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New China TV
Published on Nov 1, 2018
A feast for the eyes: Stunning Shaolin #KungFu show staged on Mt. Song in Henan, a birthplace of Chinese martial arts.
Heritage of Middle Kingdom, UNESCO, Contemporary Chinese Culture: News & Images
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New China TV
Published on Nov 1, 2018
A feast for the eyes: Stunning Shaolin #KungFu show staged on Mt. Song in Henan, a birthplace of Chinese martial arts.
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People's Daily, China 人民日报
Published on Dec 11, 2018
A cute 3-yr-old monk shows off his martial arts skills at China’s renowned Shaolin Temple in Central China’s Henan Province. Now he has risen to fame on Chinese social media.
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Fire-resistant Xuan paper developed for precious calligraphy collection
CGTN
2018-12-29 17:11 GMT+8
Xuan paper, a type of handmade paper, was originally produced in ancient China and used for both Chinese calligraphy and paintings. The procedure of making Xuan paper was listed as a world intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2009.
File of workers making Xuan Paper in Xuancheng city, Anhui Province. /VCG Photo
The raw materials need to produce Xuan paper are found in Jingxian county, east China's Anhui Province and as of late, are in short supply.
The traditional handmade method of Xuan paper involves more than 100 steps and takes nearly two years. It has a low output and high cost. Xuan paper made with organic materials often suffers from degradation, yellowing and deteriorating properties during the long-term natural aging process.
Furthermore, the most lethal problem of traditional Xuan paper is its high flammability.
Researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics of the CAS developed a new kind of highly flexible Xuan paper with excellent fire resistance, long durability, high whiteness and excellent anti-mildew qualities benefiting from its totally inorganic origin, which is far superior over traditional Xuan paper.
Xuan Paper /VCG Photo
The inorganic analogous Xuan paper had no obvious signs of deterioration after a simulated aging process of 3,000 years.
Its whiteness remained at 86.7 percent after the simulation, while the traditional Xuan paper had less than 42.5 percent whiteness.
The production process of the newly-developed Xuan paper takes only two to three days to make instead of the usual two years for traditional Xuan paper.
The excellent nonflammability and high thermal stability of the new Xuan paper can safeguard China's precious calligraphy and paintings, documents, books and archives for a very long period of time.
CGTN
2018-12-29 17:11 GMT+8
Xuan paper, a type of handmade paper, was originally produced in ancient China and used for both Chinese calligraphy and paintings. The procedure of making Xuan paper was listed as a world intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2009.
File of workers making Xuan Paper in Xuancheng city, Anhui Province. /VCG Photo
The raw materials need to produce Xuan paper are found in Jingxian county, east China's Anhui Province and as of late, are in short supply.
The traditional handmade method of Xuan paper involves more than 100 steps and takes nearly two years. It has a low output and high cost. Xuan paper made with organic materials often suffers from degradation, yellowing and deteriorating properties during the long-term natural aging process.
Furthermore, the most lethal problem of traditional Xuan paper is its high flammability.
Researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Ceramics of the CAS developed a new kind of highly flexible Xuan paper with excellent fire resistance, long durability, high whiteness and excellent anti-mildew qualities benefiting from its totally inorganic origin, which is far superior over traditional Xuan paper.
Xuan Paper /VCG Photo
The inorganic analogous Xuan paper had no obvious signs of deterioration after a simulated aging process of 3,000 years.
Its whiteness remained at 86.7 percent after the simulation, while the traditional Xuan paper had less than 42.5 percent whiteness.
The production process of the newly-developed Xuan paper takes only two to three days to make instead of the usual two years for traditional Xuan paper.
The excellent nonflammability and high thermal stability of the new Xuan paper can safeguard China's precious calligraphy and paintings, documents, books and archives for a very long period of time.
JSCh
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OUTLOOK * 06 FEBRUARY 2019
The growth of tea
Genetic studies of today’s tea plants are providing clues to how the plant was first domesticated.
Liam Drew
Credit: Susan Burghart
In around AD 500, according to legend, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma spent nine years facing the wall of a cave, silently meditating yet remaining awake and focused. Eventually, though, he dozed off, and when he awoke he was so angry with himself that he ripped off his eyelids and threw them to the ground in disgust. From this discarded flesh grew a plant from which Bodhidharma’s followers could make a beverage that both stimulated their minds and calmed their nerves. It was the first tea plant, and the drink was perfect for meditating monks.
The plant’s recently sequenced genome tells a different story, however, meaning that scientists will have to construct a more plausible account of tea’s transformation from a plant growing wild in China to a crop that is the basis of the world’s second-most popular drink, after water. Every day the world’s population consumes more than 2 billion cups of tea. Tea is grown commercially in more than 60 countries and yields an annual harvest of more than 5 million tonnes of leaves, which are plucked or cut from the plants’ freshest growth.
The tea plant’s journey is reflected in its name, Camellia sinensis. Camellia indicates that tea is a woody plant, closely related to the ornamental bushes that have earned a place in innumerable gardens owing to their flowers, and sinensis signifies its Chinese origins.
The spread of tea production and consumption from China to the rest of the world is well documented. Tea was taken to Japan by another Buddhist priest in around the year 1200. The Dutch brought tea to Europe in 1610, and the English developed a taste for it around 50 years later. Until the mid-nineteenth century, China supplied the West with tea, but after decades of tension, resulting in the Opium Wars, Britain sought to cultivate tea for itself in India. From there, tea farming spread through the British Empire and beyond.
But it is harder to determine when, where and why tea was first domesticated, as that occurred before reliable written records began to be kept. It is thought to have been first used in China as a medicinal herb, probably favoured for its mild stimulatory properties, before becoming a beverage revered for its delicate flavours. Present estimates place this first use at 3,500–4,000 years ago. But, “The first unambiguous mention of tea in a text came from an employment contract from about 2,000 years ago,” says Lawrence Zhang, a historian at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “One of the things the servant was supposed to do was go to market and buy this plant for his master.”
