22/04/2020
- Documentary puts China’s literary hero into context: there is Dante, there’s Shakespeare, and there’s Du Fu
- Theatrical legend Sir Ian McKellen brings glamour to beloved verses in British documentary
A ceramic figurine of Du Fu, a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty. Du is the subject of a new BBC documentary, thrilling devotees of his poetry. Photo: Simon Song
The resonant words of an ancient Chinese poet spoken by esteemed British actor Sir Ian McKellen have reignited in China discussion about its
literary history and inspired hope that Beijing can tap into cultural riches to help mend its image in the wake of
the coronavirus pandemic.
The BBC documentary Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet has provoked passion among Chinese literature lovers about the poetic master who lived 1,300 years ago.
Sir Ian Mckellen read works of ancient Chinese poet Du Fu in Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet. Photo: BBC Four / MayaVision International
The one-hour documentary by television historian Michael Wood was broadcast on television and aired online for British viewers this month but enthusiasm among Chinese audiences mean the trailer and programme have been widely circulated on video sharing websites inside mainland China, with some enthusiasts dubbing Chinese subtitles.
The documentary has drawn such attention in Du’s homeland that even the Communist Party’s top anti-graft agency has discussed it in its current affairs commentary column. Notably, Wood’s depiction of Du’s life from AD712 to 770 barely mentioned corruption in the Tang dynasty (618-907) government.
“I couldn’t believe it!!” Wood said in an email. “I’m very pleased of course … most of all as a foreigner making a film about such a loved figure in another culture, you hope that the Chinese viewers will think it was worth doing.”
Often referred to as ancient China’s “Sage of Poetry” and the “Poet Historian”, Du Fu witnessed the Tang dynasty’s unparalleled height of prosperity and its fall into rebellion, famine and poverty.
Writer, historian and presenter Michael Wood followed the footsteps of the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu in Yangtze River gorges. Photo: BBC Four / MayaVision International
Wood traced Du’s footsteps to various parts of the country. He interviewed Chinese experts and Western sinologists, offering historical and personal contexts to introduce some of Du’s more than 1,400 poems and verses chronicling the ups and downs of his life and China.
The programme used many Western reference points to put Du and his works into context. The time Du lived in was described as around the as the Old English poem
Beowulf was composed and the former Chinese capital, Changan, where
Xian is now, was described as being in the league of world cities of the time, along with Constantinople and Baghdad.
Harvard University sinologist Stephen Owen described the poet’s standing as such: “There is Dante, there’s Shakespeare, and there’s Du Fu.”
The performance of Du’s works by Sir Ian, who enjoyed prominence in China with his role as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie series, attracted popular discussion from both media critics and general audiences in China, and sparked fresh discussion about the poet.
“To a Chinese audience, the biggest surprise could be ‘Gandalf’ reading out the poems! … He recited [Du’s poems] with his deep, stage performance tones in a British accent. No wonder internet users praised it as ‘reciting Du Fu in the form of performing a Shakespeare play,” wrote Su Zhicheng, an editor with National Business Daily.
A stone sculpture at Du Fu Thatched Cottage in Chengdu city, China. Photo: Handout
On China’s popular Weibo microblog, a viewer called Indifferent Onlooker commented on Sir Ian’s recital of Du’s poem My Brave Adventures: “Despite the language barrier, he conveyed the feeling [of the poet]. It’s charming.”
Some viewers, however, disagreed. At popular video-sharing website Bilibili.com, where uploads of the documentary could be found, a viewer commented: “I could not appreciate the English translation, just as I could not grasp Shakespeare through his Chinese translated works in school textbooks.”
Watching the documentary amid the coronavirus pandemic, some internet users drew comparisons of Du to Fang Fang, a modern-day award-winning poet and novelist who chronicled her life in Wuhan during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Shanghai pictured in April. Devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic has brought about a new suspicion of China. Photo: Bloomberg
The pandemic has infected more than 2.5 million people and killed more than 170,000. It has put the global economy in jeopardy, fuelling calls for accountability. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab last week called for a “deep dive” review and the asking of “hard questions” about how the coronavirus emerged and how it was not stopped earlier.
Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at University of London, said the British establishment and wider public had changed its perception of Beijing as questions arose about outbreak misinformation and the political leverage of personal protective gear supply.
“The aggressive propaganda of the Chinese government is getting people in the UK to look more closely at China and see that it is a Leninist party-state, rather than the modernising and rapidly changing society that they want to see in China,” Tsang said.
On Sunday, a writer on the website of the National Supervisory Commission, China’s top anti-corruption agency, claimed – without citing sources – that the Du Fu documentary had moved “anxious” British audience who were still staying home under social distancing measures.
“If anyone wants to put the fear of the coronavirus behind them by understanding the rich Chinese civilisation, please watch this documentary on Du Fu,” it wrote, adding that promoting Du’s poems overseas could help “healing and uniting our shattered world”.
