower reaches of the river in order to control the effect of silt from the nearby and much larger Yangtze River; these works allowed the river to remain a commercial artery during the Song and Yuan dynasties: as late as 1277, sea-faring merchant ships could sail up the river to reach the gates of Suzhou. By the early 14th century, repeated major dredging works were again necessary to maintain the channel. By the late 14th century, during the early Ming Dynasty, the lower reaches of the river had entirely become land. A major tributary, the Huangpu River, was affected by silt. In 1403, a major flood affected the area.
In response, Xia Yuanji, the Vice Minister of Revenue, devised a plan for major works in what is now the Shanghai area. Water from Lake Tai was diverted via the Huangpu, both the Huangpu and the Wusong were joined to the Fanjiabang canal as their channel to the mouth of the Yangtze and the sea. Further works during the Ming Dynasty established the Huangpu as the main conduit, by 1569, after dredging works directed by Hai Rui, the relative arrangement of the two channels became established: the Wusong River flowed into the Huangpu near today's Waibaidu Bridge, the combined channel flowed to the Mouth of the Wusong via the Fanjiabang channel. In the region of today's central Shanghai, Wusong River was by 1569 a narrow channel of about 50 metres wide on the surface, half that width at the bottom. Suzhou Creek has played an important role for being the demarcation line between political spheres of influences throughout Shanghai's history. After the Treaty of Nanjing forced China to open up in 1842 and Shanghai became an international trade port, the river formed the boundary between the British concession and the American settlement until both concessions were merged into the International Settlement in 1863.
When the Japanese invaded Shanghai in 1937, the river formed the boundary between the International Settlement and the Japanese concession. Wusong River acquired its modern name in the mid-19th century: because it connected Shanghai with Suzhou, it was called "Soochow Creek" in English, the popular Chinese name was a translation from the English; the first documented mention of "Soochow Creek" occurred in the 1848 version of the Shanghai Land Regulations, the rules which governed the foreign concessions of Shanghai. From there, the name entered popular parlance, "Suzhou Creek" is now the predominant name used in Shanghai. However, "Wusong Creek" remains in use in some official contexts and is the name used by upstream residents closer to Suzhou. Due to Shanghai's role as trade port, from the 1930s Suzhou Creek was an important shipping route, facilitating the transport of goods into the interior of China. Along the river banks, a multitude of warehouses and factories were built at this time, making the region close to the river a significant industrial area.
In the course of urbanization, local industries withdrew from the city center, leaving the warehouses and factories abandoned. Up to this point, the river had been polluted by industries as well as domestic waste water, making Suzhou Creek locally known as "the smelly river", the most polluted river in Shanghai since the 1920s. Since 1992, the Shanghai Municipal Government has been pursuing a redevelopment of the area. In 1998, authorities launched the Suzhou Creek Rehabilitation Project, a 12-year-program to improve the water quality, mitigate flood impact, introduce wastewater and water resource management and push for urban revitalization and a higher living standard in the desolated areas along Suzhou River. In the meantime, Suzhou River is considered clean enough to host annual rowing competitions. Most old factories and warehouses along Suzhou River were set be demolished in favour of the construction of modern high-rise buildings in Shanghai's fast-developing city center, aiming at a social and economic regeneration of the Suzhou River area.
However, following initiatives of artists in the late 1990s the riverside has been designated as a protected heritage zone and many warehouses have been
Huángpǔ (help·info), formerly romanized as Whangpoo,[n 1] is a 113-kilometer (70 mi) long river flowing through Shanghai that was first excavated and created by Lord Chunshen, one of the Four Lords of the Warring States during the Warring States period (475 BC - 221 BC). It is the last significant tributary of the Yangtze before it empties into the East China Sea. The Bund and Lujiazui are located along the river.