The earliest archaeological evidence of tea drinking falls into a similar timeframe. In 2016, the distinctive molecular components of tea were found in plant matter collected in northeastern China and Tibet, and then carbon-dated to about 2,100 years old1. But to go further back, to the earliest domestic history of tea, biologists are looking for clues in the DNA of today’s tea plants.
Choosing traits
It is overly simplistic to imagine that there is a moment at which a wild plant transforms into an agricultural product. “Usually there’s an initial domestication followed by a long period of improvement,” says Jonathan Wendel, a plant evolutionary genomicist at Iowa State University in Ames. “And that improvement is still going on in many of our plants and animals.”
For every plant currently grown by humans, that initial domestication involved humans taking an interest in wild-growing plants — at first gathering fruit or leaves, for example — and then starting to cultivate them for their own use. Consciously or not, growers preferentially propagating the plants that best provide the qualities they want exposes that species to artificial selection.
Over time, this usually results in big changes to the species. For example, teosinte, the wild ancestor of maize (corn), is a highly branched wild grass bearing many tiny ears of corn — strikingly different to the robust single stems of cultivated maize that produce just a few large ears. By contrast, however, farmed brazil nuts are almost indistinguishable from their wild forebears.
The origins of tea are clouded by the fact that wild C. sinensis plants have never been identified unequivocally. Close cousins of C. sinensis grow wild in China and neighbouring countries today, but they clearly belong to different species. And where wild-growing C. sinensis has been found, most scientists think that such plants are feral ones descended from crops.
This situation is not particularly unusual. “It’s become a truism that the wild forms of most of our domesticated crops don’t exist — they can’t be found,” says Wendel. There are many reasons for this, he explains. The plant might have been rare and driven to extinction, for example. But why ever it was, this means that researchers do not know the point from which tea domestication proceeded. They have not seen the plant that was first exploited by humans, so they do not know which of the modern plant’s traits were introduced by people. Rather, they must try to infer this information from hints in the plant’s DNA and its biology.
Breeding tea probably selected for traits such as higher yield, perhaps by choosing plants with seasonal uniformity in growth and resistance to cold and disease. But, almost certainly, there would also have been selection for the production of compounds that make drinking tea a pleasurable experience. “Tea’s quality is mainly due to its secondary metabolites,” says Colin Orians, an ecologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. But these chemicals “are not there to make tea taste good for humans”, he says. Instead, they are the products of biochemical pathways that aid the tea plant’s survival.
We can’t be sure why each of tea’s components evolved, Orians says, but some general principles provide clues. The caffeine that gives tea its stimulatory effects is a neurotoxin to insects and other invertebrates, and might have antimicrobial benefits. Catechins — compounds that contribute to tea’s bitterness and are credited with mediating the potential health benefits of tea drinking — are flavonoids, which are a range of antioxidant molecules that help plants to deal with oxidative stress. Some also offer the plant protection from herbivores or shield it from ultraviolet radiation. And theanine — the chemical linked to tea’s potential calming effects — is an amino acid that is likely to contribute to nitrogen biochemistry and the synthesis of plant material.
Some combination of these compounds first drew people to wild tea plants, but since then, their relative abundances have probably been shifted by artificial selection. “I have no doubt that we started liking tea because of the caffeine,” says Orians, “but we like our stimulants to taste good too.” Early texts about tea, dating from the eighth century, show that it was often prepared with extra flavourings such as onion, ginger, salt or orange, suggesting that the tea alone was unpalatable. The taste was improved by innovations in processing the leaves — these methods enabled the production of green, white, black and oolong teas from the same plant — but tea was also likely to have been bred for better taste. Certainly, there is much experimentation in growing tea cultivars — varieties created through selective breeding — with new flavour profiles, even today. But it is not clear when flavour began to drive selection.
A, C, G and tea
In the past two decades, genetic analyses have transformed understanding of the origins of many crops, including maize, olives and rice. Now, tea is joining them.
As plants are domesticated, they become ever more genetically distinct from their wild ancestors. They accumulate mutations that underlie the traits for which growers select, and variants found on regions of chromosomes close to those mutations can spread alongside them. As time passes, random genetic differences are also amassed. Therefore, the species change genetically, and each plant strain that is kept apart from other strains by growers will also develop its own genetic profile. Without a wild ancestor to characterize, these changes can’t be observed directly, but cataloguing the genotypes of current strains enables geneticists to infer some of this history.
Analysis of the genetic differences between cultivated strains reveals most reliably how closely related the strains are. The more related that two strains turn out to be, the more recently they shared a common ancestor. Geneticists can therefore analyse today’s cultivars to draw family trees that depict their relationships. Deriving such evolutionary histories for cultivated plants is complicated by crosses between cultivars, but the hybrids that result typically have genotypes that are clearly a mixture of two distinct sets of parental genes.
Tea harvesting in Assam, India.Credit: Abbie Tryler-Smith/Panos
Geneticists can also infer which genome regions have been selected by tea growers. When a favourable genetic trait spreads quickly through a population — owing to farmers choosing to breed only tea plants that have it — an entire chromosomal region hitches a ride. This means that other versions of the genomic region are banished, and that the stretch of the genome will not vary much between strains and individual plants — a sure sign to geneticists that the region contains one or more genes related to a valuable trait.
Researchers have been using genetics to try to determine relationships between tea strains for 20 years, and have applied increasingly sophisticated genetic tools. There are now approximately 1,500 cultivars, which have conventionally been grouped in particular ways. The most obvious divide is between Chinese tea (C. sinensis var. sinensis) and Assam tea (C. sinensis var. assamica), which is named after the Assam region in India where it was first grown. Chinese tea has smaller leaves than does Assam tea and is more tolerant of colder climates. Assam tea accounts for only a small fraction of tea grown in China but is widely grown in India and other hot countries. The relationship between these two varieties has long been uncertain, however, and it has also been unclear how other major subtypes, including Khmer tea, are related to them.
