Is the voice of the (snapping) turtle heard in our land yet?

If it is, the spring must be hear. When planting tender plants, gardeners rely on the "average last frost" dates in their calendars, but an unexpectedly late frost, often ruinous, is always possible. Wise farmers have various rule of the thumbs to figure when one should plant in a particular year. None of them, however, sounds better to me than this piece of advice shared by Susan Weisand, who grows hot chili peppers in southern Indiana, in a recent issue of the 812 Magazine:

Animals know the land better than you do.
I don’t plant until I see that my snapping turtle has laid her eggs in the spring. If she’s not out, I’m not planting.

(Photo of the snapping turtle by Willy Logan)

Now, where do I get a snapping turtle?

"Shopping-enabled Wikipedia page on Amazon"

Now working for Amazon.com's benefit!

Everybody is probably aware of a panoply of "parasitic" web site whose entire content consists of a huge number of articles copied, usually with no changes (other than poor formatting, character set confusion, etc) from open-source web sites such as the Wikipedia. There are even a few publishers (or, more precisely, "publishers") which reprint assorted Wikipedia articles as books (or "books"), and sell them through various channels including Amazon.com. But do you know that Amazon.com itself has joined the game?

Hmm, Bixi (tortoise) - Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Page on Amazon... I wonder what suitable products are available on that topic on Amazon!...

Looking at a few articles, it turns out that the "products" on which shopping is "enabled" are mostly books (real books, that is) whose ISBNs are mentioned in the article. Well, even though a tad parasitic, that's at least reasonable.

Kangyuan Yellow River Turtle Farm Inc.

Strange things one can find on Youtube: a music video about Kangyuan Yellow River Turtle Farm Inc. (镇平县康苑鳖业有限责任公司) in Jiasong Town, Zhenping County, Henan Province of China. The facility, one of the largest of its kind, is said to raise some 6 million Yellow River turtles (a variety of the Chinese softshell turtle, Pelodiscus sinensis) annually, and occupies 600 mu (100 acres) of land and water. I wish the guy who took the video had a better camera, though!

It is apparently here on Google Maps.

The bear and the Littl Shyning Man

The city of Zheleznogorsk adopted a new coat of arms, which, according to the city councils, is described as a "bear or tearing apart an atomic nucleus argent". Considering the city's location and its main industry, the design is quite appropriate. But am I the only one who wonders if the emblem's designers have read too much Russell Hoban?

Tumbleweed news

Hundreds of tumbleweeds pushed against West Texas home by strong winds. Apparently, in Texas that's a newsworthy event. Back in Penticton, on windy winter days, it was daily business!

Electric tricycles of Qufu

Qufu, Shandong, is famous as the hometown of the Yellow Emperor and Confucius. But besides dozens of stone turtles guarding the memory of ancient sages, there is one more interesting thing to see in this town: a variety of electric vehicles that the locals use to get around and to move stuff.

Electric bicycles and scooters are nothing unusual for China: for several years now, many cities now have more of them than the regular kind, and they may have become the most common means of private transportation in some metropolitan areas. What I found interesting in Qufu, however, on my visit in January 2011, is the abundance and variety of larger, three-wheeled vehicles often seen there. They seem to be much more prominent in Qufu than in bigger cities I visited in more southern provinces, such as Nanjing, Wuhan, or Xiamen. I don't know if the difference is due to a difference in legislation between Shangdong and other provinces, or this is primarily due to difference in residents' financial means (i.e., perhaps a person in Nanjing who's in a trade that requires him to move stuff would be more likely to afford a pickup truck?).

Anyways, here are a few pictures: some from a shop where these vehicles (as well as more conventional 2-wheeled electric bikes and scooters) were on display, and some from the streets. All pictures are clickable.

The "vehicle" has pedals, and presumably can be moved on pedal power if necessary (say, you've run out of charge in the battery), although I suppose it would not be a particularly pleasant thing to do.
Another model for sale, and a couple more - with a bit more protection from the elements - going down the street.
Another view. Apparently the back of the "vehicle" can be configures as needed, either with a bench for passengers or with more cargo space.
The dashboard.
Yet another model - this one seem to have no pedals, so probably is purely electrical.
Winters are pretty cold in Qufu, definitely below freezing. But this does not deter bicyclists. Most bicyclists (and drivers of the three-wheel contraptions) in Qufu have "mittens" of sort attached to the handlebars, to keep hands warm.
Local drivers, I assume, are not surprised by electric trikes, since they must have been long used to the original, pedal-only variety. Here's a pretty old specimen of those - now not as common as in the days of yore - against the background of an array of electric bikes.
Here's one of those traditional "cargo bikes" (trikes) in use by a vendor next to Qufu's Bell Tower.
Apparently no electric vehicles in this picture; but it gives an idea of rather relaxed traffic on a slow winter morning in Qufu. The building in the middle is Qufu's Drum Tower, so it is the center point of the city. In the summer it would all be thronged with tourists.
And here, it seems, all vehicles in site are electric! (Outside of Qufu's Mosque, just west of the walled city).
And here, too.
Sharing road with cars. There are a few more pictures of the local bike shops etc. here.

