Archive for August 4th, 2009

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Beijing Olympic – Strong jumpers lead Women’s High Jump prelims

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Marina Aitova from Kazakhstan, Ruth Beitia from Spain, Tia Hellebaut of Belgium, and Vita Styopina of Ukraine led a strong field in the Women’s High Jump qualifying rounds to qualify for the final, clearing 1.93m smoothly.

European Cup winner Ariane Friedrich of Germany was ranked second. She has a personal best of 2.03m and is sitting at No. 2 on the 2008 rankings list. She has jumped over two meters five times this year.

Vita Palamar of Ukraine and Svetlana Shkolina from Russia came in third.

Italy’s Antonietta Di Martino jumped to the fourth rank with one failure at the first attempt at clearing 1.80m.

Reigning world champion Blanka Vlasic from Croatia was ranked sixth with one miss at the 1.93m mark. She won her first world title in 2007, defeating Di Martino in Osaka with a mark of 2.05m and has not been defeated since June 2007.

Defending Olympic Games champion Elena Slesarenko from Russia also qualified. She ranked ninth.

A total of fourteen athletes will compete in the Women’s High Jump final, scheduled at 7:00 p.m. (UTC/GMT +8) on August 23 at the National Stadium.

(Source: en.beijing2008.cn)

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China Travel – Former Site of the 8th Route Army (ERA) Xi’an Office

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

The former site of the Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi’an Office lies at No 1 Qixian Zhuang (manors for seven virtuous persons), Beixin Street (a new street in the north), Xiwu Road (the fifth road in the west), Xi’an City, Shaanxi Province. It faces south and has 10 rooms. It has been rebuilt as the Memorial Museum of the Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi’an Office.

The second KMT (Kuomintang)-CCP cooperation came into being after the peaceful settlement of the Xi’an Incident in 1936. To make their deliberations over matters about the resistance against the Japanese aggression more convenient, the CPC (the Communist Party of China) established the Red Army Liaison Office.

After the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945) broke out, the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (1927-1937) was reorganized into the Eighth Army of the National Revolutionary Army. In September 1937, the Red Army liaison Office was renamed the Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi’an Office. Its main tasks were to disseminate Anti-Japanese National United Front policies, as well as expand them, organize the resistance against Japanese invaders for national salvation, escort the patriotic Progressive Youth to Yan’an to cultivate and enlarge the revolutionary force and, at the same time, purchase and transport materials to the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia border region and front, in support of the Anti-Japanese War. Numerous leaders of the CPC, such as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, Wu Yuzhang, and many others, once came here to give instructions. Many foreign friends, like Henry Norman Bethune, 1890-1939; Dwarkanath Shantaram Kotnis, 1910-1942, an Indian doctor who spent the last 10 years of his life in China working with the Communist Party; Agnes Smedley, 1890-1950, a US journalist and writer who wrote books about China’s revolution, including The Great Road — the biography of Marshal Zhu De — also lived and worked here for some time.

The Eighth Route Army (ERA) Xi’an Office is a legal office settled in the provinces under the KMT’s control. In September 1946, Chiang Kaishek started a full-scale civil war and the office was moved from Xi’an to Yan’an.

(Source: chinaculture.org)

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Chinese Culture – Palaces — A Structure of the Utmost Maturity and Highest Accomplishment

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

A palace was a structure of the utmost maturity, highest accomplishment and largest scale in China‘s development, clearly reflecting the characteristics of traditional Chinese culture which stressed a stable social and political order. A palace was the place where the emperor met his ministers and lived. In addition to meeting the emperor’s material living demands, it provided strong spiritual influence to the people and prominence to the emperor’s authority mainly through its solemn and magnificent majesty, its grand scale and compact spatial pattern.

To achieve this, ancient Chinese architects adopted three kinds of architectural artistic techniques: first was showing the (volume and quantitative) difference of architecture: the more respectable structure, the greater its volume and the quantity of single structures that form this building complex; the second was that the axial symmetric method was stressed in the layout of the complex; the third was expanding the axial symmetric layout to all capital cities, further setting off the importance of the palace. Therefore, there was an inseparably close relationship between China‘s palaces and capital cities. Their development represented the process of continuous enrichment and perfection of the above-mentioned concepts.

There were several famous palaces during the Qin and Han dynasties (221BC-220AD), such as the Epang Palace in Xianyang of the Qin Dynasty, the Weiyang Palace and Jianzhang Palace in Chang’an of the Han Dynasty. This marked the first upsurge in palatial construction, but due to remote antiquity details are not very clear.

The second upsurge was set off during the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907), such as the Daming Palace of the Tang Dynasty, and the perfectly preserved Forbidden City of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911).

（Source: chinaculture.org

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