Work led by Lian-Ming Gao, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Kunming Institute of Botany, suggests that there are three distinct genetic lineages of tea plants. And, provocatively, Gao’s team proposes that this finding indicates that tea was domesticated on three separate occasions. The first sort is Chinese tea, which the authors say probably comes from southern China. But they find two distinct types of Assam tea: a Chinese tea from the southwestern province of Yunnan, and an Indian one from the Assam region. Their analyses also show that Khmer tea is not a separate lineage in its own right, but rather a hybrid of the assamica and sinensis cultivars.
The initial findings were based on genomic fragments from 300 samples of tea from China and 92 from India. Two more studies by Gao’s team, using chloroplast DNA and more sophisticated sequencing techniques, have subsequently supported these groupings. It has long been suggested that Chinese and Assam tea might have distinct origins, but the idea that Assam tea consists of two distinct lineages that were domesticated separately is more controversial.
Gao’s team then used its genetic data to estimate when the three lineages diverged. Taking the genetic differences between strains, and then estimating the rate at which genetic changes accumulate in such plants, researchers can calculate when lineages probably last shared a common ancestor. Such calculations suggested that the sinensis and assamica varieties diverged 22,000 years ago — long before any suggested date for the domestication of tea, and consistent with two wild populations having been domesticated independently.
The date for the Chinese and Indian assamica lines splitting is much more recent at 2,770 years ago — after tea was first domesticated. It is therefore open to debate whether these lineages were domesticated independently. Possibly, the assamica variety was domesticated only once, and was transported by people from one region to the other, allowing it to evolve separately in the two locations. “There have been three different gene pools demonstrated,” Wendel says, “but that’s a far cry from three different domestications.”
Xiao-Chun Wan, a biochemist at the State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization at Anhui Agricultural University in China, is also sceptical about this conclusion. In 2016, Wan’s group published a study2 of tea’s evolutionary relationships, also using genomic fragments, that demonstrated a clear separation between domesticated C. sinensis and wild tea species, and showed that the sinensis variety forms a genetic cluster apart from the assamica variety, although he did not compare Indian and Chinese forms of assamica.
In the same study, Wan’s group also attempted to identify genetic footprints that would reveal the selection process that domesticated tea has undergone. They found preliminary evidence of selection for several enzymes involved in the generation of secondary metabolites, including caffeine. Their work shows the sorts of analysis that should become even more powerful now that a complete genome is available, says Wendel.
The C. sinensis var. assamica genome3 was published in 2017, and Wan’s group published a draft sequence4 of the C. sinensis var sinensis genome in 2018. These data provided insight into the evolution of caffeine biosynthesis in tea. Wan says that the genome, which took a decade for his group to assemble, “provides a solid foundation for the investigation of domestication in tea plants”, making it possible to do more detailed surveys of the differences between strains. For a start, comparison of these full genomes indicated that the assamica and sinensis varieties diverged much earlier than suggested by Gao’s team, with the first estimate being 380,000–1,500,000 years ago4.
The suggestion that the sinensis and assamica varieties were domesticated independently draws attention to events in the nineteenth century, when Britain first sought to cultivate tea in India. A crucial advance came when, in the 1840s, Robert Fortune, a botanist from Scotland, stole tea plants from China to start plantations in India — and brought Chinese tea farmers with him to do so. Fortune’s heist is consistent with the idea that C. sinensis was domesticated just once — in China.
At the time of the theft, Britain was already growing some tea in India — but it was the assamica variety. In 1823, Robert Bruce, also from Scotland, had travelled along the Assam Valley. There, he learned of a wild tea that was harvested and consumed — sometimes as a vegetable, other times as a fermented drink — by the indigenous Singpho people. Because the plant had larger leaves than the Chinese tea with which he was familiar, Bruce was unsure whether it was a genuine tea. After his death, his brother, Charles Bruce, started to cultivate Assam tea in India — more than a decade before Fortune’s exploits.
Colin Orians (with camera) and colleagues hunt for tea green leafhoppers, an insect pest that damages tea leaves (inset), in Shaxian, China.Credit: Main: Xin Li; Inset: Eric R. Scott
The Singpho people might therefore have been responsible for a second, independent domestication of tea, although the possibility remains that migrating tribes such as the Shan people of southeast Asia brought this tea to Assam from elsewhere. It might also be the case that Assam tea was domesticated independently in China. But Yunnan, the main province in China in which this tea is grown, is less than 1,000 kilometres from Assam. Agricultural exchange therefore seems possible.
Genetic analyses will elucidate the relationships between assamica cultivars. Yet such methods are best deployed in tandem with historical and archaeological evidence.
New brews
The other problem when defining domestication is that tea varieties are still being refined. Eric Scott, a PhD student at Tufts University who works with Orians on plant defence mechanisms, spent June and July 2017 at Shanfu Tea Company in Shaxian, China, studying how tea growers are using different varieties to make the best version of a newly popular type of tea.
The tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii) is an insect that eats tea plants, and the conventional response to an attack was to discard the affected leaves. But in the 1930s, farmers in Taiwan found that the surviving leaves yielded an excellent tea. When attacked by leafhoppers, tea plants respond by producing a chemical alarm signal that attracts jumping spiders, a natural predator of leafhoppers. “Those alarm signals just happen to be delicious,” says Scott. “They have a really nice honey, fruity aroma that ends up in the processed tea and really increases the quality.” This Eastern Beauty tea is fashionable at the moment, so farmers are exploring which varieties are most favourably transformed by their defence mechanism against this insect.
Scott stresses that this is just one example of farmers exploring new varieties to make better tea, along with theanine-rich, catechin-poor albino mutants and purple-leaved varieties. Zhang agrees, saying that tea production in India is focused on “big plantations, industrialized processing and more central quality control”, whereas in East Asia, tea is grown mostly on small farms and with more diversification. “Tea is constantly moving,” he says.
