Jordan Road, Hong Kong
Jordan Road is a road in Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong. It spans from the West Kowloon Highway in West Kowloon, through Ferry Point to Gascoigne Road, is a major east-west road in southern Kowloon. Jordon Road known as Sixth Street, was renamed to its present name in a streets renaming notice as gazetted by the government in March 1909. In May 1909, Gascoigne Road South was merged into the new Jordon Road. According to a letter to the editor as published in the South China Morning Post of 31 May 1909, Jordan Road, like a few streets in the same area which were named after British diplomats, was renamed in honour of Sir John Jordan, the British Minister to China; the story suggested by some Chinese sources that the street was named after British pathologist G. P. Jordan, who served as Health Officer in Hong Kong for nearly thirty years, was a myth. In 1908, a stone obelisk was erected as a memorial to French sailors of the "Fronde" who had drowned in the 1906 typhoon. Located at the corner with Gascoigne Road, the monument has since been relocated to the Colonial Cemetery at Happy Valley.
Prior to the opening of the Cross-Harbor Tunnel in 1972, ferries such as the ones departing from Jordan Road were the only way to transport automobiles from Kowloon to Hong Kong. Once a quiet, suburban street, since the 1950s Jordan Road and its surrounding area have become one of the most overcrowded areas in Kowloon. At the end of the road, there was the Jordan Road Ferry Pier in Ferry Point, with ferries carrying passengers and vehicles to Central of Hong Kong Island; until the completion of the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, it was a major transport hub to and from the Hong Kong Island. There was an important bus terminus, Jordan Road Ferry Pier Bus Terminus, near the pier; the bus terminus hosted many routes to the New Territories. After the completion of major part of reclamation in West Kowloon, the bus terminus was moved to Jordan Bus Terminus in the new reclamation nearby. In 2011-2012, the bus terminus was closed and most routes were rerouted to Jordan; some go to Kowloon Railway Station bus terminus, near Kowloon Station of the Mass Transit Railway Airport Express.
These factors make Jordan Road an important transportation access point. Jordan Station of the MTR was named after Jordan Road, between the centres of Yau Ma Tei and Tsim Sha Tsui; the station's name is so used that it has replaced the traditional name, Kwun Chung, for the neighbourhood. Jordan, Hong Kong List of streets and roads in Hong Kong Google Maps of Jordan Road
Cassette tape
The Compact Cassette, Compact Audio Cassette or Musicassette commonly called the cassette tape or tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. It was developed by Philips in Hasselt and released in 1962. Compact cassettes come in two forms, either containing content as a prerecorded cassette, or as a recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms are reversible by the user; the compact cassette technology was designed for dictation machines, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the Stereo 8-track cartridge and Reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers; the first cassette player designed for use in car dashboards was introduced in 1968. Between the early 1970s and the early 2000s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP record and the compact disc.
Compact Cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which the magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film is passed and wound. These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell, 4 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches at its largest dimensions. The tape itself was referred to as "eighth-inch" tape 1⁄8 inches wide, but it was larger: 0.15 inches. Two stereo pairs of tracks or two monaural audio tracks are available on the tape; this reversal is achieved either by flipping the cassette, or by the reversal of tape movement when the mechanism detects that the tape has come to an end. In 1935, decades before the introduction of the Compact Cassette, AEG released the first reel-to-reel tape recorder, with the commercial name "Magnetophon", it was based on the invention of the magnetic tape by Fritz Pfleumer, which used similar technology but with open reels. These instruments were expensive and difficult to use and were therefore used by professionals in radio stations and recording studios.
In 1958, following four years of development, RCA Victor introduced the stereo, quarter-inch, reel-to-reel RCA tape cartridge. However, it was a large cassette, offered few pre-recorded tapes. Despite the multiple versions, it failed. Consumer use of magnetic tape machines took off in the early 1960s, after playback machines reached a comfortable, user-friendly design; this was aided by the introduction of transistors which replaced the bulky and costly vacuum tubes of earlier designs. Reel-to-reel tape became more suitable to household use, but still remained an esoteric product. WIRAG, the Vienna division of Philips developed a cartridge, described as single-hole cassette, adapted from its German described name Einloch-Kassette. Tape and tape speed were identical with the Compact Cassette. Grundig came up with the DC-International derived from blue prints of the Compact Cassette in 1965, but failed on the demand of distributing companies. In 1962, Philips invented the Compact Cassette medium for audio storage, introducing it in Europe on 30 August 1963 at the Berlin Radio Show, in the United States in November 1964, with the trademark name Compact Cassette.
