Polish Jesuit's squirrel

Sum Xu (松鼠)
Sum Xu animal apud Sinas reperitur, flavi & nigri coloris est, pulcherimi aspectus. Cicurant illiud Sinenses & collum argento exornant, mures egregiè venatur. Sæpe venit septem & novem scudis. ....
Lo Meo Quey (绿毛龟) - Vindium (viridium?) alarum Testudo
Alatæ testudines in aliquibus provinciis Sinarum & præcipuè in Ho-van inveniuntur virides, & interdum cæruleas adiunctas pedibus habet alas, & gradum tardissimum quàm volatu aut potiùs quodam saltu extensis pedum alis compensat. Pedes alati hujusmodi testudinum in pretio sunt apud Sinas etiam ob raritatem. ...

(Michael Boym, Flora Sinensis, 1656

While looking for later references to some of the creatures mentioned in Boym's work, I found an interesting article by Sarah Hartwell about a strange breed of cats that, according to many European authorities of the 18-19th centuries, supposedly existed in China - but was not anywhere to be found when people actually went looking for it. This certainly called for a day in a rare book library...

Polish Jesuit's squirrel

The Jesuit missionaries who operated in China between the late 16th and early 17th century were a an outstanding group, but even against this background the story of Michael (Michał) Boym (ca. 1612–1659) is remarkable. Born in Lwów (a.k.a Lemberg, Lvov, Lviv), he left his native Poland to join the Jesuits, and was posted to China. He happened to arrive to China right around the time of the Manchu invasion and the fall of the Ming Dynasty. Fifty years earlier, the Wanli Emperor never deigned to meet Matteo Ricci and Diego Pantoya in person (and when given the portrait of the priests, exclaimed "Ah, they are Hui-Hui!"). Now, when Beijing and Nanjing both fell to the Manchus, Koffler (another Jesuit, an Austrian) and Boym were able to enter the inner circle of the court of the Yongli Emperor (a grandson of Wanli), who was still resisting the Manchus from the empire's southwestern corner, and to baptize several members of the royal family. As the Ming's situation became increasingly precarious, Empress Elena sent Boym to Europe with a plea for help from the Pope. The Portuguese (who controlled Jesuit's operations in China and elsewhere in Asia) and the Jesuit leadership, however, were not all that enthusiastic about supporting the Ming's nearly-lost cause, so getting to Europe became yet another adventure for Boym and his traveling companion, a Chinese Christian named Andrew Zheng.

Engaged as he was with politics and the missionary business, Boym managed to write a few important books and articles, only some of which were published at the time. One of the best known is his delightful Flora Sinensis (1656). The album actually covered both flora and fauna, and not only of China. One of the most interesting pictures there was the one showing two creatures: Sum Xu (松鼠) and Lo Meo Quey (绿毛龟).

松鼠 is transcribed songshu in the modern Chinese transcription (Hanyu Pinyin), and is the usual Chinese word for "squirrel". (The literal meaning is "pine rat".) ''Sum Xu'' would be the normal way to transcribe this in the Portuguese-influenced transcription that Boym used; elsewhere, for example, he has the Shandong province as Xantum. While Boym's picture of the creature is reasonably squirrel-like, his description of the creature's lifestyle is, however, decidedly non-squirrel-ly. According to Boym, the ''sumxu'' was a pretty yellow-and-black animal, commonly tamed, and made to wear silver a collar. Valued as good hunters of mice, they would sell for 7 to 9 silver coins. Based on this, it has been suggested (e.g., by Hartmut Walravens) that he was actually describing some animal from the mustelid family (including martens, ferrets, weasels, etc.) that may have been domesticated in China.

Boym's treasure trove of flora and fauna became further popularized in Europe via the efforts of another Jesuit, German Athanasius Kircher. Early in his career, Kircher, too, wanted to become a missionary and go to China, but instead he became a professor in Rome, and published an astonishing number of books. The one that concerns us is his ''China monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae and artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata'' (1667). Making heavy use of the expert help provided by Boym, Martino Martini (Kircher's former student, and now an important Jesuit visiting Europe from China), and Zheng, the book was able to break new ground in European Sinological literature - for example, the transcript and translation of the Nestorian Stele of Xi'an was probably the first Chinese document of a comparable size published in Europe in original and translation.

But Boym and Martini had to go back to China after a few years in Europe; once on his own, Kircher was to rely much heavier on his imagination throughout the rest of his book. His description of the ''sumxu'' was, however, fairly close to Boym's original:

There is also a domestic animal called the Sumxu which is similar to a cat. It is black and saffron colored and has splendid hair. The Chinese tame it and put a silver collar around its neck. It is an avid hunter of mice. It is so rare that one sells for seven to nine scudi.

(p. 186, in modern English translation by Dr. Charles D. Van Tuyl), although it is Kircher, not Boym, who was the first to compare the creature to a cat.

Kircher's ''sumxu''

Kircher, however, seemed to have given free rein to the fantasy of the artist who was to provide a picture of the animal. While the body shape of the creature is much like the one in Boym's picture, it is Kircher's picture that gave us a scale: his ''sumxu'' looks almost as long as the two men next to it are tall. Through the open door in the back of the room one can see a hunter with a few similar creatures chasing a deer (rather than mice, as the text says!) No wonder that a later art historian described the curious creature as a "Chinese badger"!

The caption in Kircher's book is rather curious too. As Szczesniak notes at some point, Boym's Chinese handwriting was competent enough, but fairly clumsy, as it is common with foreigners learning Chinese. Kircher's artists obviously did not know Chinese at all, so he mangled Boym's Chinese caption in a curious way: the two-character word 松鼠 (which Boym's writes in a vertical way) has now been split into three nonsensical character arranged from the left to the right. The left half of 松 (i.e., the 木 radical) and the left top corner of 鼠 now make up the first "character" of Kircher's caption; the right half of 松 (i.e., 公, which was already written by Boym rather clumsily) and the right top corner of 鼠 are making the last "character" of Kircher's caption; and the remaining part of 鼠 is its middle character. Above the pseudo-Chinese text a strange inscription in Latin characters says: Feki. This word does not occur in the text of the book itself (nor, needless to say, in Boym), and I am at a complete loss as to where the artist got it from. Most likely, from the thin air... although, possibly, the artist read an anagram of these letters into the Chinese character 鼠.

Boym's winged turtles made an appearance in Kircher's book as well, but that's a story for another day.

Martini's white cats of Peking

Michael Boym was not the only Jesuit visit Europe from China in the 1650s. Another person whose reports made a sensation throughout Europe's literati at the time was Martino Martini. Originally from Trent (now in northern Italy), Martini was overtaken by the advance of the Manchus while in east-central China, and was able to switch his loyalty to the country's new masters smoothly enough. He was sent to Europe by the China-based Jesuit organization to advocate the mission's policy of "accommodation" to the Chinese realities (controversial with some Catholic circles in Europe).

During his European trip, Martini published Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655), which besides maps, contained a fairly detailed description of each of China's provinces. In the section on the Peking Province, also known as Northern Zhili (which included Beijing, Tianjin and what's today the Hebei Province), Martini talks about white, long-haired and long-eared cats found there (p. 22):

Feles in deliciis
Feles in hac Provincia sunt omnino albæ, longioribus pilis protensisque auriculis, qui canum Melitensium habentur loco, matronarumque sunt deliciæ : at mures minime capiunt, forte quia delicate nimis à dominis suis enutritæ, haud tamen desunt etiam aliæ murium egregiæ venatrices, licet minus laute habitæ, eoque forte meliores.

Martini's Atlas became the authortiative source on China's geography for the next 80 years, and his descriptions were often copied wholesale by other authors. A compilation "Englished" in 1673 by John Ogilby^[1] has two passages based on Martini's white cats story. On page 98, in the description of the Northern Zhili (Province of Peking that's inserted into the Johannes Nieuhoff's report, he has:

In this Province are white rough cats, not unlike the Malteeza Dogs, with long Ears, which are there the Ladies Fosting-hounds or Play-fellows; they will catch no Mice, being too much made of: There are other Cats that are good Mousers, but they are very scarce, and had in great esteem.

And then in Chapter XVI, "Of Animals"; page 233:

In the province of Peking there are some Cats with very long hair, as white as Milk, and having long Ears like a Spaniel: the Gentlewomen keep them for their Pleasure; for they will not hunt after, or catch Mice, the reason perhaps being for that they are too high fed: Yes they have store of other Cats which are good Mousers.