Because the selective force of people never stays still, the genetics will always be changing, says Orians. “Domestication never ends.”
The growth of tea | Nature
The growth of tea
Genetic studies of today’s tea plants are providing clues to how the plant was first domesticated.
Liam Drew
In around AD 500, according to legend, the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma spent nine years facing the wall of a cave, silently meditating yet remaining awake and focused. Eventually, though, he dozed off, and when he awoke he was so angry with himself that he ripped off his eyelids and threw them to the ground in disgust. From this discarded flesh grew a plant from which Bodhidharma’s followers could make a beverage that both stimulated their minds and calmed their nerves. It was the first tea plant, and the drink was perfect for meditating monks.
The plant’s recently sequenced genome tells a different story, however, meaning that scientists will have to construct a more plausible account of tea’s transformation from a plant growing wild in China to a crop that is the basis of the world’s second-most popular drink, after water. Every day the world’s population consumes more than 2 billion cups of tea. Tea is grown commercially in more than 60 countries and yields an annual harvest of more than 5 million tonnes of leaves, which are plucked or cut from the plants’ freshest growth.
The tea plant’s journey is reflected in its name, Camellia sinensis. Camellia indicates that tea is a woody plant, closely related to the ornamental bushes that have earned a place in innumerable gardens owing to their flowers, and sinensis signifies its Chinese origins.
The spread of tea production and consumption from China to the rest of the world is well documented. Tea was taken to Japan by another Buddhist priest in around the year 1200. The Dutch brought tea to Europe in 1610, and the English developed a taste for it around 50 years later. Until the mid-nineteenth century, China supplied the West with tea, but after decades of tension, resulting in the Opium Wars, Britain sought to cultivate tea for itself in India. From there, tea farming spread through the British Empire and beyond.
But it is harder to determine when, where and why tea was first domesticated, as that occurred before reliable written records began to be kept. It is thought to have been first used in China as a medicinal herb, probably favoured for its mild stimulatory properties, before becoming a beverage revered for its delicate flavours. Present estimates place this first use at 3,500–4,000 years ago. But, “The first unambiguous mention of tea in a text came from an employment contract from about 2,000 years ago,” says Lawrence Zhang, a historian at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “One of the things the servant was supposed to do was go to market and buy this plant for his master.”
The earliest archaeological evidence of tea drinking falls into a similar timeframe. In 2016, the distinctive molecular components of tea were found in plant matter collected in northeastern China and Tibet, and then carbon-dated to about 2,100 years old1. But to go further back, to the earliest domestic history of tea, biologists are looking for clues in the DNA of today’s tea plants.
Choosing traits
It is overly simplistic to imagine that there is a moment at which a wild plant transforms into an agricultural product. “Usually there’s an initial domestication followed by a long period of improvement,” says Jonathan Wendel, a plant evolutionary genomicist at Iowa State University in Ames. “And that improvement is still going on in many of our plants and animals.”
For every plant currently grown by humans, that initial domestication involved humans taking an interest in wild-growing plants — at first gathering fruit or leaves, for example — and then starting to cultivate them for their own use. Consciously or not, growers preferentially propagating the plants that best provide the qualities they want exposes that species to artificial selection.
Over time, this usually results in big changes to the species. For example, teosinte, the wild ancestor of maize (corn), is a highly branched wild grass bearing many tiny ears of corn — strikingly different to the robust single stems of cultivated maize that produce just a few large ears. By contrast, however, farmed brazil nuts are almost indistinguishable from their wild forebears.
The origins of tea are clouded by the fact that wild C. sinensis plants have never been identified unequivocally. Close cousins of C. sinensis grow wild in China and neighbouring countries today, but they clearly belong to different species. And where wild-growing C. sinensis has been found, most scientists think that such plants are feral ones descended from crops.
This situation is not particularly unusual. “It’s become a truism that the wild forms of most of our domesticated crops don’t exist — they can’t be found,” says Wendel. There are many reasons for this, he explains. The plant might have been rare and driven to extinction, for example. But why ever it was, this means that researchers do not know the point from which tea domestication proceeded. They have not seen the plant that was first exploited by humans, so they do not know which of the modern plant’s traits were introduced by people. Rather, they must try to infer this information from hints in the plant’s DNA and its biology.
Breeding tea probably selected for traits such as higher yield, perhaps by choosing plants with seasonal uniformity in growth and resistance to cold and disease. But, almost certainly, there would also have been selection for the production of compounds that make drinking tea a pleasurable experience. “Tea’s quality is mainly due to its secondary metabolites,” says Colin Orians, an ecologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. But these chemicals “are not there to make tea taste good for humans”, he says. Instead, they are the products of biochemical pathways that aid the tea plant’s survival.
We can’t be sure why each of tea’s components evolved, Orians says, but some general principles provide clues. The caffeine that gives tea its stimulatory effects is a neurotoxin to insects and other invertebrates, and might have antimicrobial benefits. Catechins — compounds that contribute to tea’s bitterness and are credited with mediating the potential health benefits of tea drinking — are flavonoids, which are a range of antioxidant molecules that help plants to deal with oxidative stress. Some also offer the plant protection from herbivores or shield it from ultraviolet radiation. And theanine — the chemical linked to tea’s potential calming effects — is an amino acid that is likely to contribute to nitrogen biochemistry and the synthesis of plant material.
Some combination of these compounds first drew people to wild tea plants, but since then, their relative abundances have probably been shifted by artificial selection. “I have no doubt that we started liking tea because of the caffeine,” says Orians, “but we like our stimulants to taste good too.” Early texts about tea, dating from the eighth century, show that it was often prepared with extra flavourings such as onion, ginger, salt or orange, suggesting that the tea alone was unpalatable. The taste was improved by innovations in processing the leaves — these methods enabled the production of green, white, black and oolong teas from the same plant — but tea was also likely to have been bred for better taste. Certainly, there is much experimentation in growing tea cultivars — varieties created through selective breeding — with new flavour profiles, even today. But it is not clear when flavour began to drive selection.