The team at Philips was led by Lou Ottens in Hasselt, Belgium."Philips was competing with Telefunken and Grundig in a race to establish its cassette tape as the worldwide standard, it wanted support from Japanese electronics manufacturers." However, the Philips' Compact Cassette became dominant as a result of Philips' decision to license the format free of charge. Philips released the Norelco Carry-Corder 150 recorder/player in the US in November 1964. By 1966 over 250,000 recorders had been sold in the US alone and Japan soon became the major source of recorders. By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million players. By the end of the 1960s, the cassette business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars. In the early years sound quality was mediocre, but it improved by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving; the Compact Cassette went on to become a popular alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s. The mass production of "blank" Compact Cassettes began in 1964 in Germany.
Prerecorded music cassettes were launched in Europe in late 1965. The Mercury Record Company, a US affiliate of Philips, introduced M. C. to the US in July 1966. The initial offering consisted of 49 titles. However, the system had been designed for dictation and portable use, with the audio quality of early players not well suited for music; some early models had an unreliable mechanical design. In 1971, the Advent Corporation introduced their Model 201 tape deck that combined Dolby type B noise reduction and chromium oxide tape, with a commercial-grade tape transport mechanism supplied by the Wollensak camera division of 3M Corporation; this resulted in the format being taken more for musical use, started the era of high fidelity cassettes and players. Although the birth and growth of the cassette began in the 1960s, its cultural moment took place during the 1970s and 1980s; the cassette's popularity grew
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
Night market
Night markets or night bazaars are street markets which operate at night and are dedicated to more leisurely strolling and eating than more businesslike day markets. They are open-air markets; the concept of the night market traces its roots back to the medieval Chinese Tang dynasty. The Tang government put strict sanctions on night markets and their operations in A. D. 836. Towards the end of the Tang Dynasty, economic expansion led to less state regulation and restrictions being lifted on night markets. During the Song Dynasty, night markets played a central role in Chinese nightlife; these markets were found in corners of large cities. Some stayed open for twenty- four hours. Song period night markets are known to have included restaurants and brothels due to being located near business districts and red light districts. In Taiwan, in the 1950s and 1960s, migrant urban workers made up a large base of night markets' customers; the vendors served xiaochi foods. The names of the towns came from the dishes.
The serving of xiaochi foods attracted Taiwan's local elite. Stories were formed of how well-known intellectuals visited Night Market stalls. Night markets started to embody the local and the global modern popular culture because of commercial industries; because of the global recession in the 1970s, canceled imports created more opportunities for vendors selling light industry and family made goods. This was due to more products becoming available to local markets. Night marketing networks were sold Taiwan's light industry goods; because of the prosperity of the night markets, some traditional businesses were replaced by higher quality garment and shoe stores in the 1980s. The energetic night markets were known during this period where neon signs, loud music and light displays were used to attract customers; the new replaced the old. At Taiwan's stock market surge, chains started opening franchises that were located in or near the night markets; these included fast food outlets such as McDonald's and convenience stores such as 7-Elevens, which were followed by garment stores.
This transformation continued in the 1990s, when chains who sold higher grade merchandise replaced individually owned businesses. Night Markets changed from places that sold traditional snack food and handicrafts to modern centers of popular culture. Markets responded to new trends by producing their own versions of popular goods in the 1990s, when copyright and intellectual property laws were only loosely enforced; these counterfeit items that now flooded the market attracted young customers. In recent years, these laws are now more enforced so counterfeit items are found in traveling night markets; the night markets are now known for not personifying Taiwan. The night market was transformed to accommodate to the modern capitalist economies of present day. Night markets are popular in Chinese culture. Night markets are more prominent within ethnic Chinese economic and cultural activities; some well-known night markets exist in Taipei, Shanghai, in Hong Kong and Bangkok, but they exist in Chinatowns worldwide.
