Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

Here’s a gallery of gorgeous pictures of China, from lakes, fishermen, villages, farming, rivers, and mountains to more!

I am not sure who took these, but the colors are absolutely vibrant!

Sunday is Chinese New Years (春节), this year being the year of the dog, and year 4703 in the Chinese calendar:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!

Every decade, solar radiation is decreasing by 2% in China since 1954. This means it’s roughly 10% darker now than it was there, due to pollutants in the atmosphere. Livescience writes:

Eliminating clouds from the dimming equation leaves little doubt that fossil fuel emissions, which have increased by nine-fold in the past half-century, is blanketing China in a foggy haze that absorbs and deflects sunlight, the researchers say.

Isn’t it a scary idea to be living in a country pushing out so many fossil fuel pollutants that the air is literally getting thicker, darker, and harder to breath every minute? Is this the cost of rapid industrialization? Why can’t China just skip the “mistake” of using fossil fuels and go straight to hybrid/electric transportation, or efficient mass transportation?

Let me open this post with a quick picture of two chinese girls/women sharing a lesbian kiss¹ on Tienanmen Guangchang.

In the west, we’ve been seeing women making out in public for many years now. Even our most revered US celebrities (Madonna, Britney Spears) aren’t afraid to lock lips on live television. Conservatives grumble and then brush it off and forget about it, while the rest of us feel mildy aroused and then flip channels again.

In China, this is unheard of. The government is not receptive to the idea of alternate sexuality, or discussion thereof:

“China continues to talk about political reform, but closing down a cultural event is a crude reminder of the limits on openness,” said Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. “This police raid was an effort to drive China’s gay and lesbian communities underground and to silence open discussions about sexuality throughout the country.”

If you’re interested in reading more about the government’s response to homosexuality in China, give Chinese government: It’s OK to be gay, just don’t make a fuss on Danwei.

Of course the Chinese would claim that they discovered all parts of the world before the rest of us worms crawled out of caves and blinked at the sun, but the BBC reports a newly discovered map that purports to show America. The map, made in 1763 by Mo Yi Tong, claims to be a copy of a 1418 map. However, take a look at it:

Comparing this with another 15th century world map, drawn by 15th-century Italian mathematician Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, we see that not only does the Chinese map include a fairly accurate rendition of the new world, but also a much higher level of precision in the old:

I don’t believe that that a map in 1418 could be so well drawn–clearly Mo Yi Tong took the 15th century map’s style, and added his own cartographic embellishments. The BBC comes a similar conclusion:

Even if it does prove to have been drawn in 1763, sceptics will point out that we still only have the mapmaker’s word that he copied if from a 1418 map, rather than from a more recent one. But for some, this would still not make the Chinese admiral the first modern discoverer of the Americas, as they believe that Viking Leif Eriksson sailed to north America in the year 1000.

Hurray for my ancestors, the noble Vikings!!