A, C, G and tea
In the past two decades, genetic analyses have transformed understanding of the origins of many crops, including maize, olives and rice. Now, tea is joining them.
As plants are domesticated, they become ever more genetically distinct from their wild ancestors. They accumulate mutations that underlie the traits for which growers select, and variants found on regions of chromosomes close to those mutations can spread alongside them. As time passes, random genetic differences are also amassed. Therefore, the species change genetically, and each plant strain that is kept apart from other strains by growers will also develop its own genetic profile. Without a wild ancestor to characterize, these changes can’t be observed directly, but cataloguing the genotypes of current strains enables geneticists to infer some of this history.
Analysis of the genetic differences between cultivated strains reveals most reliably how closely related the strains are. The more related that two strains turn out to be, the more recently they shared a common ancestor. Geneticists can therefore analyse today’s cultivars to draw family trees that depict their relationships. Deriving such evolutionary histories for cultivated plants is complicated by crosses between cultivars, but the hybrids that result typically have genotypes that are clearly a mixture of two distinct sets of parental genes.
Geneticists can also infer which genome regions have been selected by tea growers. When a favourable genetic trait spreads quickly through a population — owing to farmers choosing to breed only tea plants that have it — an entire chromosomal region hitches a ride. This means that other versions of the genomic region are banished, and that the stretch of the genome will not vary much between strains and individual plants — a sure sign to geneticists that the region contains one or more genes related to a valuable trait.
Researchers have been using genetics to try to determine relationships between tea strains for 20 years, and have applied increasingly sophisticated genetic tools. There are now approximately 1,500 cultivars, which have conventionally been grouped in particular ways. The most obvious divide is between Chinese tea (C. sinensis var. sinensis) and Assam tea (C. sinensis var. assamica), which is named after the Assam region in India where it was first grown. Chinese tea has smaller leaves than does Assam tea and is more tolerant of colder climates. Assam tea accounts for only a small fraction of tea grown in China but is widely grown in India and other hot countries. The relationship between these two varieties has long been uncertain, however, and it has also been unclear how other major subtypes, including Khmer tea, are related to them.
Work led by Lian-Ming Gao, a plant evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Kunming Institute of Botany, suggests that there are three distinct genetic lineages of tea plants. And, provocatively, Gao’s team proposes that this finding indicates that tea was domesticated on three separate occasions. The first sort is Chinese tea, which the authors say probably comes from southern China. But they find two distinct types of Assam tea: a Chinese tea from the southwestern province of Yunnan, and an Indian one from the Assam region. Their analyses also show that Khmer tea is not a separate lineage in its own right, but rather a hybrid of the assamica and sinensis cultivars.
The initial findings were based on genomic fragments from 300 samples of tea from China and 92 from India. Two more studies by Gao’s team, using chloroplast DNA and more sophisticated sequencing techniques, have subsequently supported these groupings. It has long been suggested that Chinese and Assam tea might have distinct origins, but the idea that Assam tea consists of two distinct lineages that were domesticated separately is more controversial.
Gao’s team then used its genetic data to estimate when the three lineages diverged. Taking the genetic differences between strains, and then estimating the rate at which genetic changes accumulate in such plants, researchers can calculate when lineages probably last shared a common ancestor. Such calculations suggested that the sinensis and assamica varieties diverged 22,000 years ago — long before any suggested date for the domestication of tea, and consistent with two wild populations having been domesticated independently.
The date for the Chinese and Indian assamica lines splitting is much more recent at 2,770 years ago — after tea was first domesticated. It is therefore open to debate whether these lineages were domesticated independently. Possibly, the assamica variety was domesticated only once, and was transported by people from one region to the other, allowing it to evolve separately in the two locations. “There have been three different gene pools demonstrated,” Wendel says, “but that’s a far cry from three different domestications.”
Xiao-Chun Wan, a biochemist at the State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization at Anhui Agricultural University in China, is also sceptical about this conclusion. In 2016, Wan’s group published a study2 of tea’s evolutionary relationships, also using genomic fragments, that demonstrated a clear separation between domesticated C. sinensis and wild tea species, and showed that the sinensis variety forms a genetic cluster apart from the assamica variety, although he did not compare Indian and Chinese forms of assamica.
In the same study, Wan’s group also attempted to identify genetic footprints that would reveal the selection process that domesticated tea has undergone. They found preliminary evidence of selection for several enzymes involved in the generation of secondary metabolites, including caffeine. Their work shows the sorts of analysis that should become even more powerful now that a complete genome is available, says Wendel.
The C. sinensis var. assamica genome3 was published in 2017, and Wan’s group published a draft sequence4 of the C. sinensis var sinensis genome in 2018. These data provided insight into the evolution of caffeine biosynthesis in tea. Wan says that the genome, which took a decade for his group to assemble, “provides a solid foundation for the investigation of domestication in tea plants”, making it possible to do more detailed surveys of the differences between strains. For a start, comparison of these full genomes indicated that the assamica and sinensis varieties diverged much earlier than suggested by Gao’s team, with the first estimate being 380,000–1,500,000 years ago4.
The suggestion that the sinensis and assamica varieties were domesticated independently draws attention to events in the nineteenth century, when Britain first sought to cultivate tea in India. A crucial advance came when, in the 1840s, Robert Fortune, a botanist from Scotland, stole tea plants from China to start plantations in India — and brought Chinese tea farmers with him to do so. Fortune’s heist is consistent with the idea that C. sinensis was domesticated just once — in China.
At the time of the theft, Britain was already growing some tea in India — but it was the assamica variety. In 1823, Robert Bruce, also from Scotland, had travelled along the Assam Valley. There, he learned of a wild tea that was harvested and consumed — sometimes as a vegetable, other times as a fermented drink — by the indigenous Singpho people. Because the plant had larger leaves than the Chinese tea with which he was familiar, Bruce was unsure whether it was a genuine tea. After his death, his brother, Charles Bruce, started to cultivate Assam tea in India — more than a decade before Fortune’s exploits.