Chinese New Year and Mardi Gras

Both the Chinese calendar and the Christian calendar (as far as the Easter-based moveable feasts are concerned) are lunisolar, which means that the dates of the Chinese New Year and Easter are determined by rules that are based on the timing of the new (or full) moons with respect to the winter solstice (or spring equinox). Of course, the existence of the 7-day week enters yet additional rule into the Paschal computations, which don't exist in the rules for the Chinese New Year. (The 7-day week cycle is a comparatively recent development in Chinese history, and the Chinese New Year may fall on any day of the week).

So what is the exact correspondence between the dates of the holidays of the two traditions?

The Chinese New Year is the beginning of the first month (农历正月) of the Chinese year, and as such has to fall on a new moon, or more precisely, "dark moon" - i.e. the day when moon is in front of the sun; this, incidentally, means that solar eclipses can only happen on the first or last day of a Chinese month, and lunar eclipses, only around the middle of a Chinese month). The idea of choosing the first month of the year is, basically, to do it so that the New Year Day is as close to the half-way point between the winter solstice (which in the traditional scheme of solar terms is viewed as the mid-winter point) and the spring equinox (which, in China is, notionally, the middle of the spring). In other words, the Chinese New Year day should be chosen as the new moon day closest to the first day of the lichun 立春 ("Start of spring") solar term (around Feb 4). Thus the Chinese New Year Day festivities are referred to as the Spring Festival (春节, chunjie). In other words, the Chinese New Year Day (the first day of the Chinese Year, or [农历]年初一 [Nongli] Nian Chuyi) has to be the first new moon on or after Jan 21.

In a similarly "lunisolar" way, the Easter is determined, more or less, as the sunday on or after the first full moon (the Paschal Moon) after the spring equinox. With some simplification, the Easter of the Catholic Church, and most other Western churches, happens on the first Sunday on or after the first full moon on or after March 22.

Since the full moon is always in the middle of the Chinese calendar month, we see that the Paschal Moon has to occur around the middle of the 2nd or 3rd month of the Chinese calendar (农历二月15日 or 农历三月15日). The former takes place in case of a "late New Year" (i.e., the Chinese New Year happens after the first day of Lichun), and the latter, if the Chinese New Year occurs early (before Lichun). The (Western) Easter would be celebrated, respectively, on the 1st Sunday after the middle of the 2nd or 3rd Lunar month.

Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lent in the Western tradition, is 46 days before Easter. The last day before the Lent begins (the Shrove Tuesday, celebrated as Mardi Gras - the Fat Tuesday - in Latin Countries) is 47 days before Easter. Assuming 29 to 30 days in a lunar month, Mardi Gras should typically fall on the first Tuesday within the 7-day window that begins either 2-3 days before the Chinese New Year Day (in case of a "late New Year"), or 2-3 days before the end of the first month of the Chinese calendar (i.e. around 农历正月28日 - 农历二月5日) (in case of an "early New Year").

In other words, if the Chinese New Year Day comes during the Lichun term (on or after Feb 4), then the Mardi Gras will most likely fall on the Tuesday before or after the Chinese New Year Day. If the Chinese New Year Day occurs before Lichun (i.e., during the Xiaohan 小寒 term, before Feb 4), then Mardi Gras will be on a Tuesday a month after the Chinese New Year Day. Over a long period, both situations are approximately equally likely (since, by definition, Lichun is right in the middle of the period when the Chinese New Year Day may occur).

The Orthodox version

How will this work for those of the Eastern Orthodox persuasion? Both the Old Style and New Style Orthodox churches agree that Easter ought to be celebrated on the first Sunday on or after the first full moon (the [Orthodox] Paschal Moon) on or after March 22 of the Julian calendar - i.e. April 4 on the Gregorian calendar. Which means that in almost all years the Orthodox Easter (or Pascha - 巴斯克节 - as it is called in most Orthodox communities worldwide) has to occur on Sunday right around (or a few days after) the middle of the 3rd Lunar month (农历三月15日). The Orthodox equivalent of Mardi Gras is the "Butter Week" (Maslenitsa in Russian); this pre-Lent celebration ends on the Sunday 49 days before the Orthodox Easter, i.e. in most years, on the last Sunday of the first Lunar month or the first Sunday of the second Lunar Month.

In other words, the Maslenitsa Sunday and the Clean Monday are typically a month after the Chinese New Year, and 2 weeks after the Lantern Festival (元宵节 Yuan Xiao Jie). On rare occasions, when the Chinese New Year occurs very late (e.g., 2007-02-18, 2015-02-19), the full moon in the middle of the 2nd lunar month is late enough to be the [Orthodox] Paschal Moon; in these years the Butter Week happens right around the Chinese New Year. In the 22nd century the Julian calendar will fall back by one more day, so such situations will be even more rare.