Martini's long-eared cats, now compared to a spaniel, kept living in European literature about China. In 1736-37, his Atlas was to a large extent superseded by the multi-volume Description de l'Empire de la Chine, compiled in Paris by the Jesuit du Halde. While the work was primarily based on teh reports on over a dozen French Jesuits who had worked in China over the several preceding decades, the overall framework, and quite a bit of the content had come from Martini. And sure enough, in the "Pe Tche Li" (i.e., Northern Zhili) section of Volume 1 of du Halde's work, page 134, we find a nearly verbatim copy of Martini's report. The only things that's lost are the mention of the cats' white color, and their disinclination to catch mice:

Parmi les animaux de toute espèce, on y trouve des chats singuliers, que les Dames Chinoises recherchent fort, pour leur servir d'amusement, & qu'elles nourissent avec beaucoup de délicatesie : ils ont le poil long, & les oreilles pendantes.

Around du Halde's time, the ability of Europeans to do on-the-ground research in China became severely curtailed, due to deteriorating relations between the Catholic church and the Chinese authorities. No wonder that du Halde's book remained the standard reference for the next century. The China chapters in ''A new general collection of voyages and travels'' (compiled by John Green. London : T. Astley, 1745-47), were pretty much an abbreviated ranslation of du Halde's, and the section on "Pe-che-li, Cheli, or Li-pa fû, the first province" (page 6), stated:

Among the animals, there is a particular Sort of Cats, with long Hair, and hanging Ears, which the Chinese Ladies are very fond of.

John Green's compilation was back-translated into French by abbé Prevôt (a.k.a. Prévost d'Exiles). In Vol. IV, ''Geographie de la Chine'', of Prevôt's ''Histoire générale des voyages'', we read (Paris, 1748), the chapter on "Province de Pe Che-li, autrement Che-li ou Li-pa-fu" (page 10):

Entre les animaux, on vante une espece singuliere de chats à long poil, avec des oreilles pendantes, que les Dames Chinoises aiment beaucoup.

Buffon and his work of synthesis

It was, however, the great French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon) who brought the ''sumxu'' and the long-eared cat from the realm of general geography and into that of "natural science". He noticed that cats have a lot fewer distinct breeds than dogs, and thought that only Spain, Syria and Khorasan (i.e., Persia) have developed truly distinct cat breeds; the purported long-haired lop-eared cat of Northern Zhili could perhaps be the fourth:

Ils sont en effet d’une nature beaucoup plus constante, et comme leur domesticité n’est ni aussi entière, ni aussi universelle, ni peut-être aussi ancienne que celle du chien, il n’est pas surprenant qu’ils aient moins varié. Nos chats domestiques, quoique différens les uns des autres par les couleurs, ne forment point de races distinctes et séparées ; les seuls climats d’Espagne et de Syrie, ou du Chorazan, ont produit des variétés constantes et qui se sont perpétuées : on pourroit encore y joindre le climat de la province de Pe-chi-ly à la Chine, où il y a des chats à longs poils avec les oreilles pendantes, que les dames Chinoises aiment beaucoup.(Histoire Naturelle, vol. 6, p. 14, or p. 670 in this later edition)

Buffon (1777) gave as his source the work of abbé Prevôt, which, as we know, was the French back-translation of John Green's digest of du Halde's Description... whose cat reference, in its turn, goes back to Martini (1655)!

Buffon was good at building general theories of... of everything. He observed that in the process of the development of the domestic dog breeds, wolves' stiff standing ears often evolved into softer, hanging ears, and surmised that this applied to cats as well. He though that the wild cats have "stiffer" ears than the domestic ones, and of course it was only so natural that in a country of ancient civilization and "mild climate" such as China cats would have a chance to develop hanging ears (sort of like the Pekingese dog):

Les chats domestiques n’ont pas les oreilles si roides que les chats sauvages, l’on voit qu’à la Chine, qui est un empire très-anciennement policé et où le climat est fort doux, il y a des chats domestiques à oreilles pendantes. (''Histoire Naturelle'', vol. 6, p. 17)

Buffon's Histoire Naturelle was meant to be all-encompassing; so we should not be too surprised that on p. xxxv the subject index (Table des matières) of Volume IX (supplément à l'Histoire des Animaux quadrupedes; 1777), between les SOURIS blanches aux yeux rouges (white mice with red eyes) and SURIKATE (meerkat), we find our old acquaintance, le SUMXU, not heard of since the days of Kircher more than a century before:

SUMXU (le) - eft un joli animal domestique à la Chine, qu'on ne peut mieux comparer qu'au chat. Notice à ce sujet. Volume VIII, 186.

And in the supplement to his chapter on Cats (Buffon 1777 - Vol. VIII, pp. 186-187; also seen here) Buffon performs his tour de force of synthesis, suggesting that perhaps the by-now-famous "lop-eared cat of China" is a different species from the regular domestic cat - and could not it be that mysterious ''sumxu''?

Nous avons dit (volume VI, page 14) qu’il y avoit à la Chine des chats à oreilles pendantes ; cette variété ne se trouve nulle part ailleurs, et fait peut-être une espèce différente de celle du chat, car les Voyageurs parlant d’un animal appelé Sumxu, qui est tout-à-fait domestique à la Chine, disent qu’on ne peut mieux le comparer qu’au chat avec lequel il a beaucoup de rapport. Sa couleur est noire ou jaune, et son poil extrêmement luisant. Les Chinois mettent à ces animaux des colliers d’argent au cou, et les rendent extrêmement familiers. Comme ils ne sont pas communs, on les achette fort cher, tant à cause de leur beauté, que parce qu’ils font aux rats la plus cruelle guerrea.

In retrospect, we understand that there was no particularly good reason to associate Boym's sumxu and Martini's long-eared cat. In fact, just the opposite:

• Sumxu was black-and-yellow, while for Martini one of the special features of those peculiar cats of Peking was their all-white fur. (As we have seen, the whiteness was one of the elements of Martini's report that was lost by the time of its being related by du Halde).
• Boym's picture of sumxu seems to completely ignore the creature's ears, while the long ears were a distinct feature of Martini's cat of Peking.
• Sumxu was valued as a good mice-hunter, while Martini specifically describes the long-eared cats asnot interested in mice. (Again, this point was omitted by du Halde).
• Boym did not compare the sumxu to cats (and, in fact, his picture looks a lot more like a squirrel than a cat!); it was Kircher who did, probably long after Boym left for China again.
• Boym's ''Flora Sinensis'' was primarily based on his observations in South China (note the abundance of tropical plants and animals there), while Martini specifically describes his white long-eared cats as a specialty of the Peking Province (a.k.a Northern Zhili), in the north of China.

While Buffon just suggested a connection between the sumxu and the lop-eared cat of Peking, some of the later authors who drew on his work described that connection as a certain fact. Thus, one Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest in his Mammalogie ou description des espèces de mammifères (Volume 1, p. 233) simply combined sumxu's name and color with the supposed Peking's cat location, hair texture, and "hanging ears". His list of the cat varieties of the world thus included, under no. 2:

... le chat d'oreilles pendantes, à poil fin and long, noir ou jaune, en domesticité à la Chine, dans la province de Pe-chi-ly, sous le nom de sumxu.

Accepted fact

"Cat Handlers and Tea Dealers of Tong-Chou", from China, The Scenery, Architecture, and Social Habits of That Ancient Empire (1843), based on sketches by William Alexander, who visited China in 1793. Although the scene is on the outskirts of Beijing, there is not a lop-eared cat in sight.

Blessed by Buffon's authority, the supposed existence of the lop-eared cat of Peking (its whiteness having been already forgotten) became an "accepted fact" for the authors of the 19th century biology books, from Brehm to Darwin, and especially those of cat books. From a specialty of the Peking province, the supposedly existence creature would often be transformed into simply "the cat of China". Sarah Hartwell cites a number of typical passages in her article; I will quote here just one, Le chat: histoire naturelle, hygiène, maladies by Gaston Percheron (1885). The author suggests that perhaps the lop-eared cat is a hybrid of a cat and a marten (pp. 127-128):

Certains naturalistes dignes de foi prétendent même qu'il [le chat domestique] s'accouple avec la fouine et qu'il produit alors des rejectons rappelant assez bien le dernier type par la couleur de pelade. C'est ainsi qu'ils expliquent chez le chat de Chine ces oreilles tombantes qui jurent si fort avec les formes traditionnelles de l'espèce.

