Photos From China Part II- Feng Huang

My friend Qin Yu Chuan (friends call him Achuan) is a student of electrical engineering in Changsha who recently visited Feng Huang in southern Hunan province.

His travel photos are posted on his QQ web page, accompanied (quite endearingly, in my opinion) by both English Simon&Garfunkle and Chinese popular rock music.

The city's name Feng Huang means "phoenix" in Chinese. It was founded along the TuoJiang River in the Tang dynasty (A.D. 660) by Emperor Gaozong's son Tian YangMing, who was sent there as a punishment to suppress ethnic groups in the east.

Because so much of the traditional ethnic Miao and Tujia minority culture has survived here, it's a popular tourist destination for Chinese people and is a tourist "must see" UNESCO world heritage site.

The photos were too beautiful not to repost for my English-speaking readers. The vast majority of Chinese cities these days are filled with modern skyscrapers and highways, so it's an honor to get to see old parts of the country first hand. Thanks, Achuan, for the story telling and photo reprints.

A Miao girl in traditional costume

Achuan visited Feng Huang with a group of his university classmates. They made the rounds of the historical sites. This one is a desk decorated with 100 birds, used by an officer of the Qing dynasty.

A museum displays traditional child's attire.

Doorways throughout China are often decorated with Menshen, ("door god" posters that depict brave Tang dynasty war heros such as generals Yu Chigong and QinQiong). The chinese character on the left poster says "moon", and on the right "sun."

This ancestor worship shrine is laden with wine bottles and burnt incense from the many passersby, probably used heavily during the recent QingMing festival. During QingMing in the spring, families trek to their ancestors gravesites to perform Sao Mu, which means "sweeping the tombs." The families honor the dead by clearing weeds around the burial sites and leaving offerings of food, wine, lit incense and firecrackers to notify the dead their descendants have come for a visit. For those ancestors with no known burial site, offerings at a shrine serve the same purpose.

Even though the city is ancient, there is a thriving night life along the river.

Mmmmmmmm...it looks so delicious! Although it also looks typically spicy Hunan, so in all probability my wimpy western taste buds would rebel at all that red pepper.

Watch full length movies on your LG Voyager

Here's how to watch an .AVI movie on your LG Voyager using the 3g2 format, assuming you have a SD card inserted into the LG Voyager that has enough room on it to store the movie.

Tools you will need:
LG Voyager running firmware v07 or later (mine is v09)
PC running XP/equiv with the latest updates as of 1/2009
A tool to convert AVI/etc files to 3g2, such as this one: http://www.smallvideosoft.com/download.php

Step 0: download onto your pc an .avi movie you want to watch on the Voyager phone. Recommended location for your movies: c:/my documents/my videos.
Run the Freez 3GP video converter (or other .avi->3g2 converter, if you aren't using Freez)
Leave the Framerate at about 15
Leave the zoom mode as stretch
Set the video quality to highest (but the file size will be larger than if you choose medium or less. You decide the tradeoff.)
Set the screen resolution to 320 by 240 (perfect screen size for the Voyager is 320 by 244, but for some reason most converters offer 320 by 240 instead. )
Initial video codec should say mpeg 4
Don't change anything with audio settings, most movies will be fine keeping the sound as normal.
Set the output directory to a location you like on your pc
Set the output file format to 3GPP2 or 3G2

step 1) convert the AVI file to 3g2: If using Freez, click the ADD button on the left. Navigate to the AVI file from your hard drive that you want to copy to your phone. After you've chosen the AVI file, click the "convert now" button. Wait about 10 minutes more or less while the file converts. Your output directory now contains a *.3g2 file for your movie.

Step 2) copy the movie to your phone: On the phone, choose Settings and Tools, then Tools, then USB Mass Storage. Your PC should recognize the phone as a new USB drive on My Computer. If not, you probably need to install the USB driver that comes on the CD shipped with the phone. (Insert the cd, let autorun run, and choose "install usb drivers".) The phone will make some directories on the sd card, if it's a new SD card. One of the directories is /myflix. Copy the new *.3g2 movie file to /myflix directory, using windows copy/paste functions.

