Italy
Italy the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Austria and the enclaved microstates San Marino and Vatican City. Italy covers an area of 301,340 km2 and has a temperate seasonal and Mediterranean climate. With around 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth-most populous EU member state and the most populous country in Southern Europe. Due to its central geographic location in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, Italy has been home to a myriad of peoples and cultures. In addition to the various ancient peoples dispersed throughout modern-day Italy, the most famous of which being the Indo-European Italics who gave the peninsula its name, beginning from the classical era and Carthaginians founded colonies in insular Italy and Genoa, Greeks established settlements in the so-called Magna Graecia, while Etruscans and Celts inhabited central and northern Italy respectively; the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom in the 8th century BC, which became a republic with a government of the Senate and the People.
The Roman Republic conquered and assimilated its neighbours on the peninsula, in some cases through the establishment of federations, the Republic expanded and conquered parts of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. By the first century BC, the Roman Empire emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean Basin and became the leading cultural and religious centre of Western civilisation, inaugurating the Pax Romana, a period of more than 200 years during which Italy's technology, economy and literature flourished. Italy remained the metropole of the Roman Empire; the legacy of the Roman Empire endured its fall and can be observed in the global distribution of culture, governments and the Latin script. During the Early Middle Ages, Italy endured sociopolitical collapse and barbarian invasions, but by the 11th century, numerous rival city-states and maritime republics in the northern and central regions of Italy, rose to great prosperity through shipping and banking, laying the groundwork for modern capitalism.
These independent statelets served as Europe's main trading hubs with Asia and the Near East enjoying a greater degree of democracy than the larger feudal monarchies that were consolidating throughout Europe. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science and art. Italian culture flourished, producing famous scholars and polymaths such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Machiavelli. During the Middle Ages, Italian explorers such as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, John Cabot and Giovanni da Verrazzano discovered new routes to the Far East and the New World, helping to usher in the European Age of Discovery. Italy's commercial and political power waned with the opening of trade routes that bypassed the Mediterranean. Centuries of infighting between the Italian city-states, such as the Italian Wars of the 15th and 16th centuries, left the region fragmented, it was subsequently conquered and further divided by European powers such as France and Austria.
By the mid-19th century, rising Italian nationalism and calls for independence from foreign control led to a period of revolutionary political upheaval. After centuries of foreign domination and political division, Italy was entirely unified in 1871, establishing the Kingdom of Italy as a great power. From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, Italy industrialised, namely in the north, acquired a colonial empire, while the south remained impoverished and excluded from industrialisation, fuelling a large and influential diaspora. Despite being one of the main victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil, leading to the rise of a fascist dictatorship in 1922. Participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in military defeat, economic destruction and the Italian Civil War. Following the liberation of Italy and the rise of the resistance, the country abolished the monarchy, reinstated democracy, enjoyed a prolonged economic boom and, despite periods of sociopolitical turmoil became a developed country.
Today, Italy is considered to be one of the world's most culturally and economically advanced countries, with the sixth-largest worldwide national wealth. Its advanced economy ranks eighth-largest in the world and third in the Eurozone by nominal GDP. Italy owns the third-largest central bank gold reserve, it has a high level of human development, it stands among the top countries for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military and diplomatic affairs. Italy is a founding and leading member of the European Union and a member of numerous international institutions, including the UN, NATO, the OECD, the OSCE, the WTO, the G7, the G20, the Union for the Mediterranean, the Council of Europe, Uniting for Consensus, the Schengen Area and many more; as a reflection
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
Cantonese
Cantonese is a variety of Chinese spoken in the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety and standard form of Yue Chinese, one of the major subgroups of Chinese. In mainland China, it is the lingua franca of the province of Guangdong and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi, it is the official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Cantonese is widely spoken amongst Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and throughout the Western world. While the term Cantonese refers to the prestige variety, it is used in a broader sense for the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese; when Cantonese and the related Yuehai dialects are classified together, there are about 80 million total speakers. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities.
Although Cantonese shares a lot of vocabulary with Mandarin, the two varieties are mutually unintelligible because of differences in pronunciation and lexicon. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. A notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is; this results in the situation in which a Cantonese and a Mandarin text may look similar but are pronounced differently. In English, the term "Cantonese" can be ambiguous. Cantonese proper is the variety native to the city of Canton, the traditional English name of Guangzhou; this narrow sense may be specified as "Canton language" or "Guangzhou language". However, "Cantonese" may refer to the primary branch of Chinese that contains Cantonese proper as well as Taishanese and Gaoyang. In this article, "Cantonese" is used for Cantonese proper. Speakers called this variety "Canton speech" or "Guangzhou speech", although this term is now used outside Guangzhou. In Guangdong and Guangxi, people call it "provincial capital speech" or "plain speech".