Taiwan hosts numerous night markets in each of its major cities. The larger and more formal of these markets might take place in purpose-built marketplaces while smaller or more informal ones tend to occupy streets or roads that are normal thoroughfares by day; the temporal night markets are consistent in their location. Though the temporal night market stalls appear at night and vanish by day, the vendors return to the same location the next evening. Night markets do not close, but the individual stalls may randomly take days off due to holidays, family illness, etc. Most temporal stalls within a night market have bright lights; this gives the temporary night markets a carnival-like atmosphere. When a new night market street develops, the initial response is not always positive - they are thought to be noisy and the customers leave trash behind that the owners of the daytime stores must deal with; as the night market becomes more well known, however it is looked upon more positively and the daytime stores adjust.
The daytime stores stay open because there are now customers at night when there wouldn't be. Night markets can increase profitability and bring secondary type of consumers that are different from the daytime consumers. For example, a daytime store may sell herbs. At night, that same daytime store may now change its wares to include iced grass jelly and honey tea. Although some of these markets are specialized, most have a mixture of individual stalls hawking clothing, consumer goods and specialty drinks; the atmosphere is crowded and noisy with hawkers shouting and fast-paced music playing over loudspeakers. Some individual vendors may take advantage of the informality of the market to offer counterfeit, pirated or grey market consumer goods
Antique
A true antique is an item perceived as having value because of its aesthetic or historical significance, defined as at least 100 years old, although the term is used loosely to describe any object, old. An antique is an item, collected or desirable because of its age, rarity, utility, personal emotional connection, and/or other unique features, it is an object that represents a previous time period in human history. Vintage and collectible are used to describe items that are old, but do not meet the 100-year criteria. Antiques are objects that show some degree of craftsmanship, collectability, or a certain attention to design, such as a desk or an early automobile, they are bought at antique shops, estate sales, auction houses, online auctions, other venues, or estate inherited. Antique dealers belong to national trade associations, many of which belong to CINOA, a confederation of art and antique associations across 21 countries that represents 5,000 dealers; the common definition of antique is a collectible object such as a piece of furniture or work of art that has a high value because of its considerable age, but it varies depending on the source and year.
Motor vehicles are an exception to the 100-year rule. The customary definition of antique requires that an item should be at least 100 years old and in original condition. In the United States, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act defined antiques as, "...works of art, collections in illustration of the progress of the arts, works in bronze, terra cotta, pottery, or porcelain, artistic antiquities and objects of ornamental character or educational value which shall have been produced prior to the year 1830." 1830 was the approximate beginning of mass production in the United States. These definitions were intended to allow people of that time to distinguish between genuine antique pieces, vintage items, collectible objects; the alternative term, antiquities refers to the remains of ancient art and everyday items from antiquity, which themselves are archaeological artifacts. An antiquarian is a person who studies antiquities or things of the past. Traditionally, Chinese antiques are marked by a red seal, known as a'chop', placed there by an owner.
Experts can identify previous owners of an antique by reading the chops. The pre-revolution Chinese government tried to assist collectors of Chinese antiques by requiring their Department of Antiquities to provide a governmental chop on the bottom of a Chinese antique; this chop is visible as a piece of red sealing wax that bears the government chop to verify the date of the antique. The government of the People's Republic of China has its own definitions of what it considers antique; as of the Cultural Revolution and China's opening trade to other countries, the government has tried to protect the definition of a Chinese antique. Antiquing is the act of shopping, negotiating, or bargaining for antiques. People buy items for gifts, or profit. Sources for antiquing include garage sales and yard sales, estate sales, resort towns, antique districts and international auction houses. Note that antiquing means the craft of making an object appear antique through distressing or using the antique-looking paint applications.
Individuals get confused between these handmade distressed vintage or modern items and true antiques. Would-be antique collectors who are unaware of the differences may find themselves paying a high amount of money for something that has little value in the antiquing industry. Antique furniture is a popular area of antiques because furniture has obvious practical uses as well as collector value. Many collectors use antique furniture pieces in their homes, care for them with the hope that the value of these items will remain same or appreciate; this is in contrast to buying new furniture, which depreciates from the moment of purchase. Antique furniture includes dining tables, bureaus, chests etc; the most common woods are mahogany, pine and rosewood. Chinese antique furniture is made with elm, a wood common to many regions in Asia; each wood has color. Many modern pieces of furniture use wood veneer to achieve the same effect. There are a number of different styles of antique furniture depending on where it was made.
Some examples of stylistic periods are: Arts & Crafts, Georgian and Victorian. List of antiques experts Antiquarian book trade in the United States Antique tool Antiques restoration Antiques Roadshow Authentication Del Mar Antique Show The San Francisco Fall Antiques Show Dolly Johnson Antique and Art Show Primitive decorating, a style of decorating using antiques American Pickers Pawn Stars Vintage Antique at Encyclopædia Britannica
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.
