1.
Qing dynasty
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It was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China. The Qing multi-cultural empire lasted almost three centuries and formed the base for the modern Chinese state. The dynasty was founded by the Jurchen Aisin Gioro clan in Manchuria, in the late sixteenth century, Nurhaci, originally a Ming vassal, began organizing Banners, military-social units that included Jurchen, Han Chinese, and Mongol elements. Nurhaci formed the Jurchen clans into an entity, which he renamed as the Manchus. By 1636, his son Hong Taiji began driving Ming forces out of Liaodong and declared a new dynasty, in 1644, peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng conquered the Ming capital, Beijing. The Ten Great Campaigns of the Qianlong Emperor from the 1750s to the 1790s extended Qing control into Central Asia, the early rulers maintained their Manchu ways, and while their title was Emperor, they used khan to the Mongols and they were patrons of Tibetan Buddhism. They governed using Confucian styles and institutions of government and retained the imperial examinations to recruit Han Chinese to work under or in parallel with Manchus. They also adapted the ideals of the system in dealing with neighboring territories. The Qianlong reign saw the apogee and initial decline in prosperity. The population rose to some 400 million, but taxes and government revenues were fixed at a low rate, corruption set in, rebels tested government legitimacy, and ruling elites did not change their mindsets in the face of changes in the world system. Following the Opium War, European powers imposed unequal treaties, free trade, the Taiping Rebellion and the Dungan Revolt in Central Asia led to the deaths of some 20 million people, most of them due to famines caused by war. In spite of disasters, in the Tongzhi Restoration of the 1860s, Han Chinese elites rallied to the defense of the Confucian order. The initial gains in the Self-Strengthening Movement were destroyed in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895, in which the Qing lost its influence over Korea, New Armies were organized, but the ambitious Hundred Days Reform of 1898 was turned back by Empress Dowager Cixi, a conservative leader. Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries competed with reformist monarchists such as Kang Youwei, after the deaths of Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor in 1908, the hardline Manchu court alienated reformers and local elites alike. The Wuchang Uprising on October 11,1911, led to the Xinhai Revolution, General Yuan Shikai negotiated the abdication of Puyi, the last emperor, on February 12,1912. Nurhaci declared himself the Bright Khan of the Later Jin state in both of the 12–13th century Jurchen Jin dynasty and of his Aisin Gioro clan. His son Hong Taiji renamed the dynasty Great Qing in 1636, there are competing explanations on the meaning of Qīng. The character Qīng is composed of water and azure, both associated with the water element and this association would justify the Qing conquest as defeat of fire by water
2.
Sun Ce
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Sun Ce, courtesy name Bofu, was a military general and warlord who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty. He was the eldest child of Sun Jian, who was killed during the Battle of Xiangyang when Sun Ce was only 16, Sun Ce then broke away from his fathers overlord, Yuan Shu, and headed to southeastern China to establish his own power base there. With the help of people, such as Zhang Zhao and Zhou Yu. In 200, when the warlord Cao Cao was at war with his rival Yuan Shao in the Battle of Guandu, However, he was assassinated before he could carry out the plan. Sun Ce was posthumously honored as Prince Huan of Changsha by his younger brother Sun Quan when the became the first emperor of Eastern Wu. Chen Shous Records of the Three Kingdoms describes Sun Ce as a man who was full of laughter. He was also a generous and receptive man who employed people according to their abilities, as such, his subjects were willing to risk their lives for him. One detractor named Xu Gong, in a letter to Emperor Xian, likened Sun Ce to Xiang Yu, as a result, Sun Ce was also referred to as the Little Conqueror in popular culture. Born in 175, Sun Ce was the eldest among five sons and one daughter of Sun Jian, in 190, a year after Emperor Ling died, the warlord Dong Zhuo usurped power, placing in the throne the puppet Emperor Xian. Regional warlords in eastern China then launched a campaign against Dong Zhuo, Sun Jian rendered his service to Yuan Shu, one of the leaders of the coalition. The attempt to oust Dong Zhuo soon failed and China slid into a series of civil wars. In the next year, Sun Jian was sent by Yuan Shu to attack Liu Biao, governor of Jing Province, Sun Ce brought his fathers body to Qua for burial and settled his mother down before heading for Danyang, where his uncle Wu Jing was the governor. There he raised a militia a few hundred in strength. This small force was far from sufficient for him to establish his own power so in 194 Sun Ce went to Yuan Shu, Yuan Shu was very impressed with Sun Ce and often lamented that he had no son like him. He also returned Sun Jians former division of troops to Sun Ce, initially, Yuan Shu promised to appoint Sun Ce the governor of Jiujiang but eventually gave the governorship to Chen Ji. Later, when Yuan Shu was denied a loan of grains from the governor of Lujiang, he sent Sun Ce to attack the latter. When Sun Ce did, however, Yuan Shu again went back on his words, the disappointed Sun Ce then began to contemplate leaving. Meanwhile, Liu Yao, who was by imperial decree the governor of Yang Province, occupied Qua as the regional seat Shouchun was already occupied by Yuan Shu
3.