Academically called "Canton prefecture speech". In Hong Kong and Macau, as well as among overseas Chinese communities, the language is referred to as "Guangdong speech" or "Canton Province speech", or as "Chinese". In mainland China, the term "Guangdong speech" is increasingly being used amongst both native and non-native speakers. Given the history of the development of the Yue languages and dialects during the Tang dynasty migrations to the region, in overseas Chinese communities, it is referred to as "Tang speech", given that the Cantonese people refer to themselves as "people of Tang". Due to its status as a prestige dialect among all the dialects of the Yue branch of Chinese varieties, it is called "Standard Cantonese"; the official languages of Hong Kong are English, as defined in the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Chinese language has many different varieties. Given the traditional predominance of Cantonese within Hong Kong, it is the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in the Hong Kong Government and all courts and tribunals.
It is used as the medium of instruction in schools, alongside English. A similar situation exists in neighboring Macau, where Chinese is an official language alongside Portuguese; as in Hong Kong, Cantonese is the predominant spoken variety of Chinese used in everyday life and is thus the official form of Chinese used in the government. The Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong and Macau is mutually intelligible with the Cantonese spoken in the mainland city of Guangzhou, although there exist some minor differences in accent and vocabulary. Cantonese first developed around the port city of Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta region of southeastern China. Due to the city's long standing as an important cultural center, Cantonese emerged as the prestige dialect of the Yue varieties of Chinese in the Southern Song dynasty and its usage spread around most of what is now the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi. Despite the cession of Macau to Portugal in 1557 and Hong Kong to Britain in 1842, the ethnic Chinese population of the two territories originated from the 19th and 20th century immigration from Guangzhou and surrounding areas, making Cantonese the predominant Chinese language in the territories.
On the mainland, Cantonese continued to serve as the lingua franca of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces after Mandarin was made the official language of the government by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s. Cantonese remained a dominant and influential language in southeastern China until the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and its promotion of Standard Chinese as the sole official language of the nation throughout the last half of the 20th century, although its influence still remains strong within the region. While the Chinese government vehemently discourages the official use of all forms of Chinese except Standard Chinese, Cantonese enjoys a higher standing than other Chinese langua
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice known as the Justice Department, is a federal executive department of the U. S. government, responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice in the United States, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries. The department was formed in 1870 during the Ulysses S. Grant administration; the Department of Justice administers several federal law enforcement agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration. The department is responsible for investigating instances of financial fraud, representing the United States government in legal matters, running the federal prison system; the department is responsible for reviewing the conduct of local law enforcement as directed by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The department is headed by the United States Attorney General, nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate and is a member of the Cabinet.
The current Attorney General is William Barr. The office of the Attorney General was established by the Judiciary Act of 1789 as a part-time job for one person, but grew with the bureaucracy. At one time, the Attorney General gave legal advice to the U. S. Congress as well as the President, but in 1819 the Attorney General began advising Congress alone to ensure a manageable workload; until March 3, 1853, the salary of the Attorney General was set by statute at less than the amount paid to other Cabinet members. Early Attorneys General supplemented their salaries by running private law practices arguing cases before the courts as attorneys for paying litigants. Following unsuccessful efforts to make Attorney General a full-time job, in 1869, the U. S. House Committee on the Judiciary, led by Congressman William Lawrence, conducted an inquiry into the creation of a "law department" headed by the Attorney General and composed of the various department solicitors and United States attorneys. On February 19, 1868, Lawrence introduced a bill in Congress to create the Department of Justice.
President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill into law on June 22, 1870. Grant appointed Amos T. Akerman as Attorney General and Benjamin H. Bristow as America's first Solicitor General the same week that Congress created the Department of Justice; the Department's immediate function was to preserve civil rights. It set about fighting against domestic terrorist groups, using both violence and litigation to oppose the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Both Akerman and Bristow used the Department of Justice to vigorously prosecute Ku Klux Klan members in the early 1870s. In the first few years of Grant's first term in office there were 1000 indictments against Klan members with over 550 convictions from the Department of Justice. By 1871, there were 3000 indictments and 600 convictions with most only serving brief sentences while the ringleaders were imprisoned for up to five years in the federal penitentiary in Albany, New York; the result was a dramatic decrease in violence in the South.