As in Martini and du Halde, the "cat of China" is still fed on choice morsels. But instead of merely being the pet of its doting mistress (as in these early works), the silky-furred and lop-eared ("like a badger") cat has been transformed, by Percheron's pen, into a delicacy itself, akin to swallow nests (p. 130):

Le Chat de Chine. Il a le poil long et soyeux et les oreilles pendantes, comme celles du blaireau.

Sa chair est très estimée par les habitants du Céleste Empire. De même que le chien, il est de la part de certains nourrisseurs et engraisseurs de ce pays l'objet d'une sollicitude toute particulière. Et, quand il est bien en chair, il figure à côté des nids d'hirondelles sur les tables bien servies.

Reality check

After the Opium Wars, China became "opened" to foreign missionaries, entrepreneurs, and researchers. Quite a few of them undertook a search for the mysterious lop-eared cat. But, as the famous biologist and Catholic priest Armand David concluded in his report on China's wild and domestic felines (Les Missions Catholiques, Vol. 21; p. 227) (1889), there was none to be found:

Jamais nous n'avons rencontré la race à oreilles tombantes dont on a parlé beaucoup, il y a quelque temps.

Conclusions

At least my fur is white and silky!

There is only one mystery in the story of the sumxu and that of a "long-eared cat" - that of their origin.

Was Boym told a tall tale about mice-hunting squirrels? Did he mistakenly attach the name of a squirrel (songshu) to actually existing tamed martens (or similar animals)? (Misunderstandings like this did occasionally happen; see the note on his "winged turtles", to appear.) Was the word songshu (normally meaning "squirrel") actually applied to marten-like small predators in some remote region that he visited while evading the Manchu invaders?

What did Martini mean by his feles ... protensisque auriculis? He certainly could see white and silky-haired cats in Beijing wealthy homes, and of course there were Pekingese dogs with their hanging ears. Not that I claim that he took a Pekingese for a cat, but he wrote the text for his Atlas during a long, long grueling trip from China to the Netherlands by the way of Java and Norway... There was always space for a slip of the pen.

What I think we do know for sure is that Martini's story, and to a lesser extent Boym's, were copied (and sometimes merged) by dozens of authors for over two centuries, without anyone being in a position to verify them. Which probably is not all that unusual.

Notes

1 Nieuhof, Johannes, 1618-1672 / An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham, emperor of China: delivered by their excellencies Peter de Goyer and Jacob de Keyzer, at his imperial city of Peking wherein the cities, towns, villages, ports, rivers, &c. in their passages from Canton to Peking are ingeniously described by John Nieuhoff; also an epistle of Father John Adams, their antagonist, concerning the whole negotiation; with an appendix of several remarks taken out of Father Athanasius Kircher; Englished and set forth with their several sculptures by John Ogilby (1673)

News from Hanoi

In the words of the Time Magazine's headline writer, "Hanoi's Reclusive Lake Turtle Forced Out of Its Shell." Not an entirely felicitous metaphor, I'd say! (As to the content of the article, it sounds to me a bit as if I had just heard that Santa Claus had been sent to an old folks' home in Osoyoos.)

Looking at Fidelity's "Ultra-Short" portfolio

It's been many years since I've looked inside a prospectus or an annual report of a US mutual fund. Indeed, what is there to look for? The fund name and its classification on a site like Morningstar.com gives you an idea of what it is supposed to invest into, and if you are curious what it actually is investing in, you can just see the top holdings on Morningstar. So why bother with the prospectuses? A few days ago I was reviewing with a friend the list of mutual funds her 401(k) provider, Fidelity, was offering. "Well, stock funds invest into stocks, bond funds invest into bonds... With a long bond fund you'll get a higher current yield, but a risk of a greater capital loss when the interest rates go up; with a medium, or short bond fund, the current yield and the risk of a capital loss are both smaller. Oh look, they offer an Ultra-Short Bond Fund - that ought to be just like a money market fund, similarly low yields, but practically no potential for capital loss. Let's see what their record is actually like..." Well, it turned that Fidelity Ultra-Short Bond Fund (FUSFX) has had quite a remarkable record: while bringing positive returns comparable to the (low) short-term interest rates most of the time, it managed to lose about 15% of its net asset value during the period of about 2 years in 2007-2008. How do "normal" bond funds - that is, fund that invest into bonds (corporate or government debt obligations, or repackaged mortgages) lose money over a particular period of time? Well, there could be several possible reasons for a loss: * Bond issuers defaulted on some bonds * The perceived risk of default on some bonds increased, and the market value of the said bonds correspondingly dropped, even if no actual default happened * Current interest rates rose, so the market value of longer-term bonds correspondingly fell The first situation, of course, signifies a permanent loss, The second and the third situations are, in a sense, a "recoverable" loss: if you hold a bond to maturity, you still will get your principal back, plus the interest, so a fund that does not need to sell its holdings well eventually get its NAV back to the pre-drop position. So with a truly short-term bond fund such problems normally should not be an issue. So what ever happened to FUSFX during the financial crisis and market meltdown in 2007-2008 - did some 15% of the bonds in their portfolio default? That would be a remarkable thing indeed. The fund's current prospectus (2011-02-11) and annual report (2010-07-31) do not contain much of anything that would allude to the circumstances of the events of 2007-2008. "The fund seeks to obtain a high level of current income consistent with preservation of capital"... "investing at least 80% of assets in investment-grade debt securities"... "similar overall interest rate risk to the Barclays Capital 6 Month Swap Index".... "dollar-weighted average maturity of two years or less." There is this, "Engaging in transactions that have a leveraging effect on the fund, including derivatives", which of course can leverage the fund either way... and yeah, "Derivatives include ... credit default swaps (buying or selling credit default protection)." But the list of fund's holdings in its current annual report contains no such instruments - just a boring list of government and corporate bonds and mortgage securities. It took some effort to locate the fund's old annual reports or investment holdings lists at EDGAR, but when I found one (holdings as of October 31, 2007 ), it made for a surprising reading. After a long list of debt obligations, an inconspicuous section followed, called "Swap Agreements", and full of "Credit Default Swaps". What kind of animal is that? Well, here's one of the many items of this kind that the fund's portfolio contained at the time: * Receive monthly notional amount multiplied by 3.86% and pay Morgan Stanley, Inc. upon credit event of Merrill Lynch Mortgage Investors Trust, Inc., par value of the notional amount of Merrill Lynch Mortgage Investors Trust, Inc. Series 2006 HE5, Class B3, 7.32% 8/25/37 * Expiration date: Sept. 2037 * Notional amount: $600,000 * Value: $(504,664) (that's negative half a million dollars). This is, how I understand it, this works. Morgan Stanley bought a fairly high-interest (7.32%) and long-term (matures in 2037) mortgage-based bond from Merrill Lynch. Being clever enough, they understood that something may happens over the next 30 years, so they went to Fidelity and bought an insurance against the default of that bond. That is, Morgan Stanley would give up part of the interest payments they received on the bond (I suppose they really meant 3.86% per year - that is, over half of the entire interest - rather than per month, since the latter would just make no sense, even in the depth of the credit crunch), and Fidelity (actually, this particular Fidelity mutual fund) would reimburse Morgan Stanley for any losses incurred if Merrill Lynch (or, actually, the underlying mortgages) were to default. Apparently a default, or near default did happen, since the value of the contract with the notional value of $600K is shown to be a negative $504K. Now, half a million dollar loss is almost nothing for a billion-dollar fund, but the fund had quite a few contracts like this, as well as some interest-play instruments (total return swaps), with the "nominal" of $8M and the total value, as of that moment, of minus five million dollars. This, apparently, was already after some of that portfolio had been liquidated: an earlier (Oct 31, 2006) report shows quite a bit more of those, with the total nominal of $18M of credit default swaps and $9M of total return swaps, and a slightly positive total value. Besides playing an insurance company and insuring other companies against the default of third parties, FUSFX owned a good load of such bonds outright. About 30% of their assets at that moment was in "Asset-Backed Securities", some of which apparently, were in the dire need of insurance themselves: e.g., quite a few obligations from the "Accredited Mortgage Loan Trust" or "ACE Securities Corp. Home Equity Loan Trust" were shown as valued at 10-30% below the face value, and a few had lost over 2/3 of their value. So basically here we have it: a mutual fund with a mandate for preservation of capital gorges on some subprime mortgages with 30+ year maturity, and as if that's not enough, insures other companies against the default of similar instruments that they have. The net result, the "ultra-short bond" fund loses about 15% in a two-year period, while Fidelity's regular bond funds (including the GNMA one) are doing reasonably alright over the same time frame. No wonder that soon after the 2007-2008 debacle Fidelity ended up changing the fund's manager. A lesson for consumers? Sometimes it may pay to look into you fund's recent annual report, and to understand what exactly the things in their portfolio are.