Some translation stats

I was trying to add a comment to a recent post on Bruce Humes' blog, but apparently you can't enter HTML there. So here it is.

---

You may be interested in the statistics in UNESCO's Index Translationum, which is based primarily on the data (not always complete) from the participating nations' national libraries (such as the Library of Congress). The "Index" is aware of 81 books translated from Uighur into other languages published since 1979. Most of them (56) were published in the USSR (i.e., during 1979-1991; the Soviets were big at this kind of thing; most of these translations were into Russian, but also into Kazakh, German etc); and 19 more titles, in China. (Interestingly, not all of the latter were translations into Chinese!). And the remaining 6 titles, all over the world - including Europe, the USA, and even Singapore.

Not surprisingly, translations from Chinese to Uighur are a lot more numerous: 2006 titles over the same time frame. (You don't even need to go to Xinjiang to see a collection of these kind of works: there is, for example, a very quiet and dusty room in the National Library in Beijing full of such editions, some still in Romanized Uighur and Kazakh!).

The index is also aware of 8 books translated from Manchu published worldwide in the same time frame, and 946 translations from Kazakh (870 of which published in the USSR, 15 in China, and 10 in Russia. (Strangely, they don't seem to have any data on translations from Kazakh published in the independent Kazakhstan itself).

World's top translated authors

According to UNESCO's Index Translationum:

1  Christie, Agatha  7135
2  Verne, Jules  4702
3  Shakespeare, William  4159
4  Blyton, Enid  3813
5  Lenin, Vladimir Il'ič  3592
6  Steel, Danielle  3559
7  Cartland, Barbara  3527
8  Andersen, Hans Christian  3394
9  King, Stephen  3220
10  Grimm, Jacob  2873
11  Grimm, Wilhelm  2850
...

(The numbers, I presume, is the total number of translations of these author's works into other languages since ca. 1979).

In the news: South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist'

BBC: South Pacific Sandy Island 'proven not to exist'. It still shows on my Google Maps though.

Cornell chimes

Looking at the Cornell University campus from the bell tower...
... while a musician plays on the chimes

China's cheapest train ticket

While new high-speed railway lines keep opening throughout China, and cheaper slower trains are replaced with faster and more expensive ones, it is nice to know that you can still go somewhere for just 1.5 yuan (about $0.25). This is the full fare from Shenyang to the nearby (16 km away) station Masanjia (马三家). According to Liao-Shen wan bao (辽沈晚报 a local newspaper in Shenyang), this is the fare class for the train no. 6366 (no letter in the name, which means it's the slowest and cheapest class), and the travel time is 42 minutes.

Admittedly, not everyone may want to travel to that particular travel destination. (Google Search is your friend...).

According to the published schedule, the train makes 3 intermediate stops between Shenyang and Masanjia; inquiring minds may want to know if the fare to some of them is even lower, but, according to Liao-Shen wan bao's fact checkers, the fare to all stations is the same 1.5 yuan.

Incidentally, this kind of local train service - 5 stations on a 10-mile section - is very rarely seen in today's China anymore. From a train, you see lots of small stations like this, with passenger platforms and everything, but when you look up a schedule web site, you see that there is no passenger service to them now. Presumably service existed years ago, but was abolished and replaced with buses. Short-distance, frequent-stop (commuter) train service, of the kind commonly seen in most European and some North American (New York, Chicago, Toronto) metropolitan areas is quite uncommon in China.

First frost, again

Sweet potatoes: in the ground... This year, the spring in southern Indiana was very early, with shirtsleeves weather by mid-March. The first frost also came a bit earlier (around Oct 9) than the last year. Just a light patchy frost, completely killing only the "subtropical" type plants, such as the silk melon (AKA loofah 丝瓜), bitter melon (苦瓜), winter melon (冬瓜), the vines of sweet potatoes (山芋). This of course is a signal to harvest your
... and out.

Indiana University International Center: "dispersed"?

Leo R. Dowling International Center building, 1955-2012 Ms. Yuriria Rodriguez, a music graduate student from Indiana University Bloomington, raises an important issue for the university community: the "dispersal" of the university's International Center. Not having a Facebook account, I am commenting on the situation here.

Since 1955 and until the summer of 2012, IU's Leo R. Dowling International Center occupied a small, but adequate building in the heart of campus (Jordan Ave, just a block from the IU Auditorium and Herman B. Wells library). It hosted a great variety of events there: not just specialized meetings for IU's international students and faculty, but also events open to the general public, such as Friday lunch concerts, ethnic coffee hours, foreign language conversation groups, etc. I first got to visit the place exactly 20 years ago, when I was a graduate student at IU, and I have been visiting them ever since then, whenever I am in Bloomington.

