Need2LearnChinese Blog: June 2007 Archives

If you miss the train I'm on...

For most girls, the dream to have a wedding gown with a ridiculously long train that requires a dozen or more train-bearers remains but a dream, but for this lucky bride in Guiyang in South China's Guizhou province, that dream became a reality. Her 99,800 yuan ($12961) wedding gown comes with a 28m-long train that took 10 tailors 45 days to sew, and 20 train-bearers to carry. Now if you don't actually realise how ridiculous that is yet, Queen Elizabeth's gown was a paltry 13 feet long, and even Princess Diana's fairy tale gown was no match at 25 feet.

Posted by jialilyus at 08:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yao Ming to do lots of exercises while getting married

So after reports that Yao Ming would get married to his fiancée Ye Li, a player on the Chinese women's basketball team last year in Shanghai proved to be all but wrong, it appears the Houston Rockets star is finally ready to tie the knot this summer. According to the Rockets' Manager Daryl Morey, the couple will hold their wedding in August after Yao Ming is done with serial practices in July.

We found this gem in a report on CRIEnglish:

The manager said he believed Yao will look after himself well and do all of the necessary exercises during the summer vacation to tune up his physical fitness.

Did someone actually ask the manager if he thought Yao would be fit enough for the next season? And what exercises did they think Yao would be doing? We reckon the only exercises one should be doing while getting married would be some of the slick moves taught here, just in case Mr. Yao needs any inspiration.

And while Yao has only confirmed that he would get married in August this year, no date has been confirmed yet, leading a Chinese report to wonder aloud if he would actually choose Aug 8th, a most auspicious date for the Chinese, not just because it's the Chinese Father's Day (爸爸节), but because the Beijing Olympics open exactly a year from then.

Posted by jialilyus at 08:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

412 days to the Beijing Olympics

With just 412 days to the Beijing Olympics, work continues to be underway at the Beijing National Stadium, which was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron, in collaboration with ArupSport and China Architecture Design & Research Group, and contemporary Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei, as the Artistic Consultant for design. Also affectionately known to the Chinese as the bird's nest, the stadium comes at a cost of 3.5 billion yuan (422,873,850 USD).

Posted by jialilyus at 08:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Forbidden City

The imperial palace where the emperors resided during the Ming and the Qing dynasties is known today as the Forbidden City in English (though a more accurate translation would be the Purple Forbidden City) so named because only members of the royal clan could enter. The palace, which has been converted into a museum and tourist attraction, is located north of Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Completed in 1420, the Forbidden City took 14 long years to build and over 200,000 laborers. Over the centuries, about 24 emperors have lived there.

At 178 acres, the Forbidden City is the largest palace compound in the world. It’s surrounded and protected by both a moat six meters deep and a wall ten meters high. Rectangular in shape, the city is constructed on a north/south axis, with the most important buildings on the central axis. The Forbidden City compound includes five halls, seventeen palaces and numerous other structures. There are four gates in all – the Meridian Gate, used only by the emperor, and the Gate of Divine Might, used by all others, are the two most prominent. The palace rooftops are all yellow, the royal color, and each has a certain number of statues on it, signifying the power of the person occupying that house. The emperor’s own buildings have nine statues. There is only a single building that has one statue more than the emperor’s number.

The City is divided into two sections, namely the outer and inner courts. The emperor lived in the inner court with his wives, eunuchs and servants. The outer court, on the other hand, had several more public uses, including ceremonial purposes such as weddings and coronations. There are three major halls in the outer court, the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Gate of Supreme Harmony and the Palace of Heavenly Purity. The library archives as well as lantern storage are also in the outer court. The Heavenly Purity Hall is the most important hall in the Forbidden City, for it houses the imperial throne. The city garden, towards the northern end, has trees over three centuries old.

So large is the Forbidden City that there are several parts of the palace that are not open to the public for lack of maintenance. The city has burned numerous times, and some parts have never been restored, though work is ongoing. The restoration and protection of those parts of the City open to the public has been thorough. In particular great care seems to have been taken in reconstructing the huge wall around it. The walls are strong enough to resist even canon attacks.

Commercialization has entered the Forbidden City. Small snack and souvenir shops, including a Starbucks, are everywhere inside the compound. In the past few years there has been significant opposition to the commercialization of one of China’s greatest historical and culture monuments; the Starbucks in particular has attracted intense criticism.