Phags-pa inscriptions in Qufu

Four Yuan Dynasty steles in Qufu's Temple of Confucius and Temple of Yan Hui with inscriptions in 'Phags-pa script. (Presumably in Mongolian, but I have no idea). Three of these tables were carried by some of these temples' twenty-five stone turtles,, and one was without such a pedestal. Click on any image for details and other views.

Top of a stele in one of the stele pavilions of Kong Miao. The Dade era (1297-1307)

Another Phags-pa stele in the same pavilion. Year 11 of the Dade era (1307)

Imperial edict about the protected status of the Yan Miao. Year 11 of the Dade era (AD 1307). Note a square (left top) what appears to be Phags-ps seal script. (This stele has no turtle, though))

Base of a stele with an imperial edict bestowing new titles on Yan Hui, in the Yan Miao. Year 2 of the Zhishun era (AD 1331)

Confucius' twenty-five turtles

If you are an Emperor of China, and need to demonstrate the strength of your commitment to the Confucian principles, how would you go about it? You can of course renovate or rebuild the Temple of Confucius, or that of his favorite disciple, Yan Hui (they do seem to catch fire pretty often). You can bestow a new honorary title on the great sage or his disciple. But whatever you do, you have to conclude by writing it up in stone, and putting the tablet on top of a stone tortoise (bixi). After all, did not Confucius say, "Place the tortoise in front of all the other offerings, because of its knowledge of the future"? ("龜為前列，先知也"; Li Ji, Li Qi 32) This gallery features the twenty-five imperial turtles, with tablets in Chinese, Mongol, and Manchu, that still stand in Qufu's Temples of Confucius and Yan Hui. Contributed by 16 emperors, these stone reptiles span nine centuries and five dynasties, and represent all styles of the bixi art, from the naturalistic tortoises of the early Song to the dragon-headed bixi of the mid-Qing. See also 'Phags-pa inscriptions in Qufu

In the Yellow Emperor's hometown

This January, I spent a few days in Qufu, Shandong. The city is mostly known as the hometown of Confucius, and the guidebooks, accordingly, spend plenty of space discussing the ''San Kong'' (Three Confucian [Sites]): the Confucius Temple, the Confucius Mansion, and the Confucius Cemetery. Qufu, however, is not only Confucius' hometown: the guidebook also had a few lines about something called Shou Qiu (寿丘, "Longevity Hill"), said to the birthplace of the Yellow Emperor, the legendary founder of the Chinese nation, and the adjacent tomb of his son Shaohao (少昊陵, Shaohao Ling). Not a lot of details though. I had a spare morning, so I decided to go an see what it's all about. The place is in Jiuxian village, on the east side of Qufu - about 4 km from the historical center (the old walled city, where the Confucius Temple and Mansion are). So if that's where you're staying, you can take a city bus (I think no. 2) to get to Jiuxian. That January morning I was walking though, as I wanted to see a bit more of the city outside of the center. Following the highway sign, I came to where Shaohao Tomb and Shou Qiu were supposed to be... but all you could see from the outside were a brick wall and a closed gate with a "beware of the dog" sign. But no, that wasn't all: you could also see the tops of two giant dragon-crowned steles rising high above the wall: That certainly was intriguing enough, so I went on a walk around Jiuxian, looking for something that was open. Nothing much was, though, at this early hour - they did not even seem to have a noodle shop or a mantou stall. A house in the main street was decorated with the text of some provincial regulations dealing with family planning - and I don't mean it was just a slogan or a summary painted on the wall (as I'd see all over the place in rural China): it was actually done in tilework, with an eye toward permanence: (Here's a close-up). Walking out of the village to the fields north of it, and then coming back toward where the giant steles had been seen, I saw the gates of another compound, now indeed labeled "Shaohao Tomb" (少昊陵, Shaohao Ling). Sure enough, there was a ticket booth, and the entry fee was a rather outrageous Y50 (about US$8 - more than a daily wage for an average blue-collar worker or a service sector worker in the area). I was the day's first visitor, and, considering the frosty weather, I would not be surprised if I turned out that day's only visitor. As the guidebook says, the Shaohao Tomb site indeed has a small pyramid (probably, just an earth structure faced with stones), and an earth tumulus next to it. I suppose the stone pyramid design is indeed unusual for China, but that's of course no Cheops Pyramid. This all of course was said to be a Song Dynasty site (ca. AD 1000-1100) - but, really, with a backhoe, a supply of stone blocks and a few hired hands I probably could build such a pyramid myself within a reasonable time frame. There was a small temple on site, and some no doubt ancient steles - some whole, some broken, but nothing that exciting for a comparatively casual visitor such as myself. And yes, there was a cage with a guard dog in a corner: Somewhat disappointed, out the Shaohao Tomb's gate I went... and saw the top of the big stelae still on the horizon, above the trees. The path went south for about 500 meters, through a small forest. The forest is said to have grown over the site where the Jingling Palace (Jingling Gong) - a temple for venerating the Yellow Emperor - is said to have stood during the Song days... so the giant steles must have been originally put in front of the temple. (The ancient Chinese tradition is for temples etc. to be facing south, so "south of something" means "in front of something"). Soon enough, the path did come to the northern gate of the same fenced site that I saw the first thing upon arrival in Jiuxian a couple hours before. So that was the Shou Qiu. Both gates were open now. My ticket said that it also covered Shou Qiu along with the Shaohao Tomb. However, it seems that, in winter at least, no ticket is actually required to enter Shou Qiu, so if you're visiting, you may just as well skip Shaohao and buying tickets, and just go to the more interesting Shou Qiu. Now, within the fence, I saw Shou Qiu in all its glory. There weren't all that many objects there - just two, really - but the size of them certainly warranted attention. The two giant steles, over 16 meters (50+ feet) tall, crowned with dragons playing with a pearl, rested on top of similarly giant stone turtles, over 6 m (20 feet long). I've checked on a few books later on, and, supposedly, the twenty-footer turtles and the steles were originally erected during the Xuanhe Era (1119-1125) of the Huizong Emperor, arguably the most famous emperor of the Northern Song Dynasty. A tragic figure, early in his reign Huizong saw the rise of the Jurchen barbarians of the far north, and probably welcomed them as a force potentially useful against the other barbarians, the Kidan, whose Liao Empire had been the Song's rival for two centuries. Alas, having destroyed the Liao, Jurchen did not stop for too long before destroying the Song as well, and Huizong ended his days in captivity somewhere not too far from today's Harbin. The book claims that Huizong had four steles (all on twenty-footer turtles? the book is silent about it) erected in front of the Jingling Palace, but, apparently, they did not keep standing for too long after the Jurchen conquest. (However, one of the steles does have text - two letters 庆寿, "Celebrate Longevity" - written over a century later, under the Yuan Dynasty. The other is still blank, is known as ''Wan Ren Chou Bei'' (万人愁碑, "The Sorrow of Ten Thousand People"), on account of its weight (over 300 tons) and the effort involved in its carving and transporting. I have no idea what happened to the other two steles, but the two we see today were put together, from many pieces, and re-erected in 1991 and 1992. The tortoises, at least their faces, seem to be in remarkably good condition, so I wonder to which extent they are the actual restored Huizong turtles, and to which extent they are modern work; but in any effect, the entire ensemble is impressive, and is certainly worth visiting if you are in Qufu.

P.S. Not that getting to Qufu was difficult before, but with the opening of the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway in July 2011, on which Qufu has a station, you can get there in style. Now the Yellow Emperor's pyramid and giant turtles are within 3 hours' train ride from any of Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, or Qingdao.

