5/11/2017: Chinese history overview, and the Muslim quarter

When our tour guides gave us the handouts for this morning's lecture -- covering Chinese history and through from prehistoric through the present, my expectations were not high.  However, by the time our speaker finished, I wanted to transcribe my notes, to try to get more of the content into my head. 

We had lunch at the University (see below), then spent 1/2 hour conversing with adult education English students.  Mine taught English to Primary school students -- I started going on about Dr. Seuss & Maurice Sendak and what fun she could have reading them to her students.  Then I got onto Jane Austen -- she had read Pride & P in Chinese but I started telling her how she should read it in English, and Persuasion and Emma...

Then we were taken to an art museum -- not all that memorable for me, and then we went to the Muslim section (aka Uighers) -- very picturesque, with lots of street food, and a mosque hundreds of years old (per stone inscriptions, it dates to the Tang dynasty -- 742CE), with peaceful, verdant courtyards.  One very old lady was there -- I asked could I take her picture, and she and her family agreed, then started telling me something about numbers -- I finally realized they were saying she was 102. 

We came back to the hotel -- we were on our own for dinner -- I went to a nearby restaurant & ordered 2 vegetarian dishes -- spicy okra and dry cooked mushrooms -- the English menu was hard to understand -- I figured I'd like one, anyway.  The waitress asked:  spicy?  I nodded vigorously.  Then another waitress came to ask, spicy?  And I nodded again.  The okra was good, and the whole meal cost RMB 54, so a bit under $8.  I left a tip, because the waitresses had been very nice, but the waitress ran outside and gave my 10 RMB back to me.

Notes from our lecture this morning: 

Prof Yang Hongying, of Xi'an International Studies Univ, started with "where are we", showing us the characters for middle (zhong) + kingdom (guo) = China.  For US, the Chinese name is beautiful (mei) + kingdom (guo), which actually helped me, because Pimsleur had used those names, but I hadn't known the meaning of the components.  Xi'an = west + peace.  The school started as a training institute for translators for Soviet technical assistance personnel.  Now, only the adult ed + continuing ed are inside the city limits -- the undergrads have been moved to the suburbs.

Yang, her family name, means poplar tree.  Hong means red and ying means brave -- hong was a popular name-component when she was born in the early 1950's, but now children get names like Ashley, and hong is "so yesterday".

Once, the universe was shaped like an egg, and Pan Gu came out -- the upper part of the egg became the sky and the lower part became the earth, and the fleas on Pan Gu became people.  Yin = earth/moon/female; Yang = sky/sun/male, and engineering students study how to take Fen Shue into account in their building plans.

Yellow = center -- most important color.

Red = south, black = north, blue = E and white = west

She talked about divination using the cracks in baked bones -- the number ad direction of the cracks all having meaning.

She talked about Taoism (day = road) as being an effort to follow the ways of nature, knowing your strengths and weaknesses.  She could long to be a basketball player, but she can't make herself grow (she's < 5').  Action by non-action -- governing is like cooking a small fish -- the less you do, the better.  Be a happy person, don't eat GMO's, have a low carbon footprint.

She talked about Kung Fuji -- be good to each other.  2,400 years ago -- rules for Brothers, Kings, children.  A mother who moved 3 x to avoid bag influences.  Filial piety, loyalty to ruler (so a Chinese mother would be more concerned about whether a child starting a new job had showed respect to boss than whether the child thought the boss was nice), love to siblings.  Nothing about wives, lack of intelligence being considered a virtue in women.  So when Prof Yan's Mom visited her and saw Yang's husband cooking, mother scolded prof. Yang.  Now Prof Yang makes sure she does the cooking when her mother visits, and gives her husb a book to read.

Confucius's Analects are his students' lecture notes.

Legalism -- need iron fist in addition to virtue in a ruler.

The exam system started 605 as a way to reduce back-Dorism -- were given at county, provincial, and national level, on 13 books, incl book of changes, history, songs.  Emphasized rote learning.  An emphasis that remains.  So when Prof Yang was advisor to a primary school on teaching English, the first test question for the children was the # of strokes in the English alphabet.  How passing the exams meant prestige -- when someone passes, your dogs and chickens rise to the sky.

Classical society had 4 classes:  scholar-officials (who had little $$), farmers, artisans, merchants (who had little power).

In response to a question -- butterfly love -- a tragedy about a young woman who dressed as a boy to attend school, and a young man who fell in love with her.  They died tragically, but were reincarnated as butterflies, in love forever. 

Her father was a teacher -- sent to farm during the cultural revolution -- he stressed to his children the things he'd learned:  how to take care of cows, grow peanuts, be a barefoot Dr.  When she was studying for the Univ entrance exams in the early 1980's, he wanted her to read Moby Dick -- she tried 10x but couldn't finish it.  When she got out of college, in a class of 108, there were 400 potential employers vying for the graduates.

In the Tang Dynasty, women had natural feet -- the 3" lotus foot came later -- it was like walking on the blade of a knife.

Tany dynasty poets -- short poems 4-5 characters per plane.  Kids even now would compete in how many they had memorized. She recited one about a man feeling depressed in the afternoon, until he saw the sunlight on a hill.

Song Dynasty:  Movable print, paper, gun powder, compas points.

Ming Dynasty:  capital moved to Beijing, voyages to India and the E coast of Africa -- 1421 China discovered the World.  They carried beans to sprout for vitamin C to ward off scurvy.

Manchu -- pig tails, and women had long fingernails.

Language reform -- in 1949, 94% of the country was illiterate.  Her grandmother learned to read by writing characters in a box of sand, not being able to afford paper.  Simplification of characters, pinyin, putonghua (common language).

Great Leap Forward -- steel made in Univ -- cattle droppings.  No one worked in the fields.  1960-63:  30 million starved to death.  But no one says famine -- only 3 years of "difficult period".  Even now, people who were children then have bowed legs.

Dang Xiaoping -- white cats, black cats both ok if catch mice.  Now also fat cats.  Her own family once lived -- parents & 3 children -- in a single room, with curtains.  Now she, her brother & sister each have multi-room apts.