After the copy is finished, you can disconnect the phone from the PC. From the main shortcuts menu choose Media Center then Picture&Video then My Videos. Your movie should now show up now on the list of videos you can select to watch.

Enjoy!

Photos from China--my 2008 year in review photo essay

2008.2.9 A dragon from Pao Long Jie (Firecracker dragon celebration) in BinYang county, Guangxi province, last year during Chinese New Year. This year the spring festival starts 2009.1.25; last year it was on 2008.2.9. The day varies because Chinese new year is set according to the lunar calendar, not the solar calendar. Some students have already travelled home from school for the holidays.

Pao long jie really gets wild after dark. Notice these are dragons, not lions. Zhong Ying tells me the dragons are unique to BinYang. Elsewhere it's dancing lions.

Chinese New Year (spring festival) decorations at Liu's house in Gaomi, (a city south of Beijing), last year. I haven't seen his decorations yet for this year.

Liu sent me photos of his house . This is the main outdoor courtyard.

Liu's mom making the dough for bao zi (steamed yeast buns with meat filling).
Steaming the bao zi. She also taught me how she makes jiao zi (the smaller pork dumplings, no yeast in the dough) during a video session on new year's day (by the solar calendar, not chinese new year).

2008.4.7 Anti-china protesters did their best to disrupt the running of the Olympic torch all spring. The worst was an attack in Paris on Jin Jing, the paralympics fencing athlete who valiantly refused to give up the torch despite her disability. Boycotts of Paris businesses including Carrefour supermarkets ensued in protest of lax security arround JinJing that day. http://www.anti-cnn.com/ was born as a result of poor reporting of the torch protests by CNN and other media outlets including the AP.

2008.5.12 Major earthquake in Sichuan. I followed the news about it for weeks, because I have friends from there. Thousands of people died, but everybody I know from there was ok. Several schools with hundreds of school children collapsed, killing hundreds of students who were their parents' only children. The rescue was plagued with rain. Tragic!

2008.6.30 Zhong Ying got red hair not long before he left his village and went to Guang Dong to look for work. He got a job making appliances at a factory for 1500 yuan (about $250 US) a month.


2008.7.9 A Luo and A Qiang hijacked my QQ account, rearranged my photos and stole a bit of money, so I had to recover it and kick them off my buddy list. Nanping punks-- love nothing more than pestering the lao wai (foreigner). But I miss them, the way you miss a cat nipping too hard at at your arm trying to get you to play with it. They could have done more damage but they didn't, and they kept me fairly entertained.

2008.7.14 Chen finished his hotel project before the Olympics, on schedule, and sent me photos of it. He works for a company that contracted with Hyatt hotels to build the kitchen and rooftop restaurant at new Hyatt hotel in Beijing.

Chen spent over a year planning, drawing, and being project manager during the time the restaurant was built.

The wine vault. Yep, looks like a Hyatt. Chen took a well deserved vacation in the Mongolian grasslands afterward.


2008.8.13 In August, QinYu and his wife had a baby. His name is Qin Ao Sheng. The generational name is Ao, because he was born just before the Olympics (Ao Yun Hui). The coin bracelets are a good wealth omen. The coin was given to QinYu by his grandfather.

For Ao Sheng's 100 day ceremony, photos were taken.

Anne Geddes would be proud.

2008.10.13 XiaoYun got married. This is one of his engagement photos. Hen hao kan!


Look at all that gold on her hands! Quite the opulent wedding, compared to some country village weddings I've seen.

They opted for a western wedding, sans priest and white dress. A friend acted as "MC" for the ceremonial dinner. The actual wedding occurred when he drove to pick up his bride at her mother's house.

The honeymoon was at Guiyang, an area in Gui Zhou province that's home to many colorful ethnic minority groups.

2008.12.26 Rui survived the Sichuan earthquake last May, but not without spending several sleepless nights outside near the river, where it was "safe". This is the view of that river from Rui's dorm room at Ya'an University, in Sichuan province, which is about 100 miles from the center of the quake. The dorm building suffered a major vertical crack but was declared inhabitable a few days later. Rui's family lives further north, near the epicenter. Their home was damaged badly, but they are all ok.


Every time I get a photo from a friend's university, there are basketball courts and outdoor pingpong tables everywhere.

