1.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
2.
Chinese language
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Chinese is a group of related, but in many cases mutually unintelligible, language varieties, forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Chinese is spoken by the Han majority and many ethnic groups in China. Nearly 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese as their first language, the varieties of Chinese are usually described by native speakers as dialects of a single Chinese language, but linguists note that they are as diverse as a language family. The internal diversity of Chinese has been likened to that of the Romance languages, There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin, followed by Wu, Min, and Yue. Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and certain Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms, all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. Standard Chinese is a form of spoken Chinese based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It is the language of China and Taiwan, as well as one of four official languages of Singapore. It is one of the six languages of the United Nations. The written form of the language, based on the logograms known as Chinese characters, is shared by literate speakers of otherwise unintelligible dialects. Of the other varieties of Chinese, Cantonese is the spoken language and official in Hong Kong and Macau. It is also influential in Guangdong province and much of Guangxi, dialects of Southern Min, part of the Min group, are widely spoken in southern Fujian, with notable variants also spoken in neighboring Taiwan and in Southeast Asia. Hakka also has a diaspora in Taiwan and southeast Asia. Shanghainese and other Wu varieties are prominent in the lower Yangtze region of eastern China, Chinese can be traced back to a hypothetical Sino-Tibetan proto-language. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty, as the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have sought to promulgate a unified standard. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, in addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach, and are often also sensitive border zones. Without a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, the earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BCE in the late Shang dynasty
3.
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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
Shanghainese
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The Shanghainese language, also known as the Shanghai dialect, Hu language or Hu dialect, is a variety of Wu Chinese spoken in the central districts of the City of Shanghai and its surrounding areas. It is classified as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family, in English, Shanghainese sometimes refers to all Wu languages, variants and dialects, although they are only partially intelligible with one another. Shanghainese proper is a language of Taihu Wu, it contains vocabulary and expressions from the entire Taihu Wu area of southern Jiangsu. With nearly 14 million speakers, Shanghainese is also the largest single form of Wu Chinese and it serves as the lingua franca of the entire Yangtze River Delta region. Shanghainese is rich in vowels and in consonants, like other Taihu Wu dialects, Shanghainese has voiced initials. Neither Cantonese nor Mandarin has voiced initial stops or affricates, the Shanghainese tonal system is also significantly different from other Chinese varieties, sharing more similarities with the Japanese pitch accent. Shanghainese has two level tonal contrasts, while Cantonese and Mandarin are typical of contour tonal languages, Shanghai did not become a regional center of commerce until it was opened to foreign investment during the late Qing dynasty. Consequently, languages and dialects spoken around Shanghai had long been subordinate to those spoken around Jiaxing, in the late 19th century, most vocabulary of the Shanghai region had been a hybrid between Southern Jiangsu and Ningbonese. It underwent sustained growth that reached a hiatus in the 1930s during the Republican era, after 1949, the government imposed Mandarin as the official language of the whole nation of China. The dominance and influence of Shanghainese began to wane slightly, especially since Chinese economic reform began in 1978, Shanghai became home to a great number of migrants from all over the country. Due to the prominence of Mandarin, learning Shanghainese was no longer necessary for migrants. However, Shanghainese remained a vital part of the citys culture. In the 1990s, it was common for local radio. In 1995, the TV series Sinful Debt featured extensive Shanghainese dialogues, the Shanghainese TV series Lao Niang Jiu was broadcast from 1995 to 2007 and received tremendous popularity among Shanghainese residents. Shanghainese programming has since declined, over concerns of regionalist/localist accusations. From 1992 onward, Shanghainese use was discouraged in schools, in addition, Shanghais emergence as a cosmopolitan global city consolidated the status of Mandarin as the standard language of business and services, at the expense of the local language. Since 2005, new movements have emerged to protect Shanghainese from fading away, Shanghais former party boss Chen Liangyu, a native Shanghainese himself, reportedly supported her proposal. There have been talks of re-integrating Shanghainese into pre-kindergarten education, because children are unable to speak any Shanghainese
7.