This summer, the university authorities decided that fix what wasn't broken: the building apparently was needed for some other worthy cause (IU International Programs - that's about arranging a year abroad for IU students; their own building has perhaps become too small for them), and IC had to move. That would not be such a big deal if the center was to move to some other location in one piece. Alas, that was not to be the case. The "administrative" part of the center (i.e., offices for its staff, such as there is) went to Poplars (a former hotel, later turned into office building, a couple blocks west of campus); while events that required actual meeting space or performance space are to take place at a number of locations all over campus, mostly in various dorms, as it seems.

What floor are you at now?

Representatives of the affected student organizations wrote a complaining letter to the university president, and got a rather remarkable response. You see, "Despite all of our best efforts, very few domestic students venture into the International Center" (hmm... certainly not my observation), and kicking the center from its beloved building is somehow supposed to "facilitate greater interaction among domestic and international students." This seems a rather self-serving justification: maybe the residents of a particular residence hall would be more tempted to visit an event that takes place in their building, but there are, after all, maybe two dozen dorms on IUB campus; so the overall effect will be probably minuscule. On the other hand, the old (Jordan Ave) location was much more convenient for students, faculty, and staff to visit, as it was much more central. This was particularly important for events such as Friday lunch concerts: a graduate student or an IU staff member could easily enough walk to the center's old location from most major campus buildings during one's lunch break, but it is not so for the Willkie Residence Hall, to which the concerts have relocated now.

Perhaps more importantly, having such a variety of programs at the same location resulted in a certain level of synergy, as someone who came for one event would learn about others as well. If the issue was really the "visibility" to the wider university community, surely it could have been achieved in a lot of other ways - such as placing a big billboard with even announcements next to the IC, or doing more advertising on the university web site.

Dermenino

Dermenino, pop. 0

How do you get to Dermenino? Much of the year, you don't. In winter, the road is often blocked by snow; in the spring and fall, it's too muddy to get through. But this August, it was an easy trip.

The twice-a-day bus from Poshekhonye
The logging road enters the forest

To get to Dermenino (Дерменино), a village in the forests of north-central Russia, about half way between Rybinsk and Vologda, one needs first to get to Poshekhonye, the district capital, and the nearest town (pop. 6,000; distance from the closest train station, about 70 km; riverboat service, cancelled). From there, twice a day, local buses run another 60 km or so to the north to Andryushino. You get off at Vasilyevskoye (about 10 km before Andryushino), which is as far north as the paved road (such as there is) gets in these parts, and then you look for the track that leads farther north - to Dermenino, Menkovo, and Krasny Yar.

Whortleberry shrubs (черника), European dwarf cousins of American blueberry bushes

The track - which seems to begin in the backyard of a disused farm building - is a pretty straight dirt road. The dirt in "dirt road" may be understood quite literally a good part of the year, but this summer was quite dry, and the 5-km walk to Dermenino (you can also drive, if you have a suitable vehicle) was actually pretty good, although boring. There is, however, a more interesting way to get there: you can take a logging road to the northwest, and then hike east across the forest, fording the little river called Kisoma Volnaya (Кисома Вольная). For somebody who's used to hiking in more populated areas, the most remarkable thing here is that, once you're away from the woodlot, there are no visible traces of human presence: no trails, no cans or bottles or other trash, no cut trees... (Very different from, say North Vancouver's Grouse Mountain, where you can find anything, including an engine from a crashed American plane!).

Forest clearings made impassable by raspberry brambles. I happened to be there right at the peak fruiting time

The forest clearings, wherever they can be found, are almost completely occupied by dense raspberry brambles. I had been rather proud of a recent backyard garden project, where over three summer seasons I have expanded raspberry plantings from a two-meter-long row to perhaps the total of 20 meters, which allowed one to harvest maybe a pint or two of berries every day for three weeks. And here I am trying to make my way through something that looks like acres of raspberries, now (early August) all densely covered with ripe fruit. (With hardly a few hundreds of residents within 10-km distance - and probably zero within 3 km - it is no surprise that most raspberry patches never see a human picking the berries. I wonder if there are bears here, and what they are doing - but with this amount of berries, they are probably in a good mood. In some clearings there are also blueberries (more precisely, "whortleberries": fairly similar fruit, but with more intense taste, and growing on much smaller shrubs). There are also some lingonberries - the fruit that I had previously only seen in Lapland - but they are still green, as they should be. (The lingonberry season is usually a month or more later than the one for whortleberries).

The sign tells me where I am, but unfortunately I don't know how to read it. This is what the local lumberjacks must have used to orient themselves before the GPS.

As I am walking to the east, out of the deep forest and toward the Kisoma River and the "main" dirt road, I know that I am approaching the area that's at least theoretically populated, and expect to find some traces of the present (or former) residents' agricultural activities. The residents, however, are apparently long gone. There are clearing that must have been used for grazing, or for growing hay at some point - but by now they have shrubs and small trees growing on them. Obviously, noone has grazed cattle or cut hay here for at least a few years.