Posted by jialilyus at 07:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New Mercer HR rankings on world's most expensive cities

Mercer HR Consulting has once again released the findings of their annual Cost of Living Survey (it's almost as if they release a new report every month, doesn't it?).

Here are some of their interesting findings:
1. Moscow is once again the world’s most expensive city.
2. Beijing has fallen from 14th to 20th and Shanghai from 20th to 26th.
3. Douala in Cameroon is ranked 24th, two ranks above Shanghai, which is just one rank above Kiev in Ukraine.
4. Other curious rankings: Dakar, Senegal (33); Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire (35); Lagos, Nigeria (37).
5. Los Angeles (42); Luxembourg (43)
6. Algiers in Algeria just managed to edge in at 50

Posted by jialilyus at 07:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese Students at London Graduate Fashion Week

With another London Graduate Fashion Week at an end as of Wednesday, June 6th, its time to look back at how some of China’s overseas hopefuls faired against their fellow students from around the world. Whether or not they will make an impact on the world of fashion in the future, only time will tell.

Zheng Yang Liu (University of Northumbria) (far left) - The first mainland contestant showing on day one drew inspiration from an unlikely Chinese source, the Communist Revolution. Her designs of laid back work wear with rolled up cuffs and hems made models look like they were on their way to a work unit, but with a boyish and relaxed charm. Clothes that I’m sure would have made Mao proud.

Li Xia Wang (University of Central Lancashire) (second from left) – This Shanghai native’s S&M, punk inspired collection featured leather as the signature fabric, a strange but refreshingly original choice for a Chinese designer. Unfortuntely fellow contestant, Bronagh Holme’s own leather themed collection for the University of Westminster was so amazing, Li was quickly forgotten by the majority of viewers.

Lin Yu Shan (University College of Creative Arts, Rochester) (centre) – Lin’s collection displayed many different influences including sportswear, hip-hop culture, and the modern Chinese love affair with over-the-top use of colour. I couldn’t help but feel that she wasn’t being daring enough in trying to reshape the world’s view on Chinese aesthetics and her collection looked like it had come straight off the stalls of Qipu Lu Market.

Olivia Yip (Somerset College) (second from right) – This Hong Kong native’s collection drew the most attention out of all the Chinese designers, possibly fueled by the fact that she has her own couture line available in Hong Kong. This urban collection she showed though featured frayed fabrics, tulip skirts and overalls. As expected from a couture dress maker, her craftsmanship was excellent, but it wasn’t exactly the most original. A lot of it seemed to be very similar to current ‘it’ Chinese American designer Phillip Lim’s work.

Christie Lee (University of Westminster) (far right) – Fellow Hong Kong native Lee was the only Chinese contestant this year to dare menswear. Models in Chinese opera masks wore exquisitely tailored, slightly avant-garde suits that featured Chinese brocade, ribbons, braids and details like belt loops on the ankles. The collection was most certainly a testament and homage to the long history of high quality tailoring that the former colony is known for.

Posted by jialilyus at 07:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The National Grand Theater

The face of the Chinese National Grand Theater was unveiled in Beijing on Monday when protection shields of the last thirty of nearly 20,000 titanium boards were peeled off. With the construction of the controversial building designed by the French architect Paul Andreu now nearly completed, the interior will be finished by the end of this year. The theater's bold design is as much a spectacle as the productions that will be staged inside in the 2,416-seat opera house, the 2,017-seat concert hall, and the 1,040-seat theater. At night, the semi-transparent skin will give passersby a glimpse of the performance inside one of three auditoriums, a feature that highlights the building's public nature.

Posted by jialilyus at 04:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pale is Beautiful

During the summer the beauty isle at a Western supermarket is chock full of tanning oil and spray tans -- guaranteed to give you a natural looking tan without streaking! There’s sunscreen too, for those prone to burning, but the tanning products are by far the more popular and varied. During the winter tan upkeep becomes a constant worry: tanning salons, spray tans, and Caribbean cruises are all the rage. People have been aware of the links between skin cancer and sunbathing since the 60’s, but that knowledge seems to have done little to change our love of tanned skin. In the West, tanned skin is beautiful skin.

Pale is Beaitiful What’s most striking, then, to a white woman in the beauty isle in China is the whitening cream. Everything, from body wash to body lotion promises to make your skin white and smooth and beautiful; there are even specialized facial creams that have no other purpose. During the summer, it seems like every woman in China carries an umbrella with UV protection wherever she goes. When Chinese women ride their bikes and can’t carry their umbrellas, they wear big floppy hats and long gauzy white sleeves (even in the height of summer!) to protect their skin. Faced with such a radically opposite standard of beauty, a white woman in China can’t help but ask: what gives?