English-language state media such as CGTN and the Global Times reported on the documentary last week and some Beijing-based foreign relations publications have posted comments about the film on Twitter.
Wood said he had received feedback from both Chinese and British viewers that talked about “the need, especially now, of mutual understanding between cultures”.
“It is a global pandemic … we need to understand each other better, to talk to each other, show empathy: and that will help foster cooperation. So even in a small way, any effort to explain ourselves to each other must be a help,” Wood said.
He said the idea for producing a documentary about Du Fu started in 2017, after his team had finished the Story of China series for BBC and PBS.
Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet first aired in Britain on April 7 on BBC Four, the cultural and documentary channel of the public broadcaster. It is a co-production between the BBC and China Central Television.
Wood said a slightly shorter 50-minute version would be aired later this month on CCTV9, Chinese state television’s documentary channel.
The film was shot in China in September, he said.
“I came back from China [at the] end of September, so we weren’t affected by the Covid-19 outbreak, though of course it has affected us in the editing period. We have had to recut the CCTV version in lockdown here in London and recorded two small word changes on my iPhone!” Wood said.
Source: SCMP
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07/07/2019
- Five thousand-year-old ruins in Zhejiang province are the earliest known example of Chinese civilisation
- Country passes Italy to become home to the largest number of World Heritage Sites
The Liangzhu site in Zhejiang dates back to 3,500BC. Photo: Thepaper.cn
A 5,300-year old Chinese city that provides the earliest example of civilisation in the country has been named as the country’s latest Unesco World Heritage Site.
The Liangzhu Archaeological Site in Zhejiang province was designated a “cultural site” at the latest Unesco meeting in Azerbaijan, bringing the total number of Chinese heritage sites to 55 – passing Italy as the country with the largest number in the world.
The ruins, located on the outskirts of the modern city of Hangzhou, sits on the plain of river networks in the basin of the Yangtze River and date back to 3,300BC.
The site covers an area of 14.3 square kilometres, and mainly consists relics of 11 dams, cemetery sites, water conservancy system and walls that gives evidence to an early Chinese urban civilisation, with rice cultivation as the economic foundation.
An aerial view of the site. Photo: Thepaper.cn
The discovery of the site was of “primary importance” as it provides evidence of compelling evidence that Chinese civilisation started 5,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, Colin Renfrew, a retired professor of archaeology at University of Cambridge, told state news agency Xinhua.
“So when we are talking of the origins of state society in China, we can think of the Liangzhu … instead of the Shang civilisation around 1,500BC.
The site was first discovered in 1936 when a team of archaeologists unearthed some pottery and began searching for further evidence
Liangzhu is China’s 55th Unesco World Heritage Site. Photo: Thepaper.cn
A breakthrough came in 1986 when a burial site with around 1,200 artefacts made from jade, pottery and ivory was uncovered.
The walls of the city were discovered in 2007 and the surrounding water conservancy system was unearthed in 2015.
Archaeologists estimate that it would have taken 4,000 people working for a decade to build the system, according to Xinhua.
The decision to add the site to the Unesco list is the culmination of more than two decades’ work, with preliminary work starting in 1994.
The site is now open to tourists, but a maximum number allowed to visit the site is limited to 3,000 a day and bookings must be made online.
Source: SCMP
Posted in Ancient Chinese city ruins, Archaeologists, Azerbaijan, bookings, burial site, cemetery sites, Chinese civilisation, dams, economic foundation, Hangzhou, Italy, Liangzhu Archaeological Site, professor of archaeology, rice cultivation, Shang civilisation, tourists, Uncategorized, unesco world heritage site, University of Cambridge, urban civilisation, walls, water conservancy system, Yangtze River, zhejiang province |
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04/06/2019
- Brahma Chellaney writes that excessive damming and drastic overuse of water resources are causing the world’s major waterways to run dry
Vessels head for the lock of the Three Gorges Dam in Yichang, in central China’s Hubei province. Sediment build-up in the dam’s reservoir stems from silt flow disruption in the Yangtze River, Brahma Chellaney writes. Photo: Xinhua
Thanks to excessive damming and drastic overuse of water resources, an increasing number of major rivers across the world are drying up before reaching the sea.
Nowhere is this more evident than in China, where the old saying, “Follow the river and it will eventually lead you to a sea,” is no longer wholly true.
While a number of smaller rivers in China have simply disappeared, the Yellow River – the cradle of the Chinese civilisation – now tends to run dry before reaching the sea.
This has prompted Chinese scientists to embark on a controversial rainmaking project to help increase the Yellow’s flow. By sucking moisture from the air, however, the project could potentially affect monsoon rains elsewhere.