A better-preserved house in Dermenino...
...And one not so well preserved
Nice woodwork.

Once I reached the village itself, I expected to see some abandoned houses and some populated once, but, judging from the pattern of vegetation (as in, waist-high or chest-high weeds with not even a trail anywhere among them), it seemed that noone lives here anymore. I hope, of course, that I am wrong on this...

There are no actual trees growing on the streets and in the houses yet - just weeds, so far - which means that the last residents have left fairly recently.

The place even used to have street lamps at some point...
... but now wires are all gone

According to a posting on sobory.ru, Dermenino must have been a fairly important village for over a century, as it had its own church. According to that article, Dermenino's Church of the Epiphany, with additional altars in honor of the Nativity of Our Lady and of St. Philip Metropolitan of Moscow, was built ca. 1812-1814, and converted to the village school in 1934. The poster there, Maxim Leonidovich, actually has a photo of the building, but I did not happen to see it.

Some of the perennial flowers keep blooming among the weeds in front of houses whose residents are long gone
Empty bottles from a "bath elixir" in an abandoned house. Although the house most likely did not have a bathtub even in its better days, the residents must have found some creative way to use the product. According to labels on the empty 250 ml bottles, it is 88% alcohol, the rest being water and various herbal extracts.
A twig of a black currant bush, with absolutely delicious fruit, which tries to grow through the doorway (the door itself is gone) and into an abandoned house

The area is quite lovely, and although the latitude is 59 degrees north, they obviously have a decent growing season here. You sort of imagine how a few farming families could live here, keeping a herd of cows, making cheese, picking chanterelles in the forest, and filling the cellar with currant and raspberry jam for the winter. But I guess it just did not work out for anyone, what with the nearest paved road 5 km away, and, probably lots of other lots available for the taking, with similar conditions, but closer to civilization. Will people come back? Ten years from now? A hundred? Who knows...

This may have been one of the last letters received by anyone in Dermenino. As the address indicates, the village was served out of the post office in the nearby Menkovo, which is now closed.

Nizhny Novgorod Airport

On my previous trips to Russia, I traveled either by rail or via Moscow's airports (SVO, DME). I have always wanted to try flying via Nizhny Novgorod Strigino (GOJ), because most of my destinations are in the area, but never had a chance, as there are fairly few direct international flights to GOJ, and booking a desirable itinerary often is a lot more expensive than flying to Moscow and then taking a train.

Fortunately, United Airlines Mileage Plus miles can be used to book tickets including segments on Lufthansa, and this time I managed to book a through ticket from North America to Nizhny Nvgorod (IND-FRA-GOJ). The experience of flying into and out of GOJ turned out to be surprisingly agreeable. The least pleasant part of flying to Nizhny from FRankfurt was that both the departure to, and arrival from, GOJ are in the middle of the night: GOJ is truly a "peripheral" destination for Lufthansa, and they have only one plane a day going there... and not every day, either. The Lufthansa plane leaves FRA in the evening, spends just over an hour on the ground in GOJ around 3-4 am, and is back in Frankfurt early the next morning. I guess they use the same plane for some European flight(s) during the day. While the obvious disadvantage of such a schedule is that you won't get normal sleep on either of the nights of arrival or departure, the advantage is that you have enough time to make any of the day's connections in FRA - and may even have some time left for city sightseeing.

Nizhny Novgorod's Strigino Airport itself is pleasant enough. It's quite small (just one terminal - about the size of a train station in a middle-sized European or Chinese city), much smaller than you'd expect for a city of this size. But I guess Nizhny Novgorod residents don't fly out of their hometown airport all that much: as Moscow's airports, with much larger selection of destinations are only a night away by train. But seating is adequate, and there is even free Wi-Fi (most of the time.. throughout most of the terminal). There are several ATMs, and even an agent selling train tickets round the clock (at a 200 RUR commission).

The transportation connections to the city is fairly decent... lots better than in, say, Halifax. Several bus (or marshrutka, maybe... I don't know how to tell the difference anymore) lines run to the city starting some time before 6 am. The fare is 20 RUR, and, theoretically speaking, if you board the right bus and stay on the bus long enough, you can get to a variety of destination throughout the city. (In particular, no. 46 runs all the way to Kuznechikha, on the opposite side of the city - a 1.5 hr trip, I was told). In practice, it may be easier to get off as soon as the bus gets to a subway station (they all seem to stop at Park Kultury, which is Nizhny Novgorod Metro's southernmost station; about 20 m ), and go from there to anywhere the subway goes. (Now, at present the subway in Nizhny does not go too many places, but they are going to finally open a station in Gorky Square in November 2012, and this will somewhat change the situation).