We've built it, now we must make them come

I suspect that quite a few Chinese rail passengers have received the recent news of the firing of the railway minister with some glee. While the last few years' projects to connect most of the country's major cities with a high-speed rail network are very impressive, they have at least one downside: it is often reported that with the introduction of the new high-speed service, "regular" services on a parallel "regular" are greatly reduced, and passengers in effect are forced to take more expensive high-speed trains. From what I have seen, this certainly is the case with the new Shanghai–Nanjing Intercity High-Speed Railway, commonly known as Huning Gaotie. The new fast line, opened in 2010, parallels the existing "conventional" Shanghai-Nanjing railway, and soon will be paralleled by the even faster Beijing–Shanghai High-Speed Railway. It seems that with the opening of the Huning Gaotie, it became practically impossible to travel in the Shanghai-Nanjing corridor on any of the less expensive "older" services: either the regular K/T/no-letter trains, or the fast D trains (which themselves were introduced only a few years ago). It appears that hardly any D trains from Shanghai terminate in Nanjing anymore; and even though D trains running from Shanghai via Nanjing to points beyond (such as Hefei or Wuhan or Beijing) may often have some spare capacity on the Shanghai-to-Nanjing sections, ticket office won't sell such tickets, and will tell customers to buy a ticket on a (more expensive) G train running on the new line. Same goes for K etc. trains. The difference between the Y146 Shanghai-Nanjing ticket for a G train, and a Y80-90 D train ticket, or a Y50 K-train ticket may be trivial to an upper-middle class professional or a foreign tourist. But for someone who earns Y1000-1500 a month (seems to be a typical wage level e.g. in the service sector) it may mean the difference between being able to afford to visit one's family every weekend or only once a month. Of course, G trains are about 1.5 times as fast as the D train, and 3-4 times as fast as "regular" trains; for the entire Shanghai-Beijing trip, this is 1 h 15 m to 2 h vs. 2-3 hours vs. 4-6 hours. However, for traveling shorter distance (say, Nanjing to Zhenjiang) the time saving is fairly trivial, compared to the overall time cost of buying the ticket, navigating the (huge) train stations, and waiting for the train.

Papers, please!

An interesting report in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan 9, 2011). In the US, anywhere within 100 miles from the international border or the seacoast is considered "border area", and the Border Patrol is allowed to check citizenship / immigration status of any persons there. (In practice, I assume, they don't go after "any person" - since perhaps a quarter of the US population lives within 100 miles from a border or a seacoast - but try to identify suspicious persons based based on their appearance, speech, and behavior). Traditionally, the area along the Mexican border was their main stomping ground; but now sufficient funds and manpower have been allocated for the Border Patrol detachments along the Canadian border as well - including in places like Rochester, NY, which doesn't even have an actual land border with Canada. Not having actual illegal border crossers in the area makes the Border Patrol look for immigration violators wherever they potentially can be found - e.g., aboard Chicago-New York trains that happen to cross Upstate New York, and on the local road. An upshot from this over-abundance of funding is that foreign students and staff members in US universities located within 100 miles from the Canadian border found their papers checked frequently - and they don't mean just one's student ID or a local driver's license, but the full stack of paper establishing one's legal status in the US at the moment: the passport, the I-94, the I-20, and any additional paperwork that may have been added as one's situation changed. The originals, not copies! From the practical point of view, this is of course a hassle and somewhat of a risk. Losing one's passport and associated paperwork while in a foreign country is an expensive proposition: Australia, for example, would charge $326 to replace a lost/stolen passport, while the USCIS will charge another $330 to replace a lost I-94 (a little slip of paper that goes inside one's passport). So no wonder most people would rather keep things like this in a safe deposit box. According to the article, the least pleasant effect of the checks is on people whose current immigration status in the US, while perfectly legal, is not that easy to determine (at least, for an average Border Patrol agent) from the paperwork they possess: namely, those who have applied for an "adjustment of status"(e.g., from an authorized foreign student or foreign worker to permanent residence). Some get detained and locked up for hours or days, even though the totality of the documents that they have in their possession is sufficient to proof their current legal status.

Going to school with the turtles

There is an elementary school in Nanjing's industrail suburb of Ganjiaxiang ("Gan Family's Lane"). Quite an ordinary elementary school, with a metal accordion gate and a sign asking parents not to accompany their children to school, as the kids can do fine on their own. But once the kids enter the grounds, they find themselves walking on a path lined up with stone figures: tortoises carrying tablets on their back, columns with fantastic creatures curling around their bases, and bixie (winged lions). These are 1500 years old, and were erected during the Liang Dynasty, in memory of Xiao Xiu, an otherwise fairly obscure member of the Liang royal family. (The bixie can't be seen in the video, as the school was closed for the Chinese New Year holidays). A hundred years ago, French poet and archaeologist Victor Segalen visited the site and felt that he's communing with the eternity. Why couldn't my elementary school be like this? More photos here.
(As usual, all photos are clickable)

Wuhan's seedy side

An array of seed shops in Zhongshan Lu

It is common for Chinese cities to have shops specializing in a particular type of products to concentrate in a particular small area of the city. There is a street in Yangzhou full of cell phone shops, blocks in Guangzhou where every shop cells electronic components, and of course there are garment districts. But in Wuhan's central Zhongshan St, just a block north of the gigantic Wuchang Railway Station, there is something that may surprise many an urbanite: an entire block of shops - several dozens of them - selling vegetable seeds. With the train station nearby, and a bus station across the street, the place apparently is convenient enough for customers arriving from rural areas.

Beans etc. sold in bulk

Inside a seed shop in Nanjing

A surprisingly large array of seeds are sold in small packets: on the outside, not much bigger than those familiar to North American or Australian backyard gardeners, but loaded rather more generously. (Something like 10 grams of seeds, while an American retailer these days would often sell seeds in milligrams!) Many packets sport mysterious names of innumerable Chinese greens and beans that are often seen in China's farmers markets and restaurants, but rarely elsewhere. Other packets, although full of text, don't even seem to name the vegetable in question - apparently, the seed companies feel that the picture is enough. Many such small packets are priced at just Y1-3 (US$0.15-0.50), although some varieties cost quite a bit more. Some seeds, especially larger ones (such as corn), appear in progressively bigger packets, up to 1 kg in weight; watermelon seeds appear in cute little cans. Others (beans etc) are sold in bulk, some by weight, some by count. For example, the huge dao dou 刀豆 beans, a.k.a. jackbeans, went four for Y1 in one of the shops; that would be about 25 beans for $1.

I would be curious to know to which extent Chinese farmers rely on shops like this to get their seed supply every year (after all, some are hybrid varieties, and the packages often say that you can't save seeds), and to which extent they would just come to a shop like this just one to buy some new variety, intending to save the seeds in future years. In any event, the trade appears brisk enough, both in August and in February.

Some vegetables however, can't be started with material from a seed shop: you apparently need to be a farmer who knows another farmer... Luhao (芦蒿), a prized specialty of the lower Yangtze area (tastes a bit like asparagus to me) is said to propagate only by root material, rather than by seeds. Although shanyao (山药; something that looks like a remarkably long and rather expensive radish, and tastes to me rather like a potato) is propagated by seeds, its seeds are said not to be commonly available commercially either.

Wuhan, of course, is not unique. Other cities have such seed shop blocks too: Nanjing's is in the market at Dong Fang Cheng 60 (less than a kilometer east of the Eastern Bus Station), and reportedly Hong Kong has an area like this as well, in Sheung Wan Connaught Road West. While places like this are interesting to visit for their educational value, if you actually intend to take some seeds outside China, it is advisable to become aware of your country's applicable quarantine laws and regulation.

Happy New Year!

A white rabbit - the best gift for the New Year of the Rabbit!

Chinese New Year - just like Christmas, but with a rabbit instead of Jesus.Maybe it's better this way...

Around the Chinese New Year, Yangzhou's street vendors roll out the traditional Yangzhou New Year selection: strawberries, radishes (green outside, red inside), and water chestnuts. Apparently, there is a large district of strawberry hothouse just east of the city.

Days of frenetic shopping activity before the holidays, although I guess what's mostly bought are various ornaments to "deck the halls" and delicacies for the New Year table, rather than gifts.

As the families sit down for the festive meal in the early evening on the New Year eve, the sound of firecrackers outside makes you feel that the city is under artillery bombardment by enemy forces. By the midnight, everyone blows up their firecrackers and fireworks all at once, waking up an occasional sleeping foreigner, and all car alarms in town go off.