The answer lies in a recent cultural shift in the West. If you look at portraits of the great kings and nobles of the past, they are almost all strikingly pale. But any modern Western magazine cover bears a picture of a movie star with a dark, rich, even tan. What changed?

For millennia the wealthy and the noble in both the West and China valued pale skin because it was a sign that a person could stay indoors all day, meaning he or she didn’t have to work for a living. Laborers had to work in the fields; they had no choice but to get a deep tan. Pale skin was therefore a sign of wealth, and it became the standard of beauty as well. Women from the Romans to Japanese geishas, to 18th century French nobles, wore thick, white, lead based makeup to give themselves the appearance of perfect and perfectly pale complexions.

However, during the twentieth century, something changed in the West. Those who weren’t laborers could afford vacations, and places with lots of sun became popular destinations, particularly the French Riviera. Sun tanning started to become popular, again because it symbolized wealth: the ability to go someplace sunny for a couple of weeks and lounge on the beach basking in the sun for hours at a time. When fashion template Coco Channel got a deep tan during her vacation to the French Riviera in the 1920’s the emerging fashion really took hold (1). That fashion has stuck around for 80 years, and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, skin cancer or no skin cancer.

In China, there has been no such parallel culture shift. Modern Chinese people continue to value pale skin as a sign of wealth and beauty just as they always have, and the standard doesn’t appear to be going anywhere any time soon, beach vacations or no beach vacations.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Saying No to No

An interesting feature of the Chinese language, and indeed of many other Asian languages, is that there are no words that translate directly to the English 'yes' and 'no'. This doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to say 'yes' or 'no' – for example, in answer to questions, an affirmative is given by repeating the verb, a negative by repeating the verb along with the word for 'not'. It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg question whether the language quirk or the cultural quirk came first, but regardless it is true that Chinese people are extremely reluctant to say no.

Part of the reason for this has to do with face. At the risk of over-simplifying, admitting that you don’t know something may cause you to lose face

Of course things are sometimes more complicated than that. Another reason Chinese people don’t like to say no is because they don’t want to appear unhelpful. If a shoe or clothing shop doesn’t have your size it’s not uncommon for the clerk to say, 'just a moment,' when she doesn’t have your size, run out of the shop, and ask her neighbors if they have your size. Then, if none of them have your size, she will come back with the closest available and offer it to you, often with the assurance that it will stretch or shrink as needed. Westerners may find this behavior frustrating, but just keep in mind that the clerk is trying her best to be as helpful as possible.

Where you may run into even more difficulty is trying to make plans with Chinese friends or other such situations. A Chinese person may say 'maybe' or change the subject to mean 'no.' A good rule of thumb is that if you don’t get a very specific agreement, it’s entirely possible that your plans aren’t as concrete as you thought they were.

Posted by jialilyus at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Olympic coins

If you’re like us, you probably have a habit of collecting crap and hoping that one day it might be worth something. If so, June 20th will be your lucky day. The People’s Bank of China is issuing a commemorative 300 RMB Olympic Coin. Even more exciting is the fact that they are only issuing the very Olympic number of 20008 (c’mon it’s only one zero off) of these 10cm in diameter coins. That is approximately 1 coin per 75,000 people in China. According to our college economics class, a small supply and a high demand should equal a very high price.

In addition, each coin contains one kilo of pure silver, which melted down would also be worth somewhere around 300 RMB. Anyway you look at it, it’s one hell of a deal. What better way to remember the Beijing Olympics than an expensive coin. Also, if you happened to get forcibly evicted from your house because of the Olympics, then you might just be able to make a little profit on the coin to find a new place to live or at least cover your medical bills after being beaten up.

The People’s Bank of China is also issuing a whole bunch of cheaper and far less exciting Olympic coins and plans to issue another batch sometime in 2008. All coins have the Beijing Olympic Logo on one side and Chinese clichés like dragons or the Great Wall on the other. There has been no news on where to obtain the coins yet, but we at Shanghaiist see a dangerous, but profitable scheme in the making.