Akerman gave credit to Grant and told a friend that no one was "better" or "stronger" than Grant when it came to prosecuting terrorists. George H. Williams, who succeeded Akerman in December 1871, continued to prosecute the Klan throughout 1872 until the spring of 1873 during Grant's second term in office. Williams placed a moratorium on Klan prosecutions because the Justice Department, inundated by cases involving the Klan, did not have the manpower to continue prosecutions; the "Act to Establish the Department of Justice" drastically increased the Attorney General's responsibilities to include the supervision of all United States Attorneys under the Department of the Interior, the prosecution of all federal crimes, the representation of the United States in all court actions, barring the use of private attorneys by the federal government. The law created the office of Solicitor General to supervise and conduct government litigation in the Supreme Court of the United States. With the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, the federal government took on some law enforcement responsibilities, the Department of Justice tasked with performing these.
In 1884, control of federal prisons was transferred to the new department, from the Department of Interior. New facilities were built, including the penitentiary at Leavenworth in 1895, a facility for women located in West Virginia, at Alderson was established in 1924. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order which gave the Department of Justice responsibility for the "functions of prosecuting in the courts of the United States claims and demands by, offsenses against, the Government of the United States, of defending claims and demands against the Government, of supervising the work of United States attorneys and clerks in connection therewith, now exercised by any agency or officer..." The U. S. Department of Justice building was completed in 1935 from a design by Milton Bennett Medary. Upon Medary's death in 1929, the other partners of his Philadelphia firm Zantzinger and Medary took over the project. On a lot bordered by Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues and Ninth and Tenth Streets, Northwest, it holds over 1,000,000 square feet of space.
The sculptor C. Paul Jennewein served as overall design consultant for the entire building, contributing more than 50 separate sculptural elements inside and outside. Various efforts, none successful, have been made to determine the original intended meaning of the Latin motto appearing on the Department of Justice s
HKS, Inc.
HKS, Inc. is an American international architecture firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The firm was founded in 1939 by Harwood K. Smith. In 2002, HKS expanded its international presence by opening HKS Arquitectos in Mexico City to serve its Latin American clients. In 2006, HKS acquired the Stein-Cox Group and Trinity Design to have presences in Phoenix and Detroit, respectively. In 2007, HKS expanded their hospitality architectural design services and acquired the hospitality design firm Hill Glazier Architects, located in Palo Alto, California; the firm opened offices in Miami, Oklahoma City, Chennai, India. HKS expanded its global presence in 2008 opening offices in Abu Dhabi and São Paulo and again in 2010 with an office in Shanghai, China. In 2008 HKS acquired that part of the Ryder HKS joint venture it did not own. In 2010 HKS announced the formation of a nonprofit architectural research group, Center for Advanced Design and Evaluation. In 2011 HKS saw rapid expansion. In October HKS released an announcement it had acquired the interior design firm Maregatti Interiors LLC in Indianapolis.
The HKS Science & Technology Practice was formed after the firm acquired Earl Walls Studios in San Diego, California. HKS opened new locations in Chicago, New York, New Delhi, India. In 2012 HKS announced the acquisition of Miami-headquartered educational design firm HADP Architecture, Inc. In 2014 HKS launched a year-long public campaign to commemorate the firm's 75th anniversary. In 2017, HKS expanded its footprint with the acquisition of a New York City Design Studio; as of 2015, the firm employs more than 1000 people, making it one of the largest architectural firms in the United States and has completed services on structures valued in excess of $69 billion, with more than $12 billion of construction underway. This list includes projects. Orlando Health/Orlando Regional Medical Center, Florida Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park, California AT&T Stadium, Texas U. S. Bank Stadium, Minnesota FAU Stadium, Boca Raton, Florida Phoenix Children's Hospital, Arizona University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas Mosaic Stadium, Saskatchewan Bank of America Corporate Center, North Carolina Apogee Stadium, Texas College Park Center, Texas American Airlines Center, Texas Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas Atlantis Paradise Island, The Bahamas Children's Medical Center, Texas Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport Terminal D, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas Dell Diamond, Round Rock, Texas Dr Pepper Ballpark, Texas Horner Ballpark at Dallas Baptist University, Texas Toyota Stadium, Texas Banner Island Ballpark, California Lucas Oil Stadium, Indiana Lone Star Park, Grand Prairie, Texas Miller Park, Wisconsin Mosaic Stadium, Saskatchewan The Palazzo, Las Vegas, Nevada RadioShack Campus, Fort Worth, Texas Ritz-Carlton, Texas Amon G. Carter Stadium, Fort Worth, Texas JCPenney Corporate Headquarters, Texas W Dallas Victory Hotel and Residences – Victory Park, Texas U.