Going back, the buses run until pretty late as well. The last airport-bound trip of the same no. 46 passes at Park Kultury quite a bit after 11 pm. I turned out to be the only passenger on that bus actually going all the way to the airport, and as the conductor said, if not for me, the driver probably would have just terminated the trip at Monchegorskaya St and go home to sleep. In any event, taking a taxi from Park Kultury to the airport probably would have been much cheaper than doing a similar thing in Moscow or most any major cities, as it is only a few kilometers.

The Lufthansa FRA-GOJ and GOJ-FRA flights were both fairly full, and there seemed to be a lot of activity in the airport, even throughout the night. They have direct flights not only to major Russian cities (as well as charters to some foreign resort destinations), but also to places like Turkey, Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Tadjikistan - some space for further travel adventures, I guess. So I certainly will try to book another ticket to GOJ if/when I need to go that way.

Nanjing to Nanjing in 12 hours

Ming Xiaoling, Nanjing City, Jiangsu	Hekeng Village, Nanjing County, Fujian

Until recently, China's southeastern Fujian Province had much less of railway network than the country's other coastal provinces. This may have been partly due to the province's mountainous topography, partly due to strategic considerations (too close to Taiwan?). A few rail lines that existed in the province mostly followed zigzagging river valleys, connecting Fujian's coastal cities (Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Xiamen) with the nation's heartland.

In the 21st century the situation started to change. In April 2010, the coastal Fuxia (Fuzhou-Xiamen) Railway opened, connecting all major coastal cities of Fujian to each other and to the coastal cities further north (via Wenzhou, Ningbo, Hangzhou, and Shanghai). This coastal line is scheduled to be soon extended further southwest, all the way to Guangzhou.

In the mean time work started on high speed rail lines into the province's interior, cutting across mountains and valleys from the coastal cities to the inland centers. The first of them, the Longxia (Longyan-Xiamen) Railway opened on June 29, 2012. It may potentially become a convenient way of accessing Fujian's tulou country, as it will actually have a so-called Nanjing Station （南靖站), halfway between Zhangzhou and Longyan.

Now, this Nanjing is Nanjing County, Fujian (南靖), not to be confused with the better known Nanjing City, Jiangsu (南京)。The way maps show the new line, it actually runs through the eastern part of the county, so the station will be probably quite a ways to the east of Nanjing County's county seat (Shancheng Town), while most of the well-known tulou sites are some 30+ km to the west of Shancheng. Still, the new Nanjing Station is just 50 min from the centrally located Xiamen station, while getting to Nanjing County from Xiamen by bus may easily take close to 2 hours; so I have no doubts that some local transportation services between Nanjing Station and the touristy tulou area in the west of the county will become available soon.

Xiamen Railway Station now offers service both to Nanjing, Fujian (南靖) and to Nanjing, Jiangsu (南京). Make sure to get tickets to the right station!

Looking at the schedules, the new Longxia line will mostly have trains circulating between Longyan and Xiamen, as well as those continuing beyond Xiamen along the coastal line all the way to Fuzhou. Interestingly, there is actually one train coming to Fujian all the way from Nanjing, Jiangsu! It follows the newly built high-speed lines in a rather intricate pattern, tracing China's south-east coast: from Nanjing (Jiangsu) south-east to Shanghai, then southwest to Hangzhou, east to Ningbo, southwest to Wenzhou, Fuzhou, and Xiamen, and finally north-west to Nanjing (Fujian) and Longyan. According to the posted schedule, it takes 12 hours 15 minutes from Nanjing (Jiangsu) to Nanjing (Fujian), with 3 provincial-capital-level cities in between (Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Fuzhou). （For comparison, a "traditional" Nanjing-Xiamen train, taking an inland route, takes over 30 hours.)

With the travel time like this, it probably would have been a lot more practical if it were an overnight train, but, alas, very few high-speed (D-series) trains (and none of the fastest, G-series ones) in China operate at night, presumably because the authorities want to reserve the night time for safety inspection, maintenance, etc.

China Medical Technologies: the end of the story?

On June 27, an analyst suggested that CMEDY (former CMED) shareholders should take profits as the stock had soared to $10 (from, essentially, the penny-stock region). They sure should have - except that many probably did not have a chance to, as the next day SEC suspended trading in this stock (which had been delisted from NASDAQ's main board in February, and has been traded on the pink sheets since then). Supposedly, the suspension is just for two weeks - but I somehow I am guessing that even if trading indeed resumes after July 13, there won't be much "profits" to take anymore...

China Medical (CMEDY)

Curious things are happening in the stock market. The stock price of China Medical (CMEDY on Pink Sheets, formerly CMED on NASDAQ) has gone up 10-fold over the last several months (from the low of US $0.60 to over $9 on June 26, 2012), just as the company bondholders are about to drive CMEDY into bankruptcy. In Cayman Islands, no less - this is where China Medical (and, apparently, quite a few other Chinese companies whose stock is traded on international securities markets) is registered.