Posted by jialilyus at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Millionaire Fair: A place for all that useless money

On Friday night, we set out to rub shoulders with Shanghai's glitterati, nouveau riche, assorted celebrities, politicians, and captains of industry at the Millionaire Fair, where we watched them splurge their hard-earned, unearned, or ill-gotten gains on some of the priciest merchandise in the known universe. There were stretch hummers, Scotch whiskey, French wines, US$350,000 diamond necklaces, and quoting from the New York Times, "Blüthner pianos, private islands off the coast of Dubai, beluga-size speedboats, snub-nosed sports cars. It is a woozy carnival of excess, with Cuervo cocktail shakers hurtling through the air and vaguely Soviet floor shows to delight or repulse, depending on how you like your entertainment served."

Among all the hubbub, a US$70,000 Limited Edition Ego Diamond laptop from Tulip Ego caught our limited attention. The chrome-plated x86 machine is encrusted with 358 diamonds set in 18 carat white gold, and the exterior is covered with genuine shark skin leather, which the salesman assured us still smells like a shark. We didn't poke our nose through the glass case for a whiff of this absurd creation, but we did express our concern for the safety of the Ego in the presence of house cats. He said that they typically sell one such bejeweled computer per show.

According to the organizers, Friday was a "black tie" affair, and in fact, prior to the event, a text message was circulated reading, "Dress code:Black suite and black tie (strickly)..." This may have been a last-minute effort to avoid the inevitable appearance of Chinese in office casual, laowai in Converse All-stars, and gay couples in matching floral shirts, but alas, shoppers were not cowed by the "strickness" of the dress-code. But realistically, who'd turn away a guy who wants to drop US$65,000 for wrist watch?

While the branding of the fair sounds like something that would appeal to China's goldrush sensibilities, in fact, Millionaire Fair is a Dutch creation. Again, quoting the New York Times,

The Millionaire concept started with Yves Gijrath, 39, an obnoxiously tan Amsterdam entrepreneur and marketing consultant who has experienced the evanescence of money. The son of a failed travel agent and a concentration-camp survivor,Gijrath made his first fortune as a marketing consultant before blowing it all on civilization’s best hotels. He then made a second fortune (and soon unmade it) in Amsterdam’s free press. A second mortgage later, he started a magazine called Quality, but with everyone trying to reach millionaires, he thought, Why not just name a magazine Millionaire? The fair seemed a clever way to split the stock.
With his history, Gijrath easily identifies the cognitive biases of the newly wealthy. "It’s like the movie Pretty Woman, when the rich guy, Richard Gere, returns to the shop with Julia Roberts and says, 'I want some maaajor sucking up.'" Russians expect this level of sucking up.

The Millionaire Fair is being held at the Shanghai Exhibition Center and runs from June 1-3 and tickets are available online here. In 2007, fairs will be held in Shanghai, Kortrijk (Belgium), Cannes, Moscow, and Amsterdam.

Posted by jialilyus at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Who's going to grace the red carpet at the SIFF?

The tenth Shanghai International Film Festival starts on June 16, and as the time draws near, people have been wondering what actors and celebs will grace the red carpet on opening night. One report we've read says that Oliver Stone, Maggie Cheung, John Woo, and Stephen Chow will be among the stars that show up. A slightly more snarky report states that Sharon Stone will show up, which is great for we connoisseurs of older women, but which the report says presents something of an image problem for SIFF because, artistically speaking, Sharon Stone is somewhat past her prime.

Posted by jialilyus at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Entropia to build a Chinese virtual world

Entropia Inc., makers of the popular virtual reality game Entropia Universe, has won the right to do the same in China:

China will soon have its first cash-based virtual world, where millions of people can work, socialize, learn and fall in love, Sweden-based Entropia Universe announced Wednesday.
Entropia said it was chosen to create an online universe of planets populated by avatars, the animated stand-ins for human users.
It took nearly a year to negotiate the deal, Entropia said, with the Cyber Recreation Development Corporation (CRD) the online entertainment division of the Beijing Municipal People's Government.

We also found out that there's a Chinese company called Hipihi that is also building a Chinese virtual reality platform (report in Chinese), which has been dubbed the Chinese version of the popular virtual reality/community program "Second Life", who also entered the competition, eventually losing ot Entropia.

Hipihi is still being beta-tested, and but the report in the above link suggests they've managed to drub up $10 million in venture capital, meaning that someone believes this just might be the next big thing. And they're not alone in this opinion,you can read what Kaiser Kuo had to say about Hipihi in a blog post from February.

One more note on Entropia, with respect to the issue of censorship:

When asked by AFP whether Entropia was adapted to the practice of Chinese officials to monitor and censor Internet use Behrmann said, "Our current system works well with the needs of CRD and China -- no special accommodations were necessary."