S. Census Bureau Headquarters, Maryland Venetian Macao, China Whole Foods Market Headquarters, Texas Winchester Medical Center, Virginia Stanley Park Stadium for the Liverpool Football Club, England Club Santos Laguna, Nuevo Estadio Corona, Torreón, Coahuila Guaranteed Rate Field, Illinois The Administration building, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas Uni-Trade Stadium, Texas 311 South Wacker Drive, Illinois Energy Center, New Orleans, Louisiana Official website
Casino
A casino is a facility which houses and accommodates certain types of gambling activities. The industry that deals in casinos is called the gaming industry. Casinos are most built near or combined with hotels, retail shopping, cruise ships or other tourist attractions. There is much debate over whether the social and economic consequences of casino gambling outweigh the initial revenue that may be generated; some casinos are known for hosting live entertainment events, such as stand-up comedy and sporting events. The term "casino" is a confusing linguistic false friend for translators. Casino is of Italian origin; the term casino may mean summerhouse, or social club. During the 19th century, the term casino came to include other public buildings where pleasurable activities took place. In modern-day Italian a casino is either a brothel, a mess, or a noisy environment, while a gaming house is spelt casinò, with an accent. Not all casinos were used for gaming; the Catalina Casino, a famous landmark overlooking Avalon Harbor on Santa Catalina Island, has never been used for traditional games of chance, which were outlawed in California by the time it was built.
The Copenhagen Casino was a theatre, known for the mass public meetings held in its hall during the 1848 Revolution, which made Denmark a constitutional monarchy. Until 1937, it was a well-known Danish theatre; the Hanko Casino in Hanko, Finland—one of that town's most conspicuous landmarks—was never used for gambling. Rather, it was a banquet hall for the Russian nobility which frequented this spa resort in the late 19th century and is now used as a restaurant. In military and non-military usage in German and Spanish, a casino or kasino is an officers' mess; the precise origin of gambling is unknown. It is believed that gambling in some form or another has been seen in every society in history. From the Ancient Greeks and Romans to Napoleon's France and Elizabethan England, much of history is filled with stories of entertainment based on games of chance; the first known European gambling house, not called a casino although meeting the modern definition, was the Ridotto, established in Venice, Italy in 1638 by the Great Council of Venice to provide controlled gambling during the carnival season.
It was closed in 1774. In American history, early gambling establishments were known as saloons; the creation and importance of saloons was influenced by four major cities: New Orleans, St. Louis and San Francisco, it was in the saloons that travelers could find people to talk to, drink with, gamble with. During the early 20th century in America, gambling became outlawed and banned by state legislation and social reformers of the time. However, in 1931, gambling was legalized throughout the state of Nevada. America's first legalized casinos were set up in those places. In 1976 New Jersey allowed gambling in Atlantic City, now America's second largest gambling city. Most jurisdictions worldwide have a minimum gambling age. Customers gamble by playing games of chance, in some cases with an element of skill, such as craps, baccarat and video poker. Most games played have mathematically determined odds that ensure the house has at all times an overall advantage over the players; this can be expressed more by the notion of expected value, uniformly negative.
This advantage is called the house edge. In games such as poker where players play against each other, the house takes a commission called the rake. Casinos sometimes give out complimentary comps to gamblers. Payout is the percentage of funds returned to players. Casinos in the United States say that a player staking money won from the casino is playing with the house's money. Video Lottery Machines have become one of the most popular forms of gambling in casinos; as of 2011 investigative reports have started calling into question whether the modern-day slot-machine is addictive. Casino design—regarded as a psychological exercise—is an intricate process that involves optimising floor plan, décor and atmospherics to encourage gambling. Factors influencing gambling tendencies include sound and lighting. Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, highlights the decision of the audio directors at Silicon Gaming to make its slot machines resonate in "the universally pleasant tone of C, sampling existing casino soundscapes to create a sound that would please but not clash".
Dr Alan Hirsch, founder of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago, studied the impact of certain scents on gamblers, discerning that a pleasant albeit unidentifiable odour released by Las Vegas slot machines generated about 50% more in daily revenue. He suggested. Casino designer Roger Thomas is credited with implementing a successful, disruptive design for the Las Vegas Wynn Resorts casinos in 2008, he broke casino design convention by introducing natural sunlight and flora to appeal to women. Thomas put in skylights and antique clocks, defying the commonplace notion that a casino should be a timeless space; the following li
Yunnan
Yunnan is a province of the People's Republic of China. Located in Southwest China, the province spans 394,000 square kilometres and has a population of 45.7 million. The capital of the province is Kunming also known as Yunnan; the province borders the Chinese provinces Guangxi, Guizhou and the Tibet Autonomous Region, as well as the countries Vietnam and Myanmar. Yunnan is situated in a mountainous area, with high elevations in the northwest and low elevations in the southeast. Most of the population lives in the eastern part of the province. In the west, the altitude can vary from the mountain peaks to river valleys by as much as 3,000 metres. Yunnan has the largest diversity of plant life in China. Of the 30,000 species of higher plants in China, Yunnan has 17,000 or more. Yunnan's reserves of aluminium, lead and tin are the largest in China, there are major reserves of copper and nickel; the Han Empire first recorded diplomatic relations with the province at the end of the 2nd century BC. It became the seat of a Sino-Tibetan-speaking kingdom of Nanzhao in the 8th century AD.