There apparently have been no news from the company's management for a long time - it is politely described as "non-communicative" by commentators. The company website is frozen in time, quoting CMED's stock price at the moment when the stock was delisted (March 31, 2012), with the last news item dated December 2011. So there are only speculations as to who/what drives up the company's stock price. Some say it's a "short squeeze" situation. Well, it's certainly a possibility. One can get some idea of the availability of the company's stock for short-selling by looking at the fees short-sellers have to pay to borrow CMEDY shares to short. Typically such fees range within a few percents, more often fraction of a percent, in annual terms; for CMEDY, the rate at present is at the incredible 32.5%. So even if you can borrow shares, and your position is not forcibly closed at an inopportune time, it is expensive to short CMEDY: even if you are lucky and buy at the the top, the stock price has to decline at least by 1/3 over a year in order for you to break even. And of course if somebody - perfectly rationally - chose to short that stock when it was at $4 a couple months ago, he may be simply wiped by the stock price increase, even not thinking about the interest.

On the opposite side of the equation, this also means that an investor who has a long position in CMEDY, and lends his shares to short-sellers, can get some fraction of that money, if his broker is of the kind that passes on some this fee to the lender. At Interactive Brokers, they called it the "yield enhancement" program, and the "net fee" that the (long) investor get is one half of the gross rate paid by the borrower (the short-seller), i.e. 16% p.a. But I would not recommend to anyone the strategy of buying this stock with the intent to lend it to short-sellers and to collect one's interest: the rate may amount to 16% per year, but how much of the principal will you have left after a year if you buy this stock at at the present price (or perhaps at any price)?

No disclosure: I don't have a CMEDY position, long or short, anymore :-)

P.S. The Chinese "face" of the company known in the Cayman Islands and the USA is apparently called "Beijing Yuande Bio-Medical Engineering Co., Ltd." (北京源德生物医学工程有限公司). They have a website, but it does not even have a "News" section.

Head and shoulders above the rest... well, one shoulder anyway

(This is an expanded version of a review for a Fujian road atlas and other atlases from the same series on Amazon.cn)

If you travel, you need maps. Even more so, if you travel "off the beaten track", bicycling or hiking. If you like maps in general, traveling also gives you pretext to shop for maps, and to learn what kind of maps are published in each country you visit.

China travelers are actually supplied with maps pretty well. Every big book store (what they'd call a 书城, "Book City" - there are at least a couple in every provincial capital) would have a fairly well-stocked map department; smaller versions are found in local book stores (mostly, the Xinhua chain) in prefectural and most county-level cities. Besides the city maps, of which I am not talking now, what you need for the countryside travel are provincial atlases. A typical atlas, selling for about CNY10 (less than $2), would have perhaps 30 pages, with one map (a two-page spread) per a prefecture-level unit (there are about a dozen or more in each province). The scale is usually around 1:500,000 - 1:1,000,000 in the more densely populated areas, or 1:2,000,000 or even less in the desert western areas. These are basically detailed road maps, primarily targeted to motorists; but for a bicyclist they are more convenient (and usually more detailed, too) than thick glossy national or regional highway atlases. They show all towns and townships (镇 zhen, 乡 xiang), and a few more major villages (村 cun ); railways and stations; all National (G) and state (S) and some county (X) roads, as well as major tourist attractions. The legend is usally all in Chinese, of course; but even if you don't speak the language, the map vocabulary is not that hard to learn. (You probably will need most of it to read road signs anyway...).

Some of the same publishers also produce provincial wall maps with essentially similar scale and content. Some travelers like them more (see Marian Rosenberg's article on Star Maps Publishing), but I'd rather pack an atlas into my bag, and get a map to hang on a wall.

Getting an atlas for the province you're currently in usually is not problem, as most good bookstores in the province would carry at least one edition. For out-of-the-province atlases, it is more of a hit and miss: a major "Book City" may have 2-3 competitors' atlases for the "home" province, and maybe also atlases for a dozen or more other provinces, but it's somewhat hard to predict which ones. If you have time and a fixed address in China, ordering from Amazon.cn is often your best bet. As of the early 2012, Amazon.cn take cash on delivery for many books, so you don't even need a Chinese credit card.

Most publishers update their atlases every year or two; still, some may be rather out of date, despite the purportedly recent publication date. And yes, occasionally you may encounter a "fantasy road" (in reality, a river of mud, or a construction site) or a "fantasy bridge" (in reality, a ferry). Occasionally, there are bigger bloopers: I've seen a few maps of this kind that manage to show Lüshun, Liaoning without its famous harbor. Hmm, maybe fighting the Battle of Port Arthur in was a mistake?