CRD is part of the Beijing municipal government. Hmmmm.

In any case, Entropia's China project will supposedly one day be able to support 7 million users simultaneously, with the hopes that there will eventually a be a total of 150 million users who come to this virtual world to do business, socialize, etc. We don't know what the figures for Hipihi are, but in any case we'll probably go for whichever one of the virtual worlds that has the highest percentage of the population that has loose morals.

Posted by jialilyus at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tai Chi in the Morning

Foreigners going for a jog through the streets of China’s big cities should be prepared for stares. Chinese people find this behavior strange and inexplicable and you will certainly never see Chinese people jogging. But this doesn’t mean that Chinese people don’t take exercise and physical fitness seriously; they simply choose to burn their calories a different way.

Tai Chi in the Morning Should you happen to be out and about in the early morning hours, say between 7:00 and 9:00, you’ll find China’s city parks, and any other large open spaces, filled with groups of people, generally elderly, taking their morning exercise. They go through Tai Chi forms in large groups, some with fake swords and some without.

Now, most of these people are not martial arts masters. Contrary to popular misconception, not all Chinese people know martial arts. Rather, Tai Chi is viewed as simple good exercise in much the same way as an organized dance class or yoga is. Also, because it’s about as low impact as you can get, it’s especially good exercise for the elderly, and this is perhaps why it’s so popular in that age group.

The other thing about China’s parks and open public spaces and often the courtyards of its apartment complexes is that they often have space set aside for free outdoor work out equipment. These Fitness Paths were first built in the mid-90’s as part of the Central Government’s National Fitness Campaign(1). Today there are 37 million square feet of outdoor gyms across China (2), and Chinese people put them to good use. They’re so popular early in the morning that you may have to wait your turn to use them.

These outdoor gyms have been so successful and so popular that China has exported the concept to the UK, where the first free outdoor gyms were built in Docklands this year.

Posted by jialilyus at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

666 for Luck

Not all phone numbers are created equal in China; people will pay exorbitant sums of money for some numbers, standard price for others, and avoid still others where at all possible. This is also true of bank account numbers, street addresses, license place numbers and a whole host of other numbers people use in their daily lives. The reasoning is simple. A given number one through nine, and a host of combinations thereof, sounds like another word or words, and a number is lucky or unlucky based on what that word is.

666 for Luck Since language varies quite a bit across China, which numbers are lucky and why varies quite a bit from region to region. Those listed below are the ones associated with standard Mandarin.

1: represents unity

2 Two is lucky because of the Chinese saying, “good things come in pairs”.

3 (? san1) sounds like “live” (? sheng1)

4 (? si4) sounds like death (? si3).

5 (? wu3) sounds like both “me” (? wo3) and “nothing” or “not” (? wu2)

6 (?liu4) sounds like “flowing” or “smooth” (? liu2)

7 (? qi1) sounds like “together” (? qi3)

8 (? ba1) sounds like “prosper” (? fa1)

9 (? jiu3) sounds like “long-lasting” (? jiu3)

There are also many number combinations with specific meanings.

14 can be pronounced two ways. Shi2 si4, which sounds like “ten deaths”, is the most common pronunciation, but it can also be pronounced yao2si4, which sounds like “want to die” (??yao4si3). Needless to say either pronunciation is undesirable and it’s easy to see why14 is the most unlucky number. Most buildings in China do not have a 14th floor.

54 can mean either “not die” (??wu2si3) or “I die” (?? wo3si3) so if you want to err on the side of caution you’d best avoid it.

59 (?? wu3jiu3) sounds like “short lived” (?? wu2jiu3).

520 (???wu3er2ling2) sounds like “I love you” (??? wo3ai4ni3)

666 sounds a lot like the words “things going smoothly” and is one of the luckiest numbers in Chinese, quite the opposite of its meaning in the heavily Judeo-Christian West!

888 stands for triple prosperity and is another of the luckiest numbers in Chinese.

The Chinese belief in the power of numbers is strong and deeply rooted. Gamblers won’t take rooms on any floor or in any room with a 4 in it, and product model numbers often skip right over four and go straight from three to five (the Cannon Powershot G series being a case in point).

But Chinese don’t just avoid unlucky numbers, they go out of their way, and are willing to spend large amounts of

Posted by jialilyus at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Need2LearnChinese Blog

The web log for everyone in the chinese learning community

June 26, 2007