This is Bi Feng Xia, "The" panda park in Sichuan. No pandas were harmed as a result of the earthquake.

2009.1.10 Holiday travelers gather at a WuHan train station waiting to go home for Chinese New year. At least it's sunny, albeit cold! Last year, a terrible snow storm stalled transportation all over northern China and made the annual spring festival commute unbearable for millions. Spring Festival in China sees the largest annual migration of humans on the globe, as students and migrant workers travel home for the holidays and back again 2 weeks later.

2009.1.10 A friend of mine visits his cousin at WuHan technical university just before getting on the train to Binyang.

2009.1.10 Zhong Yi and his buddies enjoy a day at the Museum. Zhong Yi still has a couple of weeks of school left before he can go home for the holidays.

Fossils I haven't seen before at museums I've visited.

This art carving is part of a geological display at the museum.

Not sure which is prettier, the stone or the carved stand it's sitting on.


Is this a carving or a fossil? Zhong Yi couldn't tell me.

I think I've seen some of these stone formations at museums here in the US but I don't recognize all of them.

This, believe it or not, is an ancient seismograph. It was built by Zhang Heng, a chinese scientist who lived circa the first century C.E. It detects the direction of the nearest earthquake using mechanics inside which cause a ball to drop out of a dragon's mouth into the mouth of a frog sitting on the table. The dragon that drops the ball shows the direction of the earthquake. It works.

Not sure what dynasty this vase belongs to but my bet is Qing or later.

Dinosaur egg fossils. These look noticeably different than the roving display that appeared at the University of Oklahoma natural history museum winter 2008.

What self-respecting Chinese museum would lack an ancient jade carving?

It's Not Like We Were Taught

I found this video on anti-cnn.com; the original is on youtube. I'm reposting it here independently of youtube, because in certain parts of the world youtube is blocked off and on by censors, and I have readers in those parts of the world.

It's a very eloquently spoken account by Canadian Tu Baozi of his views as a westerner on what is going on in modern China today. Truthfully, I wish I had found and posted it in August, during the Olympics. He visited China, and found it so different than the traditional western view of China that he made this video to counter the media stories most people in the US, Canada and Europe see on tv.

"It's not like we were taught."

"How can westerners know, if they don't understand Chinese history? I think it's because westerners haven't taken the time to learn. I know, because I used to be one of those people."

"...see it for yourself and don't rely on western media to teach you about China. "

Great video TuBaoZi, I agree wholeheartedly.

History Behind Chinese Work/Travel Papers

Today I found a fascinating article explaining the evolvement of Chinese ID papers, the Chinese Hukou book, LiangPiao (money used only for food), DangAn (worker classification papers) and JieShaoXin (letter of introduction) and the effect they have historically had on the movement of people within China's borders.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Why isn't Asian history taught as a mandatory subject in US schools? Understanding the limitations on movement of Chinese workers is important for western companies employing them. American history is taught in China....the US election has been covered in detail in the party news .

Chinese Hacker Site Offers Volume Discounts

Here's a quick pictorial taken from a popular chinese hacker website 7747.net, aka Red Hacker Alliance. There are many many hacker websites in China that appear similar to this one which are well known to people making trojan software for profit (yes, people will buy it in China).

It seems obvious that a key objective in reducing hacker threats globally should be to shut down to the greatest degree possible all freelance sources of blackhat software, while incenting owners of these sites to fold into an international whitehat community dedicated to preventing and solving internet crime worldwide. "Whitehats Without Borders," if you will.

So, in that vein, I feel it would be instructive to show you what's contained on these kinds of sites. The following pages are translated using Google Translate (because it's fast and, well, because I'm lazy... so pardon the poor english, but you get the general idea).

The 7747 site offers your typical assortment of remote control and other hacker-related software, whitepapers, and tutorials that teach intrusion methods and defenses, ala l0pht in the '90's. Trouble is, these sites are still online.