At 9:30 am the next morning, I find the hotel door locked. Fortunately, the back door is open.

Xin nian hao!

Yangzhou's pyramid

Who shall doubt "the secret hid
Under Cheops' pyramid"
Was that the contractor did
Cheops out of several millions?
           Rudyard Kipling, "A general summary"

Keep that A/C off

A conversation in a cell phone service office in Wuhan, Hubei:

"How do you like Wuhan?"

"Oh, it's nice here, but a bit cold".

"Yeah, in Beijing they have heating ( 暖气, *nuanqi*), but here we don't".

It is mid-January, it's around -5 C (20F) outside, and hardly much
more than +5C (40F) in the office. Everyone involved wears a winter
coat, and some (at least me) a winter hat too.

And indeed, unlike northern China (such as Beijing), indoor heating of
any kind is viewed as merely an *option* (a somewhat extravagant one,
at that) in the cities of China's Yangtze valley, such as Wuhan and
Nanjing. The region is at roughly 30 degrees latitude - the latitude
of Los Angeles or Morocco - but the climate is a lot more continental.
It is very hot in the summer (these two cities, along with Chongqing,
are known as China's "three furnaces"), but the winter is decidedly
"wintery" - it feels about as cold as in Southern Indiana or in some
parts of British Columbia. I am not sure what the traditional way of
heating the living space in winter in this region was - maybe burning
coal brickets in small stoves, or something like that - but these
days, the only available option in most modern buildings here would be
turning on their air conditioners in the "heating" mode. This, as I
understand, is considered a rather extravagant thing to do, at least
by the older generations, often even in fairly fancy offices or
apartments. And of course even when the A/C heating is on, it's not
very effective: it gives you a stream of dry hot air blowing through
the room, the rest of the place still being pretty cold.

I am not familiar with the local electricity prices, but budget hotels
here sometimes offer the use of A/C (for heating in winter) as an
option, for Y10-20 per day per room - something that would amount to
Y300-600 (US$50-100) a month.

From the environmental point of view, I suppose we all should be
grateful to the people of Jiangnan for not turning their heating on,
as the extra electric energy needed for that would come from burning
coal - and it probably would take more coal to heat the homes in the
region from Chengdu to Shanghai than any European country uses....

The use of a library card...

Internet cafes in many parts of China normally ask customers for an ID of some kind (this seems to be controlled by provincial laws, and the strictness of the law's enforcement at a particular place). I have never figured out which places would require one and which would not (although places in bigger cities seemed to be stricter in this respect). I assume that most customers would present standard national ID card, and from a foreigner, a passport and visa would be expected. In practice, though, a foreign provincial ID card would usually do. I used to carry a very nice library card from an Italian library, complete with my photo, and it was accepted as an ID as well. (A pity it was lost a while back by Air China, along with all my luggage!).

This time, in Qufu, Shandong Province, the fellow on duty decided that neither a foreign ID card, nor a passport with a current Chinese visa would do. After rummaging in my wallet, I decided to make yet another try with yet another document: a reader's card from the National Library in Beijing. (Not that I ever *read* anything there, but you needed to get a card to get on premises, and getting it was free...). No name or photo on the card, but it was officially looking enough... and bingo, it was accepted!

P.S. As I've looked at more of such places (in Jiangsu mostly), it seemed that the usual mode of operation for them was to swipe a PRC national ID card, which, I assume, all resident citizens are supposed to possess. This way, at least potentially, who uses what becomes automatically loggable (since the login ID given out by the internet cafe may be linked to one's card number). I am not sure what exactly happened when a particular place accepted my passport, a foreign ID card, or even a library card (well, just that once) as an ID; it appeared that in some cases they simply ended up swiping someone else's national ID card on my behalf.

(Poster above: "Present an ID and register with your real name! Civilized behavior on the Internet, and healthy leisure!". Seen in Gansu, 2009).

Wuhan Metro

Wuhan Metro Line 4 under construction

For many years, Wuhan Metro has consisted of one pretty useless line in Hankou. Finally, the city got its act together and started digging all over the place, to connect the 3 far-flung section of that great metropolis: Hankou, Wuchang, and Hanyang. Of course, the subway is being build along the routes which are used by the greatest number of travelers - which means, exactly the routes that are most congested now. The tunnels apparently are being bored without disturbing the street surface (i.e., *not* cut-and-cover), but each station does require digging a huge hole in the middle of one of the busiest streets, such as Luoyu Rd, reducing the space open to traffic to 2 lanes each way. So the congestion on these routes now reaches epic proportions, with traffic coming to crawl by 3pm, even on weekends.

Shanghai Metro - airport to airport

Trying to post by email...

Here's our experience trying the new Pudong-to-Hongqiao subway line (Line 2) in Shanghai.

• 16:00 - landing in Shanghai Pudong (PVG)
• 16:50 - having passed immigration, baggage claims, customs, finding our way to the Metro stop (not much farther than the Maglev), figured the ticket system (my Shanghai Metro fare card from 2008) apparently no longer valid) and the escalators, actually boarded a train
• 18:10 arrived to Hongqiao metro station (this included a cross-platform transfer at an intermediate stop at Guanglan Station)
• 18:25 got to the ticketing machines and purchases a ticket for a 19:00 train to Nanjing. (We probably could have even made the 18:30 train if we had been a bit faster earlier on, and more familiar with the layout)
• 18:35 navigated through the gigantic Hongqiao Station, got to the boarding gate
• 19:00 a G train leaves Shanghai Hongqiao Station

  20:15 - arrival to Nanjing Station. (This was a non-stop G train, probably one of the fastest trains of the day.

  The subway fare was just Y8 - and that's to cross the entire huge metropolitan area, probably over 30 km across.

  The G train to Nanjing, was Y146 (a bit over US $20) - as compared to something like Y70-90 on a D train (which takes 2-2.5 hrs) or Y50-60 on a K ("kuai", "fast") train which may take over 4 hrs

Overall, both the subway and the intercity train line are of course major engineering and public works achievement, as was the Shanghai Maglev. One is left wondering, however, whether the travelling public would have been better off if, instead of building the Maglev and the Huning line (where the new G trains run between Shanghai and Nanjing), Shanghai had instead somehow extended the regular train line from Shanghai (Main) Station to Pudong Airport, with a couple stops near Pudong's dense business and residential areas. That would allow some D trains to run all the way from Nanjing or Hefei to Pudong, making the overall travel time from PVG to places like Suzhou, Wuxi or Nanjing quite a bit shorter than the current arrangement does.

P.S. Traveling back on a Sunday afternoon; subway trains pretty full, but not overcrowded. 1 hour 30 min from boarding the subway train at Hongqiao to arrival at Pudong Airport Station.

Segalen: "J’ai entendu passer et souffler le temps en tempête autour et au front de la Tortue porte-stèle"

Inimitable Victor Segalen's impression of the stone tortoises, carriers of imperial steles of the Liang Dynasty, from his Chine. La grande statuaire:

Voisines des lions et des chimères <...> sont les Tortues porte-stèles. Nobles bêtes, majestueuses, d’une élégante stylisation malgré leur masse imposante : neuf pieds de long, sur un socle qui en atteint près de douze, sous une stèle aussi haute que le socle est long. L’original animé de cette statue est, sans contredit, une tortue d’eau. De là ses ailerons-nageoires, ce cou étendu, souple, cette tête fuselée, mais ceci dit, le sculpteur ayant rendu les parties jadis essentielles à la vie, le reste est purement création plastique. Un ensemble, un conglomérat ordonné de belles surfaces courbes, dérivées de l’ovoïde , bien partagées par le tranchant de la stèle en deux masses, dont celle d’arrière étale bien la carapace. L’enveloppé des surfaces par les arêtes, formant un champlevage plein de souplesse, est excellent. Le décor est ici donné avec un rare bonheur par le rehaut, les rebords de la cuirasse. Rien de plus : un équilibre et un galbe parfaits. Le cou, oblique d’un seul geste, porte une tête petite, non pas monstrueuse, mais biseautée et incrustée de deux grosses olives oculaires. Ces tortues n’offrent qu’un type, et sont plus homogènes entre elles que les quadrupèdes, ménagerie composite des Leang. Celle dont je donne le portrait est une tortue de gauche de la sépulture de Siao Sieou <...>. Par sa date, 518, cette statue et la stèle qu’elle supporte sont, dans leur intégrité, l’exemple type de la statuaire dressée de la Chine d’autrefois. <...> [L]a bête pointe juste par-devant, promontoire, musoir refoulant autour d’elle, bête stable par excellence, l’effroyable écoulement du temps fou, le sifflement des remous, des ondes, des filets de cette eau impalpable, avec des houles invisibles : tout un mécanisme fluide et d’un dynamisme énorme compa rable seulement à une autre énergie inconnue, — ce mascaret que tout être connaissant reçoit en plein sur la face incessamment, — et qui finalement le détruit. C’est en face de ces monuments des âges, en face de ce rocher pensé qu’est une stèle chinoise, de cette œuvre accomplie du pinceau rehaussée de sculptures dans son monument et son socle, que cette image prend son corps, sa véracité. J’ai entendu passer et souffler le temps en tempête autour et au front de la Tortue porte-stèle.