The Singpho people might therefore have been responsible for a second, independent domestication of tea, although the possibility remains that migrating tribes such as the Shan people of southeast Asia brought this tea to Assam from elsewhere. It might also be the case that Assam tea was domesticated independently in China. But Yunnan, the main province in China in which this tea is grown, is less than 1,000 kilometres from Assam. Agricultural exchange therefore seems possible.
Genetic analyses will elucidate the relationships between assamica cultivars. Yet such methods are best deployed in tandem with historical and archaeological evidence.
New brews
The other problem when defining domestication is that tea varieties are still being refined. Eric Scott, a PhD student at Tufts University who works with Orians on plant defence mechanisms, spent June and July 2017 at Shanfu Tea Company in Shaxian, China, studying how tea growers are using different varieties to make the best version of a newly popular type of tea.
The tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii) is an insect that eats tea plants, and the conventional response to an attack was to discard the affected leaves. But in the 1930s, farmers in Taiwan found that the surviving leaves yielded an excellent tea. When attacked by leafhoppers, tea plants respond by producing a chemical alarm signal that attracts jumping spiders, a natural predator of leafhoppers. “Those alarm signals just happen to be delicious,” says Scott. “They have a really nice honey, fruity aroma that ends up in the processed tea and really increases the quality.” This Eastern Beauty tea is fashionable at the moment, so farmers are exploring which varieties are most favourably transformed by their defence mechanism against this insect.
Scott stresses that this is just one example of farmers exploring new varieties to make better tea, along with theanine-rich, catechin-poor albino mutants and purple-leaved varieties. Zhang agrees, saying that tea production in India is focused on “big plantations, industrialized processing and more central quality control”, whereas in East Asia, tea is grown mostly on small farms and with more diversification. “Tea is constantly moving,” he says.
Because the selective force of people never stays still, the genetics will always be changing, says Orians. “Domestication never ends.”
The growth of tea | Nature
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Massive collection of bamboo, wooden slips found in Hubei tomb
By WANG KAIHAO | China Daily | Updated: 2019-05-14 09:01
Researchers from Jingzhou Museum clean bamboo and wooden slips in a lab. [Photo provided to China Daily]
The number of bamboo and wooden slips found at a tomb complex in China is the most among any ancient tomb in the country so far.
As many as 4,546 slips were recently unearthed from a 2,000-year-old tomb in Jingzhou, Hubei province, as announced in a news conference in Beijing last week.
This excavation is expected to offer vast knowledge of Chinese society back then.
Before papermaking was invented in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), bamboo and wooden slips were the main media for writing in China.
The reservoir of slips was found inside one of 18 tombs in a graveyard from the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), which were excavated by archaeologists in 2018. The heritage site is on the northern outskirts of Jingzhou and less than 1 kilometer from the ruins of a contemporaneous city.
Li Zhifang, an associate researcher from Jingzhou Museum, says the new finding covers a wide range. The unearthed materials include 200 slips of calendars and ephemeris, 70 slips of chronicles, 1,500 legal documents and 1,000 medical treatments that were not only for humans but also for curing animals and plants.
"We have cleaned only a small portion of the slips," Li says. "It is no doubt a big discovery because the well-preserved items have many themes to study."
For example, the dates of solstices and key solar terms from the traditional Chinese calendar are recorded every year from 140 to 41 BC.
The legal documents provide detailed explanations of imperial laws at the time, including taxation and auditing, livestock herding and protection of private property. They also show regulations on finding escaped prisoners or laborers running away from corvee, in which unpaid services for major construction projects were organized.
One medical cure is a formula to make teeth whiter by using cinnamon, and another is on how to make lean cattle fatter.
Li says a lot of the content on the slips supplement written history of the time, but some also vary.
Some words on slips can be seen clearly after cleanup. [Photo provided to China Daily]
In the chronicles, an incident from 218 BC-during the reign of king Ying Zheng, who later became China's first emperor, known as Qin Shihuang-is mentioned. When the king got angry because of a failed assassination attempt against him, he asked for an organized looting of the kingdom for seven days to vent his resentment.
In Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji, a monumental reference book in Chinese historical and archaeological studies, that campaign is said to have lasted for 10 days.
"That is probably because 'seven' and 'ten' look similar in clerical writing," Li says. "Someone may have made a mistake when copying."
Xin Lixiang, a veteran archaeologist from the National Museum of China, says: "The slips found in Jingzhou are possibly of the highest value among all Han Dynasty slips that have been found so far in China."
The results of academic research on the slips should be made public soon to further relevant studies, he adds.
Wang Zijin, a professor at Renmin University of China and a top expert on bamboo and wooden slips, says: "Some imperial laws had not been seen before in documents. I'm particularly interested in those mentioning raising children. If the study goes further, we might have new ideas of early children's education or pediatrics in China."
This year marks a crucial time for such archaeological research. In Jingzhou, 324 bamboo slips from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) were unearthed in an excavation, which ended in April. They are from the hegemonic state of Chu that expanded its territory in southern China at the time.
Peng Jun, an archaeologist working on the site, says the materials offer glimpses into the politics, military strategies, ceremonial rituals and other aspects of Chu.
By WANG KAIHAO | China Daily | Updated: 2019-05-14 09:01
The number of bamboo and wooden slips found at a tomb complex in China is the most among any ancient tomb in the country so far.
As many as 4,546 slips were recently unearthed from a 2,000-year-old tomb in Jingzhou, Hubei province, as announced in a news conference in Beijing last week.
This excavation is expected to offer vast knowledge of Chinese society back then.
Before papermaking was invented in the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), bamboo and wooden slips were the main media for writing in China.
The reservoir of slips was found inside one of 18 tombs in a graveyard from the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 24), which were excavated by archaeologists in 2018. The heritage site is on the northern outskirts of Jingzhou and less than 1 kilometer from the ruins of a contemporaneous city.