For large sections of the world’s population, major river systems serve as lifelines. The rivers not only supply the most essential of all natural resources – water – but also sustain biodiversity, which in turn supports human beings.
Yet an increasing number of rivers, not just in China, are drying up before reaching the sea.
A major new United Nations study published early this month offers grim conclusions: human actions are irremediably altering rivers and other ecosystems and driving increasing numbers of plant and animal species to extinction.
“Nature across the globe has now been significantly altered,” according to the study’s summary of findings.
The Yangtze and Jialing rivers come together in the southwestern city of Chongqing. Photo: Simon Song
Water sustains life and livelihoods and enables economic development.
If the world is to avert a thirsty future and contain the risks of greater intrastate and interstate water conflict, it must protect freshwater ecosystems, which harbour the greatest concentration of species.
The Mekong is mighty no more: book charts river’s demise
Yet, according to another study published in Nature this month humans have modified the flows of most long rivers, other than those found in the remote regions of the
Amazon and Congo basins and the Arctic.
Consequently, only a little more than one-third of the world’s 246 long rivers are still free-flowing, meaning they remain free from dams, levees and other man-made water-diversion structures that leave them increasingly fragmented.
Humans have modified the flows of most long rivers, including the Yangtze, home to some of China’s most spectacular natural scenery. Photo: WWF
Such fragmentation is affecting river hydrology, flow of nutrient-rich sediment from the mountains where rivers originate, riparian vegetation, migration of fish and quality of water.
Take the Colorado River, one of the world’s most diverted and dammed rivers. Broken up by more than 100 dams and thousands of kilometres of diversion canals, the Colorado has not reached the sea since 1998.
Sinking sands along the Mekong River leave Vietnamese homeless
The river, which originates in the Rocky Mountains and is the lifeblood for the southwestern United States, used to empty into the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.
But now, owing to the upstream diversion of 9.3 billion cubic metres (328.4 billion cubic feet) of water annually, the Colorado’s flow into its delta has been reduced to a trickle.
Altering the flow characteristics of rivers poses a serious problem for sustainable development, because they affect the ecosystem services on which both humans and wildlife depend. Photo: AP
Other major rivers that run dry before reaching the sea include the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, the two lifelines of Central Asia; the Euphrates and the Tigris in the Middle East; and the Rio Grande, which marks the border between Texas and Mexico before heading to the Gulf of Mexico.
The overused Murray in Australia and Indus in Pakistan are at risk of meeting the same fate.
Are China’s Mekong dams washing away Cambodian livelihoods?
More fundamentally, altered flow characteristics of rivers are among the most serious problems for sustainable development, because they seriously affect the ecosystem services on which both humans and wildlife depend.
Free-flowing rivers, while supporting a wealth of biodiversity, allow billions of fish – the main source of protein for the poor – to trek through their waters and breed copiously.
Urgent action is needed to save the world’s rivers, including improving agricultural practices, which account for the bulk of freshwater withdrawals
Free-flowing rivers also deliver nutrient-rich silt crucial to agriculture, fisheries and marine life.
Such high-quality sediment helps to naturally re-fertilise overworked soils in the plains, sustain freshwater species and, after rivers empty into seas or oceans, underpin the aquatic food chain supporting marine life.
China’s hyperactive dam building illustrates the high costs of river fragmentation. No country in history has built more dams than China. In fact, China today boasts more large dams than the rest of the world combined.
China’s chain of dams and reservoirs on each of its long rivers impedes the downstream flow of sediment, thereby denying essential nutrients to agricultural land and aquatic species.
A case in point is China’s Three Gorges Dam – the world’s largest – which has a problematic build-up of sediment in its own massive reservoir because it has disrupted silt flows in the Yangtze River.
Likewise, China’s cascade of eight giant dams on the Mekong, just before the river enters Southeast Asia, is affecting the quality and quantity of flows in the delta, in Vietnam.
Yangtze dams may spell end to sturgeon in a decade
Undeterred, China is building or planning another 20 dams on the Mekong.
How the drying up of rivers affects seas and oceans is apparent from the Aral Sea, which has shrunk 74 per cent in area and 90 per cent in volume, with its salinity growing nine-fold.
People beat the heat by cooling off in the Yangtze River in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province. Photo: Nora Tam
This change is the result of the Aral Sea’s principal water sources, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, being so overexploited for irrigation that they are drying up before reaching what was once the world’s fourth-largest inland lake.
Compounding the challenges is the increasing pollution of rivers. Aquatic ecosystems have lost half of their biodiversity since the mid-1970s alone.
Chinese court jails nine for dumping toxic waste in Yangtze
Urgent action is needed to save the world’s rivers. This includes action on several fronts, including improving practices in agriculture, which accounts for the bulk of the world’s freshwater withdrawals.
Without embracing integrated water resource management and other sustainable practices, the world risks a parched future.
Source: SCMP
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CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 