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia or Southeastern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of the countries that are geographically south of China and Japan, east of India, west of Papua New Guinea, north of Australia. Southeast Asia is bordered to the north by East Asia, to the west by South Asia and the Bay of Bengal, to the east by Oceania and the Pacific Ocean, to the south by Australia and the Indian Ocean; the region is the only part of Asia that lies within the Southern Hemisphere, although the majority of it is in the Northern Hemisphere. In contemporary definition, Southeast Asia consists of two geographic regions: Mainland Southeast Asia known as Indochina, comprising parts of Northeast India, Laos, Thailand and West Malaysia. Maritime Southeast Asia known as Nusantara, the East Indies and Malay Archipelago, comprises the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India, East Malaysia, the Philippines, East Timor, Christmas Island, the Cocos Islands. Taiwan is included in this grouping by many anthropologists; the region lies near the intersection of geological plates, with both heavy seismic and volcanic activities.
The Sunda Plate is the main plate of the region, featuring all Southeast Asian countries except Myanmar, northern Thailand, northern Laos, northern Vietnam, northern Luzon of the Philippines. The mountain ranges in Myanmar and peninsular Malaysia are part of the Alpide belt, while the islands of the Philippines are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. Both seismic belts meet in Indonesia, causing the region to have high occurrences of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Southeast Asia covers about 4.5 million km2, 10.5% of Asia or 3% of earth's total land area. Its total population is about 8.5 % of the world's population. It is the third most populous geographical region in the world after East Asia; the region is culturally and ethnically diverse, with hundreds of languages spoken by different ethnic groups. Ten countries in the region are members of ASEAN, a regional organization established for economic, military and cultural integration amongst its members; the region, together with part of South Asia, was well known by Europeans as the East Indies or the Indies until the 20th century.
Chinese sources referred the region as 南洋, which means the "Southern Ocean." The mainland section of Southeast Asia was referred to as Indochina by European geographers due to its location between China and the Indian subcontinent and its having cultural influences from both neighboring regions. In the 20th century, the term became more restricted to territories of the former French Indochina; the maritime section of Southeast Asia is known as the Malay Archipelago, a term derived from the European concept of a Malay race. Another term for Maritime Southeast Asia is Insulindia, used to describe the region between Indochina and Australasia; the term "Southeast Asia" was first used in 1839 by American pastor Howard Malcolm in his book Travels in South-Eastern Asia. Malcolm only included the Mainland section and excluded the Maritime section in his definition of Southeast Asia; the term was used in the midst of World War II by the Allies, through the formation of South East Asia Command in 1943.
SEAC popularised the use of the term "Southeast Asia," although what constituted Southeast Asia was not fixed. However, by the late 1970s, a standard usage of the term "Southeast Asia" and the territories it encompasses had emerged. Although from a cultural or linguistic perspective the definitions of "Southeast Asia" may vary, the most common definitions nowadays include the area represented by the countries listed below. Ten of the eleven states of Southeast Asia are members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, while East Timor is an observer state. Papua New Guinea has stated that it might join ASEAN, is an observer. Sovereignty issues exist over some territories in the South China Sea; some southern parts of Mainland China, as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan, are considered as part of Southeast Asia by some authors. * Administrative centre in Putrajaya. Southeast Asia is geographically divided into two subregions, namely Mainland Southeast Asia and Maritime Southeast Asia. Mainland Southeast Asia includes: Maritime Southeast Asia includes: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India are geographically considered part of Maritime Southeast Asia.
Eastern Bangladesh and Northeast India have strong cultural ties with Southeast Asia and sometimes considered both South Asian and Southeast Asian. Sri Lanka has on some occasions been considered a part of Southeast Asia because of its cultural ties to mainland Southeast Asia; the rest of the island of New Guinea, not part of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, is sometimes included, so are Palau and the Northern Mariana Islands, which were all part of the Spanish East Indies with strong cultural and linguistic ties to the region the Philippines. The eastern half of Indonesia and East Timor are considered to be biogeographically part of Oceania due to its distinctive faunal features. New Guinea and its surrounding islands are geologically considered as a part of Australian continent, connected via the Sahul Shelf; the region
Hong Kong