Li Zhifang, an associate researcher from Jingzhou Museum, says the new finding covers a wide range. The unearthed materials include 200 slips of calendars and ephemeris, 70 slips of chronicles, 1,500 legal documents and 1,000 medical treatments that were not only for humans but also for curing animals and plants.
"We have cleaned only a small portion of the slips," Li says. "It is no doubt a big discovery because the well-preserved items have many themes to study."
For example, the dates of solstices and key solar terms from the traditional Chinese calendar are recorded every year from 140 to 41 BC.
The legal documents provide detailed explanations of imperial laws at the time, including taxation and auditing, livestock herding and protection of private property. They also show regulations on finding escaped prisoners or laborers running away from corvee, in which unpaid services for major construction projects were organized.
One medical cure is a formula to make teeth whiter by using cinnamon, and another is on how to make lean cattle fatter.
Li says a lot of the content on the slips supplement written history of the time, but some also vary.
In the chronicles, an incident from 218 BC-during the reign of king Ying Zheng, who later became China's first emperor, known as Qin Shihuang-is mentioned. When the king got angry because of a failed assassination attempt against him, he asked for an organized looting of the kingdom for seven days to vent his resentment.
In Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji, a monumental reference book in Chinese historical and archaeological studies, that campaign is said to have lasted for 10 days.
"That is probably because 'seven' and 'ten' look similar in clerical writing," Li says. "Someone may have made a mistake when copying."
Xin Lixiang, a veteran archaeologist from the National Museum of China, says: "The slips found in Jingzhou are possibly of the highest value among all Han Dynasty slips that have been found so far in China."
The results of academic research on the slips should be made public soon to further relevant studies, he adds.
Wang Zijin, a professor at Renmin University of China and a top expert on bamboo and wooden slips, says: "Some imperial laws had not been seen before in documents. I'm particularly interested in those mentioning raising children. If the study goes further, we might have new ideas of early children's education or pediatrics in China."
This year marks a crucial time for such archaeological research. In Jingzhou, 324 bamboo slips from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) were unearthed in an excavation, which ended in April. They are from the hegemonic state of Chu that expanded its territory in southern China at the time.
Peng Jun, an archaeologist working on the site, says the materials offer glimpses into the politics, military strategies, ceremonial rituals and other aspects of Chu.
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Children play traditional Chinese instrument guzheng to celebrate China’s 70th birthday in East China
Source: Globaltimes.cn Published: 2019/6/10 18:35:08
Highlights: 180 children played the traditional Chinese instrument guzheng to celebrate the upcoming 70th birthday of the People’s Republic of China in Yangzhou, East China’s Jiangsu Province on June 9, 2019. (Photos: VCG)
Source: Globaltimes.cn Published: 2019/6/10 18:35:08
Highlights: 180 children played the traditional Chinese instrument guzheng to celebrate the upcoming 70th birthday of the People’s Republic of China in Yangzhou, East China’s Jiangsu Province on June 9, 2019. (Photos: VCG)
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14:43, 06-Jul-2019
China's Liangzhu Archaeological Site now a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Updated 18:31, 06-Jul-2019
Hong Yaobin
China's ancient Liangzhu Archaeological Site was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee during its 43rd session in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Saturday.
The site, located in Yuhang District of Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, showcases the Chinese civilization of prehistoric rice agriculture that existed between 3300 B.C. and 2300 B.C.
Spanning about 14.34 square kilometers (1,434 hectares) on the plain of river networks at the north foot of southeast China's coastal hilly region, the site includes the archaeological remains and unearthed cultural relics of the Liangzhu Ancient City and an environment of wetland.
An aerial view of parts of the Liangzhu Archaeological Site in Yuhang District of Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 5, 2019. /VCG Photo
The Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City provide profound and compelling evidence that Chinese civilization started 5,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to Colin Renfrew, a retired professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy.
The World Heritage Committee added Liangzhu to the UNESCO list in order to encourage better protection and preservation of the site, which is considered to be of "outstanding universal value" to humanity.
A screenshot of the page that shows there are a total of 55 properties across China inscribed on the World Heritage List on unesco.org.
With this new inscription, the World Heritage List now includes 55 properties – 37 cultural, 14 natural and four mixed items – across China, the highest in the world.
Among them are the recently added natural site, Migratory Bird Sanctuaries along the Coast of the Yellow Sea-Bohai Gulf (Phase I), and the last World Cultural Heritage Site, Kulangsu – a historic international settlement inscribed two years ago that covers an island in Xiamen in southeast China's Fujian Province.
Window to one of the world's oldest civilizations
Parts of the historic remains are unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site in Yuhang District of Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 5, 2019. /VCG Photo
The Liangzhu Archaeological Site exhibits the "supreme achievements" of agricultural civilization in the Yellow River and the Yangtze River basins – going back some 5,000 years. /VCG Photo
A view of the Liangzhu Archaeological Site in Yuhang District of Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 5, 2019. /VCG Photo
Parts of the historic remains are unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site in Yuhang District of Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 5, 2019. /VCG Photo
The Liangzhu Archaeological Site exhibits the "supreme achievements" of agricultural civilization in the Yellow River and the Yangtze River basins – going back some 5,000 years. /VCG Photo
As an example of Liangzhu culture (3300 BC – 2300 BC), the Liangzhu Archaeological Site is hailed as one of the most important heritage sites of the Neolithic Age in China and is thought to have served as a political, economic, cultural and religious center of China's last Neolithic jade culture.
It is surrounded by a buffer zone covering nearly 100 square kilometers (about 10,000 hectares) comprising of five heritage sites – Yaoshan, Tangshan, Xunshan, Huiguanshan and Yaojiadun.
Tremendous historic remains, such as city walls, foundations of large architecture, tombs, altars, residences, docks and workshops have been found inside and outside of the Liangzhu Ancient City.