The main page for 7747 offers exploit news, documentation on techniques such as DNS spoofing, specific details on selected exploits, scripts, and some handy hacker utilities. The front page also touts a VIP membership that includes access to restricted software not available to the public. If you read further, you'll find the site even offers personal training either one-on-one or in small groups of 8-10 students:

The site offers volume discounts to "recruiters" who order multiple copies of the hacker tutorial CD offered for sale:

Here's an example of the kind of software available for download on this site. This is the download page for Chinchilla, a remote control software touting "new and improved" infection model and keyloggers:

And this page is called Hacker Mall, offering various whitepapers for sale, including a "UN Security Council Resolution hacker attack and defense plan" and "The Art of Intrusion."

Apparently the owners of the site aren't too keen on you using their name in vain. This page is a disclaimer stating that you should not use the site's name when engaging in domestic attacks or web defacements (but it's ok to use their name if it's not domestic? hrm):

If you want to see the rest of the site for yourself, I recommend installing the Google Toolbar and turning on the Google Translate feature. You can then go to 7747.net and click the translate button to view something resembling an English version. The translator will try to follow along as you click links, but if it loses you or you get an error, just click the translate button again.

If you happen to work for a 3-letter agency, I'd sure be interested to know what's being done to take these kinds of sites offline. Maybe the US should be working cooperatively with Beijing to hand these freelancers some well paying consulting jobs, so these sites would start dropping off the public consumption radar screen. Feel free to email me at polkadot1977@yahoo.com with your opinions on that topic.

Chinese Characters 101

Let's start with something easy: the sound of laughing. Here are two ways to write it.

is pronounced "a" in pinyin (sounds like "o" as in "hot")

is pronounced "ha" in pinyin (same sound as "a" preceeded with h)

Pinyin is a way of representing a sound using roman letters (the ones we use in English). The 2 characters given above do sound like laughter, and are used interchangeably to mean the sound of laughter. They are always used in pairs; so, the onomatopoeia for pinyin sound "ha ha" ( which happens to be identical to how we'd spell it in English) looks like this:

Notice the square-ish box in the left hand side of each character . That's the radical for those characters, and gives a clue to the meaning. It looks like an open mouth, doesn't it? The name of the radical by itself in this case is pronounced "kou" in pinyin, and it's precise meaning is "mouth". Pinyin pronunciation is slightly different than english pronunciation of the same letters. In English instead of "kou" you'd be tempted to write "koe" as in "cove" without the "v." But in pinyin, the "o" is long and the "u" sounds like english "oo," so the proper way to spell it in pinyin is "kou."

"Radical" just means the primary "guts" of the character, around which additional strokes and their meaning/sound revolve. So, when you find "kou" as part of a Chinese character, you know that the character's meaning has something to do with the mouth.

For that reason, "kou" is called a pictogram, because it visually resembles the idea it represents, like a glyph. The earliest Chinese characters were just that, glyphs. As time went on, extra strokes were added to give subtler meaning, and sometimes characters are written 2 at a time to indicate an even more subtle meaning.

Here's a few more characters with "kou" as the radical:

chi == to eat
jiao== to call someone or to be called (by a certain name)
chang == to sing
he == to drink

Some of the more interesting pictograms:

shang == above (imagine the bottom line is a table, with an arm outstretched above it)
xia == below (top line is a table, arm outstretched below it)


ren == person (looks like a stick figure)
da == big (looks like a stick figure with arms outstretched to indicate "big")
tai== too much (something dropped from big arms to the feet)


fu == husband (1 person with 2 sets of arms; the shoulders of one bears the other)
tian == heaven or day (sky above a person with outstretched "big" arms)


li == strength (sideways view of a person bending over to pick something up)
nan == man (the farm rests on the strength of a person, ie, a man in a field bending over to harvest the crop)


mu == wood, or a single tree (a tree with 3 roots in the ground)
lin == woods, or a small grove of trees
sen lin == a forest of trees

What I adore about www.mdbg.net is that there are so many ways to drill down into the language for studying. You can explore Chinese words by searching on an English word, which will give you both the Chinese character and the pinyin sound. You can then explore the radical and other subcomponents of the character. Or, you can search starting with a pinyin sound and retrieve the Chinese character and english definition that goes with it. All of the points of view are cross referenced, complete with audio sound for every character.