Zhou Yu
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Zhou Yu, courtesy name Gongjin, was a military general and strategist serving under the warlord Sun Ce in the late Eastern Han dynasty. He continued serving under Sun Quan, Sun Ces younger brother and successor, around late 208, the northern warlord Cao Cao led his forces south with the intention of conquering the Jiangdong region, where Sun Quans territories were based. Zhou Yu, as the commander of Sun Quans forces. He then led Sun Quans forces at the follow-up Battle of Jiangling, Zhou Yus victories helped to solidify the survivability of Sun Quans regime, which served as the foundation of the state of Eastern Wu in the Three Kingdoms period. He died in 210 at a young age of 35 while preparing for a conquest of the Bashu region. Zhou Yu was from Shu County, Lujiang Commandery, which is in present-day Shucheng County, two of his relatives – his granduncle, Zhou Jing, and Zhou Jings son, Zhou Zhong – served as the Grand Commandant in the Han imperial court. Zhou Yus father, Zhou Yi, was a former Prefect of the imperial capital, around 190, when Sun Jian raised an army to join the campaign against Dong Zhuo, he relocated his family from Changsha Commandery to Shu County. In Shu County, Zhou Yu met and befriended Sun Jians eldest son, Sun Ce, Zhou Yu offered to let Sun Ce and his family stay with him, and he paid respects to Sun Ces mother Lady Wu as though she was his real mother. Zhou Yu and Sun Ce became very close friends, Zhou Yu later travelled to Danyang Commandery to join his uncle Zhou Shang, who was serving as the Administrator of Danyang Commandery. Around 194, Sun Ce, under a commission from the warlord Yuan Shu, entered Yang Province to aid his relatives, Wu Jing and Sun Ben, who were under attack by another warlord Liu Yao. When Sun Ce was at Liyang and was preparing to cross the Yangtze River to attack Liu Yao, Zhou Yu led some troops to assist Sun Ce. Sun Ce was delighted and he said to Zhou Yu, With you, Zhou Yu then joined Sun Ce in his conquests of Hengjiang and Dangli and achieved success. They crossed the Yangtze River, conquered Moling, and defeated Liu Yaos forces led by Ze Rong and they also conquered Hushu, Jiangcheng, and Que. Liu Yao fled after his defeats, and by then, the strength of Sun Ces forces had reached tens of thousands, Sun Ce told Zhou Yu, I now have sufficient military power to conquer Wu and pacify the Shanyue. You can return to Danyang and garrison there, Zhou Yu then made his way back to Danyang. After Yuan Shu agreed to his request, Zhou Yu travelled to Wu Commandery via Juchao, in 198, Zhou Yu arrived in Wu Commandery, where Sun Ce personally received and welcomed him. Sun Ce appointed Zhou Yu as General of the Household Who Establishes Might and put him in command of 2,000 troops, Sun Ce said, Zhou Gongjin is an extraordinary hero and talent. Hes very close to me and were like brothers, I still remember that time when he brought his troops and supplies from Danyang to assist me in my campaign
4.
Traditional Chinese characters
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Traditional Chinese characters are Chinese characters in any character set that does not contain newly created characters or character substitutions performed after 1946. They are most commonly the characters in the character sets of Taiwan, of Hong Kong. Currently, a number of overseas Chinese online newspapers allow users to switch between both sets. In contrast, simplified Chinese characters are used in mainland China, Singapore, the debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters has been a long-running issue among Chinese communities. Although simplified characters are taught and endorsed by the government of Mainland China, Traditional characters are used informally in regions in China primarily in handwriting and also used for inscriptions and religious text. They are often retained in logos or graphics to evoke yesteryear, nonetheless, the vast majority of media and communications in China is dominated by simplified characters. Taiwan has never adopted Simplified Chinese characters since it is ruled by the Republic of China, the use of simplified characters in official documents is even prohibited by the government in Taiwan. Simplified characters are not well understood in general, although some stroke simplifications that have incorporated into Simplified Chinese are in common use in handwriting. For example, while the name of Taiwan is written as 臺灣, similarly, in Hong Kong and Macau, Traditional Chinese has been the legal written form since colonial times. In recent years, because of the influx of mainland Chinese tourists, today, even government websites use simplified Chinese, as they answer to the Beijing government. This has led to concerns by residents to protect their local heritage. In Southeast Asia, the Chinese Filipino community continues to be one of the most conservative regarding simplification, while major public universities are teaching simplified characters, many well-established Chinese schools still use traditional characters. Publications like the Chinese Commercial News, World News, and United Daily News still use traditional characters, on the other hand, the Philippine Chinese Daily uses simplified. Aside from local newspapers, magazines from Hong Kong, such as the Yazhou Zhoukan, are found in some bookstores. In case of film or television subtitles on DVD, the Chinese dub that is used in Philippines is the same as the one used in Taiwan and this is because the DVDs belongs to DVD Region Code 3. Hence, most of the subtitles are in Traditional Characters, overseas Chinese in the United States have long used traditional characters. A major influx of Chinese immigrants to the United States occurred during the half of the 19th century. Therefore, the majority of Chinese language signage in the United States, including street signs, Traditional Chinese characters are called several different names within the Chinese-speaking world
5.
