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.

---

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