What I dislike about www.mdbg.net is that it is much more accurate if you are searching from Chinese character than pinyin word. Searching on pinyin words sometimes does not produce any result at all, even though searching on specific characters might produce the same correct pinyin in the opposite direction. And sometimes searching on pinyin produces a different character than you were hoping for, if, say, you just want to quickly look up a character to copy/paste without using the Windows language bar. In short, if you want to input Chinese characters into a document, there's no substitute for a quality IME (input method editor software).

How do input methods work? Here's an example online IME at dict.cn. (I'm assuming you've already turned on the asian language settings in Windows, so you can display Chinese fonts. If not, stop here and go do that first. Go to Control Panel Regional and Language Settings and then install the East Asian language support from the Languages tab).

Let's say you want to type "tai da" (too big). Type "t" and you will see a list of likely characters for which the associated pinyin sound starts with "t". Next type "a" and then "i" and observe that the exact character you want is now #1 in the list. So type 1. If the character you had in mind were in position 3 or 6 you'd just type 3 or 6 at this point instead. The character now appears on the left, in the main text box. You can stop here and copy it into your document, or you can continue to add more characters to your text. It is now ready for you to type the next character, and the input box on the right is cleared. Now for the second word, "da". Type "d" and "a" and observe the exact character you want now appears in the top position in the list, so type 1 again. The text box on the left now contains both characters for "tai da." You can now copy the entire word/sentence and paste it into your message or document.

Using the IME software, you are repeatedly typing some pinyin word followed by some number representing its position in the list. In this case, tai1 da1. The IME software assumes you can already recognize the character you're looking for, in order to see it's location in the list and determine which number to type to produce it in your text. Excellent idea for Chinese speakers, but terrible for English speakers. Notice that at the dict.cn IME there is no English definition for the word, only the possible characters for the pinyin you typed are displayed.

There are many kinds of IME software packages running around, some of them are smart and will remember characters and definitions that you manually input for the first time. Others require periodic dictionary updates, others are not updatable at all.

I personally am looking for an IME that will give me not only the list of potential chinese characters but also a short, concise English definition for each one, (or at least display the characters as URLs I can hover my mouse over, to see alt text displaying the definition). It would make choosing the correct chinese text so much simpler for English speakers still learning Chinese.

If you know of software that does this, please send me an email, would you?

Chinese Movies on Demand--Life is Good!

The future is here, and it is: movies on demand. From.....China.

You'd think that downloading a movie from China onto your PC would take an unbearably long amount of time , but you'd be wrong. Beijing Funshion Online Technologies has done this one right.

Within about 2 minutes after installing their Funshion client software, you too can be tuning in FREE to the latest tv episodes of Top Secret Convoy or watching all your HongKong, Bollywood and Hollywood favorite movies in Mandarin, Cantonese, and/or English.

Don't go to the main Funshion english website to download the free client, though, because the download there is corrupted. But I found a working copy at a Chinese QQ tech site here that will let you install the English version of the client (click the green button on the right. Oh, and don't worry, it's virus free. Everything you find on qq.com is quality software).

Under the hood this software works the same as Vuze, it's a torrent downloader. But the search and categorization is much better. I've never been impressed with Vuze's International category; every movie seems to have a gorgeous girl on the main photo, and major titles are hard to find. Even using alternate search sites the International selection is too limited and not properly categorized.

Funshion focuses on mainstream movie entertainment and lets you make a movie selection from China the same way you would if you walked into a American movie rental store: either by choosing a category like Drama or Sci Fi, or by browsing the newest releases section.

The beauty of the Funshion search is that you can paste it via this URL into any browser that has a page translator toolbar (such as Google's translate toolbar) and with one click you can translate the entire page into English. Click again on the movie you want and Funshion starts loading it immediately.

You can view the original DVD cover and publication information about the movies and actors (some are in English with Mandarin subtitles, some are in Chinese with English subtitles, although many have no subtitles). The movies are categorized in Chinese and range from children's animated fairy tales to hot off the digital press Western and Chinese full length feature movies and television series.

Once you've made a selection, the movie downloads P2P torrent-style and starts up about as fast as any music .mp3 download. You'll be watching the movie within 2 minutes generally. I did try to find a Vuze template for the Funshion search website, but there doesn't appear to be one yet. No doubt that will be a short time in coming. (/adds that to Qiuyue's todo list).

Chinese movies in English. English movies in Chinese. Just do it!