Simplified Chinese characters
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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, it is one of the two character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the Peoples Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s in an attempt to increase literacy and they are officially used in the Peoples Republic of China and Singapore. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally tend to use traditional characters, Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially. Strictly, the latter refers to simplifications of character structure or body, character forms that have existed for thousands of years alongside regular, Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional 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 pronunciation and identical meaning were reduced to a single standardized character. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies. Some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictably different from traditional characters and this often leads opponents not well-versed in the method of simplification to conclude that the overall process of character simplification is also arbitrary. In reality, the methods and rules of simplification are few, on the other hand, proponents of simplification often flaunt a few choice simplified characters as ingenious inventions, when in fact these have existed for hundreds of years as ancient variants. However, the Chinese government never officially 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 promulgated by the State Council of the Peoples Republic of China on June 5,2013, cursive written text almost always includes character simplification. Simplified forms used in print have always existed, they date back to as early as the Qin dynasty, One of the earliest proponents of character simplification was Lubi 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 it was suggested that the Chinese writing system should be either simplified or completely abolished. Fu Sinian, a leader of the May Fourth Movement, called Chinese characters the writing of ox-demons, lu Xun, a renowned Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, If Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die. Recent commentators have claimed that Chinese characters were blamed for the problems in China during that time
6.
Standard Chinese
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Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese. Like other varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is a language with topic-prominent organization. It has more initial consonants but fewer vowels, final consonants, Standard Chinese is an analytic language, though with many compound words. There exist 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, while Guoyu is written using traditional Chinese characters. There are many characters that are identical between the two systems, in English, the governments of China and Hong Kong use Putonghua, Putonghua Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, and Mandarin, while those of Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, use Mandarin. The name Putonghua also has a long, albeit unofficial, history and 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 different from the Guoyu. The former was a prestige variety, while the latter was the legal standard. Based on common understandings of the time, the two were, in fact, different, Guoyu was understood as formal vernacular Chinese, which is close to classical Chinese. By contrast, Putonghua was called the speech of the modern man. The use of the term Putonghua by left-leaning intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai, prior to this, the government used both terms interchangeably. In Taiwan, Guoyu continues to be the term for Standard Chinese. The term Putonghua, on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca, Huayu, or language of the Chinese nation, originally simply meant Chinese language, and 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 and it also incorporates the notion that Mandarin is usually not the national or common language of the areas in which overseas Chinese live. The term Mandarin is a translation of Guānhuà, which referred to the lingua franca of the late Chinese empire, 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 language from other northern. Chinese has long had considerable variation, hence prestige dialects have always existed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán rather than colloquial regional dialects, rime books, which were written since the Northern and Southern dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times
7.
Pinyin
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Pinyin, or Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese, which is written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet, and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters. The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang and it was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as a standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the standard in Taiwan in 2009. The word Hànyǔ means the language of the Han people. In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing and this was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese. One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing Dynasty scholar-official, the first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the effect of the kana syllabaries. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script, while Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts. The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and it was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979. This Sin Wenz or New Writing was much more sophisticated than earlier alphabets. In 1940, several members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Societys new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Sun Yat-sens son, Sun Fo, Cai Yuanpei, the countrys most prestigious educator, Tao Xingzhi, an educational reformer. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks
8.
Gai Qi
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Gai Qi was a poet and painter born in western China during the Qing dynasty. As an artist, he was active in Shanghai, in painting his works mainly concerned plants, beauty, and figures. However he also did numerous landscapes, in poetry he preferred the rhyming ci form and added such poems to his paintings. His social circle included prominent literati as well as artists and he organized both a literary society and a Buddhist lay society. His work often used a delicate baimiao style, which can be see in his illustrations for Honglou meng. The illustrations are chiefly portraits of the characters in the novel. Numerous poets, including the woman poet Zhou Qi, wrote poems to accompany the illustrations. The scholar Wang Qisun 王岂孙 commissioned Gai Qi to paint an album of famous Chinese women, wangs second wife, Cao Zhenxiu 曹贞秀 wrote poems about the women and did the calligraphy in the album. Gai took as a student the talented woman painter and poet Qian Shoupu 錢守璞 and he was associated with the painter Fei Danxu 费丹旭 in what has been called the Gai Fei school. Gais grandson continued the tradition of the Gai Fei school, along with descendants of Fei Danxiu and he is perhaps best known today for the Hongloumeng tiyong, a book of portraits of characters in Dream of the Red Chamber accompanied by poems about the characters. The book was based on paintings done by Gai Qi, but was not published until 1884, the book is still in print. Chinese Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford Oxford ISBN 1-85444-132-9 China on-site Zhongguo lidai shinü huaji 中國歷代仕女畫集 edited by Guo Xueshi 郭学是and Zhang Zikang, hidden Meanings of Love and Death in Chinese Painting, Selections from the Marilyn and Roy Papp Collection
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