Chinese garden
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The Chinese garden is a landscape garden style which has evolved over three thousand years. They create a miniature landscape, which is meant to express the harmony that should exist between man and nature. The earliest recorded Chinese gardens were created in the valley of the Yellow River and these gardens were large enclosed parks where the kings and nobles hunted game, or where fruit and vegetables were grown. Early inscriptions from this period, carved on tortoise shells, have three Chinese characters for garden, you, pu and yuan and you was a royal garden where birds and animals were kept, while pu was a garden for plants. During the Qin Dynasty, yuan became the character for all gardens, a famous royal garden of the late Shang dynasty was the Terrace, Pond and Park of the Spirit built by King Wenwang west of his capital city, Yin. The immaculate cranes have plumes of a brilliant white, the Emperor makes his promenade to the Pond of the Spirit, The water is full of fish, who wriggle. - translation in Jardins de Chine, ou la quête du paradis Another early royal garden was Shaqui, or the Dunes of Sand, built by the last Shang ruler, King Zhou. It was composed of a terrace, or tai, which served as an observation platform in the center of a large square park. It was described in one of the classics of Chinese literature. According to the Shiji, one of the most famous features of this garden was the Wine Pool, a large pool, big enough for several small boats, was constructed on the palace grounds, with inner linings of polished oval shaped stones from the sea shores. The pool was filled with wine. A small island was constructed in the middle of the pool, where trees were planted, King Zhou and his friends and concubines drifted in their boats, drinking the wine with their hands and eating the roasted meat from the trees. Later Chinese philosophers and historians cited this garden as an example of decadence, during the Spring and Autumn period, in 535 BC, the Terrace of Shanghua, with lavishly decorated palaces, was built by King Jing of the Zhou dynasty. In 505 BC, a more elaborate garden, the Terrace of Gusu, was begun. It was located on the side of a mountain, and included a series of terraces connected by galleries, from the highest terrace, a view extended as far as Lake Tai, the Great Lake. An ancient Chinese legend played an important part in early garden design, on this island were palaces of gold and silver, with jewels on the trees. There was no pain, no winter, wine glasses and rice bowls were always full, and fruits, in 221 BC, Ying Zheng, the King of Qin conquered other rival states and unified China under the Qin Empire, which he ruled until 210 BC. He heard the legend of the islands and sent emissaries to find the islands and bring back the elixir of immortal life, at his palace near his capital, Xianyang, he created a garden with a large lake called Lanchi gong or the Lake of the Orchids
8.
City God Temple of Shanghai
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The City God Temple or Temple of the City Gods, officially the City Temple of Shanghai, is a folk temple located in the old city of Shanghai, China. It commemorates the elevation of Shanghai to municipal status and is the site of the veneration of three Chinese figures honored as the city gods of the town. It is also known by locals as the Old City God Temple. In Chinese, Chenghuangmiao is also used as the name of the district near the temple. This is generally known in English as Yu Garden, after a nearby Chinese garden, the district is now incorporated under the name Yuyuan Tourist Mart. Regardless of size, many walled cities in ancient China contained a dedicated to one or more immortal or god as the spirit or protector of the city. The City God Temple in Shanghai originated as the Jinshan God Temple, dedicated to the spirit of Jinshan, or Gold Mountain and it was converted into a City God Temple in 1403, during the Yongle era of the Ming dynasty. During the Qing Dynasty, the temple grew popular, residents of the old city as well as nearby areas visited the temple to pray for good fortune and peace. The temple reached its largest extent in the Daoguang era, the popularity of the temple also led to many businesses being set up in the area, turning the surrounding streets into a busy marketplace. During the Cultural Revolution, the temple was closed down and used for other purposes, for many years, the main hall was used as a jewellery shop. In 1951, the Board of Trustees of the City God Temple was dissolved, the institution made changes to the temple, removing statues representing folk underworld personalities such as Yama, the judge of the dead, and placing an emphasis on Taoist spirituality instead. In 1994, the temple was restored to its use as a temple. The Temple, together with nearby Yuyuan Garden and the streets, are now part of a large pedestrian zone dedicated to restaurants. A complete restoration of the City God Temple took place between 2005 and 2006, in October 2006 the place of worship was reopened and reconsecrated by Taoist clergymen. The temple is dedicated to three city gods, Huo Guang was a famous Han Dynasty Chancellor and he is remembered for his role in deposing one young emperor and replacing him with another. Huo Guang was the original City God for the County of Shanghai from the Yuan Dynasty, qin Yubo lived in Shanghai and served in the late Yuan Dynasty civil service. When the Hongwu Emperor founded the Ming Dynasty, he resisted two summons to serve at the court and he finally relented, and served in various roles including chief Imperial examiner. After his death, he was anointed City God of Shanghai by the Hongwu Emperor, chen Huacheng was a Qing Dynasty general, responsible for the defence of Shanghai during the First Opium War
9.
Old City (Shanghai)
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The Cochin or Cochin China, is a breed of chicken. In China itself, the name 九斤黄 is actually used for any large chicken or even a dish made from one and this chicken was originally bred in China and later exported to Britain and America in the mid 19th century. As a very distinctive breed of chicken, it created a bit of a craze among poultry lovers in the English-speaking world. It was successfully bred into other birds, there is also a bantam version, which is often called the Pekin bantam, but this should not be confused with the separate and true Pekin bantam. As above, the most distinctive feature of the Cochin is the excessive plumage that covers leg, the skin beneath the feathers is yellow and the egg colour is light brown. Eggs are also medium in size, standard weight is 5 kg for a cock,4 kg for a cockerel,3.9 kg for a hen, and 3.2 kg for a pullet. Colour varieties include buff, black, partridge, blue, silver laced, splash, golden laced, cochins can be frizzled, with the feathers curling outwards. Cochins are well known as mothers, even as foster mothers for other breeds, and they can lay many eggs. Cochins are also known to be good pet hens for the garden, as they are tame, cochins are rather quiet chickens, and tend to be quite calm as well. Delayed feathering in chickens, a found in this breed. Media related to Cochin at Wikimedia Commons