Or, in Eleanor Levieux's translation:

A few paces away from the lions and chimeras <...> are the stele-bearing tortoises. Noble and majestic beasts, elegantly stylized despite their imposing bulk; nine feet long, on a pedestal that measures nearly twelve, beneath a stele as high as the pedestal is long. In life, the original is without doubt the sea turtle. Hence the fins-cum-pinions, the outstretched flexible neck, the streamlined head; but once the sculptor had rendered the features that were once essential to life, the rest was purely a plasric creation. A whole, an orderly conglomerate of beautiful curved surfaces, derived from ovoid shapes and neatly divided, by the stele as by a blade, into two masses; the rearward of the two spreads out the shell. The surfaces are superbly enveloped by the remarkably subtle way in which the sharp edges are cut away. Here is the lifting, the edges of the shell that succeed to a rare degree in forming the decor. Nothing more; nothing but perfect balance and contour. The neck, whose single movement is oblique, supports a small head, which, though not monstrous, is beveled and incrusted with two large olive-shaped protruding eye sockets. There being only one known type of such tortoises, they are more homogeneous than the four-footed composite Liang menagerie. The one whose portrait I show <...> is the left-hand tortoise at the burial place of Hsiao Hsiu <...> The date of this statue and of the stele it supports, A.D> 518, makes them the typical example of the vertical statuary of old China. <...> [T]he animal -- of outstanding stability -- points straight ahead, like a promontory, a blunt prow pushing back everything around it, the frightful flow of mad time, the whistling of the eddies and the trickles and the waves of that impalpable water with its invisible surges: a whole fluid mechanism, so enormously dynamic that is comparable only to another embodiment of unfathomed energy -- to the tidal wave that incessantly strikes every thinking being full in the face and ultimately destroys him. It is only when we contemplate these monuments of the ages, this intelligent rock that constitutes a Chinese stele, this achievement of the brush sculpturally enhanced as to both monument and pedestal that the image takes on its full meaning, its true sense. I heard time pass and stormily roar around the body and head of the stele-bearing tortoise.

Some of Segalen's original photos can be seen here

Modern photos of the statue Segalen wrote about can be found on Wikimedia Commons (mostly by myself), as well as on panoramio.com:

• By Tian Tan
• By Pseudogap (and another turtle from the same ensemble)
• In 許's中國古建筑相冊 (from 2008, before they put a roof over it)

P.S. Here's my video report on a visit to the site in February 2011.

And what did they write about railways in 1624?

When using Google Books yesterday, I was offered to fill in a survey. Besides asking whether I am aware of various new ways to sell e-books, they asked for a general feedback. Below, with minor edits, is what I wrote.

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Google Books is a great tool of course, but there are quite a few things that can be improved: 1) Sometimes the font is too small - and zooming in the browser does not help (i.e., it's still illegible). 2) Old books are occasionally scanned in careless ways, especially when they are "centerfold" type pages that no one bothered to unfold prop erly. (Can't find a good example right now, but this one comes close, complete with the image of the scanner operators' fingers: Regni Sinensis la Tartaris Tyrannicle evastati depopulatique concinna Enarratio 3) A fair number of books are mis-dated, and the cool new NGram viewer has made it painfully obvious. Just ask, for example, "Who wrote about railways or railroads 300 years ago?" 4) It seems that the mechanism for Google Books "importing" reviews from the "usual places" elsewhere (i.e., Amazon.com, I reckon...) does not always work. E.g., the review existing this Roel Sterckx's book at Amazon does not show at the books's page at GB 5) How do you insert hyperlinks into reviews anyway? Even at Amazon you can insert a link to another Amazon product (via its ASIN); at the very least, Google Books should allow one to insert a link to another book at GB.

"Nanjing's Ming and Qing Architecture" by Yang Xinhua, Lu Haiming et al.

This is my review of"Nanjing's Ming and Qing Architecture" (''Nanjing Ming-Qing Jianzhu'', NJMQJZ) by Yang Xinhua, Lu Haiming et al. An earlier version of the review, without hyperlinks (I don't know how to insert them there), is on Google Books.

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I like traveling, particularly to places with some history to them. At the same time, it seems that, due to planning and logistical reasons, I would often end up missing the most important sight of the city of region I visit. I went to Barcelona's Sagrada Familia, but failed to notice the famous turtles holding the columns around the main entrance. I've been three times to Beijing without ever making it to the Great Wall; passed through Xi'an without visiting the Stele Forest or the First Emperor's Mausoleum; crossed the Liujaxia Reservoir by ferry, while other people at the same harbor were bargaining with boatmen about the passage to the Bingling Temple. And in Nanjing... well, I only was there for 2 days, so let's say that I've hardly seen 10% of what I'd like to see there.

It looks like I will be in Nanjing again next month, and hopefully for longer than on the previous trip - so I wanted this trip's sightseeing to be a but different. I've been aware, e.g. thanks to Segalen and Paludan, about some of the most interesting sculptural ensembles there, such as the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, or the surviving funerary statuary from the Six Dynasties' period. Mentioned passim elsewhere were some other wonders, such as the giant stele that the Yongle Emperor made for his grandfather, but which, due to its size had to be abandoned at the quarry. But would not it be nice to find out in advance where all those things are - in modern geography's terms, not Segalen's - and what they look like?

When searching at a nearby university library for a good book about Nanjing's antiquities I certainly did not expect to find anything as comprehensive and well printed as "Nanjing's Ming and Qing Architecture" (南京明清建筑, Nanjing Ming-Qing Jianzhu), produced in 2001 by a teams of around 80 experts led by Yang Xinhua (杨新华) and Lu Haiming (卢海鸣). This monumental book, as big as a volume from Encyclopedia Britannica, is of course way too heavy for any tourist to consider taking with him on an overseas trip. But it's certainly a pleasure to leaf through it at the stage of "armchair travel". It seems that each site worth writing about is written about, complete with its history, geometric dimensions (Chinese guidebooks love those, in general), location, and a few photos - some modern (though still black-and-white), some historical. I wish I could actually read Chinese well, but even if I am just looking at picture captions and scanning pages for dates and locations, it is still a worthwhile experience.

As the title indicates, the book is dedicated primarily to the monuments of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911); but, in fact, it has several detailed chapters on the relics of Nanjing's pre-Ming history (a thousand years old, too!). As to the post-1911 sites, the same authors have a separate book on them. When using this volume - if you can get it - you'd probably want to have a chronological table (to look up emperors' eras) and a good map (to look up locations) nearby. The book contains a number of interesting old maps for particular sites, as well as detailed maps of some archaeological sites. However, I am a bit surprised that a volume that big and that location-specific does not have a modern map in it, as it is such a natural thing to have (and, in fact, can be seen in much smaller books on the same topic). For a European reader, the absence of an index in a scholarly reference work of such a size would seem rather strange, but one has to admit that Chinese books rarely have indexes, period. (I guess the issue is, they can't decide how to index things...) This minor shortcoming is compensated, to an extent, by a detailed and comprehensive table of content, chronologically arranged.