There are several competing publishers some with multiple maps series - Star Map Press (星球地图出版社)， SinoMaps 中国地图出版社， Dizhe Chubanshe 地址出版社 (i.e., Geology Publishers) with their Dipper （北斗） series, and a few others. Which ones to buy, if you have choice?

Hey, my cheaper atlas said this was National Highway 209!

The best series of provincial atlases that I have seen is the one published by Star Map Press, and labeled 军民双用 (Jun-min liang yong, "Civil and military use"). They of course are nothing like real military topographic maps, but have better scale than other similar maps (1:300,000 for most provinces) and correspondingly better level of detail.

They may not be as good as you can see on an on-line maps, such as on maps.google.com or ditu.sogou.com - but that assumes that the online maps have a good coverage of the region of interest - which is not always the case! Still, the rivers and the switchbacks on the roads allow you to get some idea of what the terrain is like. These atlases are a bit thicker and more expensive than those of the competitors, or than Star Map's own "lightweight" provincial road atlases series (中国分省公路丛书) (maybe CNY15-18 instead of CNY9-12), but are certainly worth the trouble getting if you're cycling, hiking, hitchhiking (usual disclaimer: not recommended!), or making use on "very local" buses.

The reader should be warned that atlases from this Jun-min liang yong series are pretty hard to come by in shops, though, especially outside of the province in question. Exceptionally, I saw an almost complete selection of them in Quanzhou's "Book City" (the underground one, in the park near Quanshan Gate), but elsewhere you'd only see a couple of them at best, often for some random province you don't need. Amazon.cn, however, sells pretty much all of them (and at a discount to the cover price, too!). For example, here's one for Yunnan， or for Fujian. And here's Tibet and Xinjiang

Star Map Press' Jun-min liang yong atlases are to be commended for their economical use of space: instead of allocating one page per prefecture, and wasting a lot of paper this way, their maps correspond to squares of a province-wide grid. (There is still a table of content, which identifies pages by the major cities located there). The publisher also avoids the annoying "feature" present in the Dipper provincial atlases, which are padded with rather unnecessary single-page maps of adjacent provinces and their capital cities. (Which results in a huge duplication of space if one buys several provinces' atlases).

Overall, Star Map Press' Jun-min liang yong product truly stands out head and shoulders above the competition. Well, maybe one shoulder: despite generally better quality than the rest of the breed, this series has some minor, but annoying, shortcomings, even in comparison with more commonly available atlases:

It sort of helps if your map shows the same villages that the local bus schedules do, doesn't it?

• Somewhat strange choice of populated places to show. It is actually a fairly common thing with online maps (like Google Maps): when you zoom in, the map shows smaller villages, but sometimes stops showing labels for some larger populated places. This is not much of an issue with an online map, but when you see it happens when you switch from a "worse" to a "better" paper map, it's annoying. For example, on the road (S207) from Xiazhai to Xiaoxin in Pinghe County, the less detailed SinoMaps atlas shows five villages (彭林 Penglin，长汀 Changting，枫埔 Fengpu，旧楼 Jiulou，厝丘 Cuoqiu）, pretty much all of which are indeed landmarks: they are signed on the ground, and listed in the schedule of a local bus (which, helpfully, is posted at each stop along the road). On the other hand, Star Maps' more detailed Jun-min liang yong atlas choose to show a completely different set of villages along this route - of which only one appears on the locally posted bus schedules!
• Similar to the competitors' products, these maps do show some of the railways and highways that are under construction (labeled as such). However, they certainly could show more of them - surely such construction projects usually take a few years, and detailed plans ought to be available to the mapmakers. It is particularly annoying that even when these maps show railways under construction, they don't indicate the location of the stations - which is something that the traveler need the most. The Fujian atlas doesn't even mark stations on the new Fuzhou-Xiamen high-speed railway, even though it must have been about to open when the atlas was printed.
• Rather strangely for mass-market maps (perhaps, taking the series name too seriously?) the Jun-min liang young series is quite stingy with showing the location of various tourist attractions. For example, out of the thousands of the Fujian Tulou, only 10 individual sites are specifically entered on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Surely it is appropriate to mark them all (as some of the cheaper maps do)? But Jun-min only show three of them. Similarly, among Fujian's famous bridges, Jun-min shows the Anping Bridge but not the Luoyang Bridge - even though most competitors usually show both. Such omissions are unfortunate, because many road signs show directions and distances to such objects, so being able to locate them on the maps is quite beneficial even for travelers who aren't interested in these attractions per se.
• The Jun-min liang young atlases probably show more of the county routes (the "X-series" roads) than other atlases, but they never label them. Some writers (see e.g. Marian Rosenberg's article) claim that no maps label them, but this is incorrect: for example, SinoMaps' Fujian road atlas (福建省公路里程地图册, from their 中国分省公路里程地图册系列 series) clearly shows and labels them all. These roads are important for country side travel, and at least in some counties they are signposted (even if not always consistently). There is no reason why a 1:300,000 map should omit these labels!