Nanzhao was multi-ethnic. The Mongols conquered the region in the 13th century, with local control exercised by warlords until the 1930s. From the Yuan dynasty onward, the area was part of a central-government sponsored population movement towards the southwestern frontier, with two major waves of migrants arriving from Han-majority areas in northern and southeast China; as with other parts of China's southwest, Japanese occupation in the north during World War II forced another migration of majority Han people into the region. These two waves of migration contributed to Yunnan being one of the most ethnically diverse provinces of China, with ethnic minorities accounting for about 34 percent of its total population. Major ethnic groups include Yi, Hani, Zhuang and Miao; the Yuanmou Man, a Homo erectus fossil unearthed by railway engineers in the 1960s, has been determined to be the oldest-known hominid fossil in China. By the Neolithic period, there were human settlements in the area of Lake Dian.
These people constructed simple wooden structures. Around the 3rd century BC, the central area of Yunnan around present day Kunming was known as Dian; the Chu general Zhuang Qiao entered the region from the upper Yangtze River and set himself up as "King of Dian". He and his followers brought into Yunnan an influx of Chinese influence, the start of a long history of migration and cultural expansion. In 221 BC, Qin Shi Huang extended his authority south. Commanderies and counties were established in Yunnan. An existing road in Sichuan – the "Five Foot Way" – was extended south to around present day Qujing, in eastern Yunnan; the Han–Dian wars began under Emperor Wu. He dispatched a series of military campaigns against the Dian during the southward expansion of the Han dynasty. In 109 BC, Emperor Wu sent General Guo Chang south to Yunnan, establishing Yizhou commandery and 24 subordinate counties; the commandery seat was at Dianchi county in present-day Jinning. Another county was called "Yunnan" the first use of the name.
To expand the burgeoning trade with Burma and India, Emperor Wu sent Tang Meng to maintain and expand the Five Foot Way, renaming it "Southwest Barbarian Way". By this time, agricultural technology in Yunnan had improved markedly; the local people used bronze tools and kept a variety of livestock, including cattle, sheep, goats and dogs. Anthropologists have determined, they lived in tribal congregations, sometimes led by exiled Chinese. During the Three Kingdoms, the territory of present-day Yunnan, western Guizhou and southern Sichuan was collectively called Nanzhong; the dissolution of Chinese central authority led to increased autonomy for Yunnan and more power for the local tribal structures. In AD 225, the famed statesman Zhuge Liang led three columns into Yunnan to pacify the tribes, his seven captures of Meng Huo, a local magnate, is much celebrated in Chinese folklore. International trade flowed by din of Yunnan. In the 4th century, northern China was overrun by nomadic tribes from the north.
In the 320s, the Cuan clan migrated into Yunnan. Cuan Chen named himself king and held authority from Lake Dian known as Kunchuan. Henceforth the Cuan clan ruled eastern Yunnan for over four hundred years. Before the rise and dominance of the Nanzhao Kingdom around Yunnan in the eighth century, many local tribes and other groups sprang up. Around Lake Erhai, the Dali area, there emerged six zhao: Mengzi, Langqiong, Dengdan and Mengshe. Zhao was an indigenous non-Chinese language term meaning "king" or "kingdom." Among the six regimes Mengshe was located south of the other five. By the 730s Nanzhao had succeeded in bringing the Erhai Lake–area under its authority. In 738, the western Yunnan was united by Piluoge, the fourth king of Nanzhao, confirmed by the imperial court of the Tang dynasty as king of Yunnan. Ruling from Dali, the thirteen kings of Nanzhao ruled over more than two centuries and played a part in the dynamic relationship between China and Tibet. By the 750s, Nanzhao had taken eastern Yunnan into its empire and had become a potential rival to Tang China.
The following period saw conflicts between Tang China and Nanzhao. In 750, Nanzhao captured Yaozhou, the largest Tang settlement in Yunnan. In 751, Xianyu Zhongtong (