Google knows how to divide text into words

... in Chinese, that is. This is no small feat, because Chinese text, when written in the usual way (in Chinese characters) does not reflect in any way the division of text into words (with the exception of some very special cases, such as when transcribing foreign personal names into Chinese). When Chinese speakers need to write a sentence in Pinyin (Latin transcription), they often end up writing every syllable as a separate word, or, more rarely, run all words together. (The photo above shows both possibilities). Most automatic Chinese-characters-to-Pinyin converters also separate the transcription of all characters with spaces. Google Translate, however, appears to have a pretty good idea how to put spaces between words in Pinyin. Getting to Pinyin, though, is a bit tricky. To do it, one can enter a Chinese phrase, ask Google Translate to "translate" it into another version of Chinese (e.g., simplified to traditional), and click on the "Read phonetically" link below, which will give you the Pinyin transcription of the phrase. E.g., for "有可能朱棣立神道碑加工期间，发现龟趺脖子下裂缝而弃之" ("Perhaps, during Zhu Di's installation of the Sacred Way Stele, cracks were discovered under the neck of the stone tortoise [serving as as the pedestal] and it was abandoned") you get "Yǒu kěnéng zhūdì lì shéndàobēi jiāgōng qíjiān, fāxiàn guī fū bózi xià lièfèng ér qì zhī". Which I think is pretty good for a machine, although of course the name Zhu Di should be capitalized and written with a space, and I would probably write "guīfū" ("tortoise-shaped pedestal") as a single word.

Fixing umountable file system in Ubuntu

I find the current version (10.10, Maverick Meerkat) of Ubuntu Linux pretty reliable, but it seems to fail to handle one special situation correctly. If you suddenly run out of the disk space on the main partition (e.g., an application writing out lots more data than you should), you may suddenly find it that you can't save the situation by removing some files: the file system will suddenly appear as "mounted in read-only mode". On reboot, the main partition will show as unmountable. If you boot from an Ubuntu CD, an attempt to run e2fsc on that partition fails, because the partition shows as "busy".

Explanation?

I conjecture that one can't run "e2fsck /dev/sda1" from Ubintu Live CD because Ubuntu tries to mount the (now unmountable) partition during its start-up process, and the mounting process just sits there without giving up. This is why if you do "sudo lsof |grep sda1", you get a report like this:

jbd2/sda1 296 root cwd DIR 0,17 300 2 /
jbd2/sda1 296 root rtd DIR 0,17 300 2 /
jbd2/sda1 296 root txt unknown /proc/296/exed

and then, when you do "ps auxw | grep 296", you learn that it is a kernel-originating process that keeps the device busy:

root 296 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S 21:36 0:00 [jbd2/sda1-8]

I tried to figure out how to prevent Ubuntu Live CD from trying to mount /dev/sda1, but couldn't: it seemed that adding options such as "sda=noprobe" (or should it have been "sda1=noprobe"?) to the boot command line had no effect.

Solutions

It seemed that other people with the same problem solved it by booting from a Slax live CD, rather than a Ubuntu one. But as I did not have a working Slax CD (the CD writer I used was not quite compatible with the CD reader), that did not work for me. Sanjaya Karunasena proposes a working solution for recovery. It turns out that even though /dev/sda1 is no mountable and can't be fsck'd, it is still accessible by the bulk copy (dd) command! So what he suggests is: * copying the entire "bad" partition to a file (an "image file") some other device (such as a big enough external hard drive) with dd, * runnning e2fsc on that file (yes, you can do it, if the file is an image of a partition) * re-writing the original corrupted partition by copying the image file back to it with dd. In between (after e2fsck), you can loop-mount the corrected file as a partition, so that you can cd to it and see if your data is actually there, Something like this, that is:

#-- copy data from bad partition to an alternative drive
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/some-other-disk/sda1.img
#-- file system repair (on an image file!)
e2fsck -f /mnt/some-other-disk/sda1.img

#-- mount the "fixed" file as a file system just to see if it's indeed fixed
mount -o loop /mnt/some-other-disk/sda1.img /media/copy-of-sda1
#-- here you can "cd /media/copy-of-sda1" and see what's there; maybe copy some files to elsewhere
umount /media/copy-of-sda1

#-- copy the data back
dd if=/mnt/some-other-disk/sda1.img of=/dev/sda1

I first tried to copy the data with "dd" from sda1 to a USB device, but soon realized that all my USB devices were either too small to copy the entire sda1 to them, or were already formatted with vfat and thus could not store files bigger than 4 GB. So I ended up unearthing an old internal hard disk drive, opening up my computer, and connecting this old drive in (so it became sdb1). Then everything worked! Incidentally, it is useful to know that "dd" can read the unmountable device, and then write to it, even when that device appears as "busy" to e2fsck.

Wuhan buiilding world's 3rd tallest skyscraper

Although one of China's - and, thus, the world's - major cities, Wuhan does not get into the international news all too often. However, they have juststarted the construction of what is going to be the world's 3rd tallest skyscraper. (The No. 1 and No. 2 are in Dubai and Shanghai, respectively).

St Melangell, the holy patron of rabbits

It's nice to know that rabbits and hares have a heavenly patron too: Virgin Saint Melangell, Abbess in Wales. As she lived long before the Great Schism, she is venerated not only by Catholics and Anglicans, but also by the Orthodox! Icons of her have been painted as well.

P.S. More details on St Melangell, including a troparion to her, here.

The bells are ringing

Bloomington's All Saints Orthodox Church now has its bells. They are called Cyrus, John, Zenaida, and Philonela. Today the bells have been blessed (with a full ritual, including a good sprinkling with holy water) and "officially" rung the first time, first by the priest himself (Fr. Peter) and other clergy, then by a girl who's been specially trained to do so.

Blessing of the Bells

Although ornately decorated inside, boasting of its own miraculous icon (or icons?), and blessed with a wonderful choir, the Bloomington's All Saints' Orthodox Church presently looks from outside more like a small office building than a traditional Orthodox Christian "Temple of God". In Russian, it can be described it as ni kupolov, ni kolokolov: "No dome, and no bells!".

The congregation's hope is that some day the existing church building (constructed in the early 2000s) will will indeed become its office/classroom space, while the divine worship will move to a beautiful new neo-Byzantine building (yes, complete with a dome!). But that's a long way off.

On the other hand, the church is getting its bells! They have already arrived and are to be mounted on what the church proudly calls its "bell tower" (actually, just a simple wooden stand). They will be officially "blessed" on Sunday, November 14, right after the Divine Liturgy (which starts at 10:00, and typically runs for around 1.5 hours). See allsaintsbloomington.org for the schedule of services.

All Saints' is quite a remarkable church, with its roots more American than "ethnic". Although part of the Patriarchate of Antioch, it owes its existence, it seems, more to the turning of some American Protestants to the Orthodox way of worship rather than to any large-scale migration of Middle Eastern Christians to South Central Indiana.

A self-described "Pan-Orthodox" congregation, All Saints' can be fairly described as a truly "American Orthodox" church:

• the service is all in English (except for a few obligatory Kirie eleison and Gospodi pomilui
• the "New" (Gregorian) Calendar is used, same as what Catholics and most Protestants use these days
• the Royal doors in the center of the iconostasis are, in fact a permanent opening, without actual doors! Which means that you can actually see the priest(s) and deacons(s) throughout the service, and not just hear them. (And to hear them better, there is a PA system as well...)
• quite a few saints featured in their icons have lived in the United States (or what's today the United States), and at least a couple actually were US citizens
• there are seats for everyone in the audience (not that you get to sit much, of course, this being an Orthodox Temple, after all!)
• they have mixed seating (or, well, standing), and the women in the audience are mostly bareheaded

Mao Zedong in Kazakh

In a recent conversation, a question came up: "Was Mao Zedong's Little Red Book ever published in Kazakh?" I am pretty sure it was, although I have not actually seen it. In fact, quite a few works of Mao, Lenin and Stalin, appeared in Kazakh translation in the 1970s. The script in use was quite interesting: it was "Kazakh Pinyin": a Latin-based script that was used in PRC for a couple decades (apparently introduced in since 1964, and "enforced" in 1976), until it was abolished in favor of the more traditional Perso-Arabic script ca. 1983.

Below are a couple pages from Mao Zedong's Selected Works, Volume 1, in Kazakh. (You can click through any picture for an enlarged view).

Note the rather unusual letter Ƣ (which corresponds to the Turkish Ğ and the Cyrillic Kazakh Ғ). I am not aware of any "official" alphabet that uses it now, but I think it was in a few Latin-based alphabets of Soviet Central Asia in the 1930s (mostly Turkic languages, but also Dungan).

Some fiction, such as Lu Xun's The True story of Ah Q was published in that alphabet as well.

P.S. Here's more on the statistics of this translation industry.