A jade bracelet unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. /VCG Photo
Part of a jade comb unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. /VCG Photo
A jade comb unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. /VCG Photo
Jade necklaces unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. /VCG Photo
A pottery jar unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. /VCG Photo
A jade bracelet unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. /VCG Photo
Part of a jade comb unearthed at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site. /VCG Photo
Moreover, the discoveries of the city gates and waterway entrances linking the water network illustrate city planning and water conservation and harvesting infrastructure of the early period of Chinese civilization.
Equally exceptional are a large number of unearthed utensils used in manufacturing, household, military, and religious rituals.
Among them are exquisite jade wares with typical "deity and animal mask pattern" showing the peak of prehistoric jade-ware production and reflecting the ultimate level of jade carving in China in ancient times.
The Jade Cong, dubbed "Jade Cong King," weighs about 6,500 grams, wide and huge in size, and has a unique decoration pattern. /VCG Photo
The "Jade Cong King," a tubular vessel contained within a rectangular body, is widely considered the most representative cultural artifact as it showcases fine craftsmanship during the Liangzhu Culture period.
It is 8.8 centimeters in height and 17.6 centimeters in diameter, weighing 6,500 grams.
The site where the vestiges of religious and cultural artifacts were unearthed not only implies the existence of the largest ancient city of the late Neolithic Age in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, but also exhibits the "supreme achievements" of agricultural civilization in the Yellow River and the Yangtze River basins – going back some 5,000 years.
Witness to generations of preservation efforts
A Chinese delegate delivers a speech after the Liangzhu Archaeological Site is declared as a World Heritage site by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee during its 43rd session in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, July 6, 2019. /Photo via UNESCO Live
Since initial excavation started in 1936, generations of Chinese archaeologists and scholars have made great efforts to explore the Liangzhu Archaeological Site and protect its heritage.
Named after the site in 1959, Liangzhu culture was universally recognized for its far-reaching influence. More than small-scale 100 archaeological sites scattered around the site had been unearthed by the late 1980s.
In 2007, some wall base relics of the ancient city were discovered, which then were confirmed to be the vestiges of the Liangzhu Ancient City, unfolding a mysterious picture of a city that remained obscured for nearly 4,000 years.
The Liangzhu Culture Museum is situated at the Liangzhu Archaeological Site in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, June 25, 2018. /VCG Photo
One year later, the Liangzhu Culture Museum was established and opened to the public.
In 2013, China added the Liangzhu Archaeological Site to its Tentative List, preparing for the official nomination proposal to UNESCO.
Last year, the nomination of the property was submitted for evaluation to the World Heritage Center, which, earlier this year, put it on the shortlist for final selection at its annual meeting.
The committee's 43rd session continues until July 10.
Video edited by Zhao Yuxiang
Cover image designed by Zhang Xuecheng
China's Liangzhu Archaeological Site now a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Updated 18:31, 06-Jul-2019
Hong Yaobin
China's ancient Liangzhu Archaeological Site was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee during its 43rd session in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Saturday.
The site, located in Yuhang District of Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province, showcases the Chinese civilization of prehistoric rice agriculture that existed between 3300 B.C. and 2300 B.C.
Spanning about 14.34 square kilometers (1,434 hectares) on the plain of river networks at the north foot of southeast China's coastal hilly region, the site includes the archaeological remains and unearthed cultural relics of the Liangzhu Ancient City and an environment of wetland.
The Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City provide profound and compelling evidence that Chinese civilization started 5,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to Colin Renfrew, a retired professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the British Academy.
The World Heritage Committee added Liangzhu to the UNESCO list in order to encourage better protection and preservation of the site, which is considered to be of "outstanding universal value" to humanity.
With this new inscription, the World Heritage List now includes 55 properties – 37 cultural, 14 natural and four mixed items – across China, the highest in the world.
Among them are the recently added natural site, Migratory Bird Sanctuaries along the Coast of the Yellow Sea-Bohai Gulf (Phase I), and the last World Cultural Heritage Site, Kulangsu – a historic international settlement inscribed two years ago that covers an island in Xiamen in southeast China's Fujian Province.
Window to one of the world's oldest civilizations
As an example of Liangzhu culture (3300 BC – 2300 BC), the Liangzhu Archaeological Site is hailed as one of the most important heritage sites of the Neolithic Age in China and is thought to have served as a political, economic, cultural and religious center of China's last Neolithic jade culture.
It is surrounded by a buffer zone covering nearly 100 square kilometers (about 10,000 hectares) comprising of five heritage sites – Yaoshan, Tangshan, Xunshan, Huiguanshan and Yaojiadun.
Tremendous historic remains, such as city walls, foundations of large architecture, tombs, altars, residences, docks and workshops have been found inside and outside of the Liangzhu Ancient City.
Moreover, the discoveries of the city gates and waterway entrances linking the water network illustrate city planning and water conservation and harvesting infrastructure of the early period of Chinese civilization.
Equally exceptional are a large number of unearthed utensils used in manufacturing, household, military, and religious rituals.
Among them are exquisite jade wares with typical "deity and animal mask pattern" showing the peak of prehistoric jade-ware production and reflecting the ultimate level of jade carving in China in ancient times.
The "Jade Cong King," a tubular vessel contained within a rectangular body, is widely considered the most representative cultural artifact as it showcases fine craftsmanship during the Liangzhu Culture period.
It is 8.8 centimeters in height and 17.6 centimeters in diameter, weighing 6,500 grams.
The site where the vestiges of religious and cultural artifacts were unearthed not only implies the existence of the largest ancient city of the late Neolithic Age in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, but also exhibits the "supreme achievements" of agricultural civilization in the Yellow River and the Yangtze River basins – going back some 5,000 years.
Witness to generations of preservation efforts
Since initial excavation started in 1936, generations of Chinese archaeologists and scholars have made great efforts to explore the Liangzhu Archaeological Site and protect its heritage.
Named after the site in 1959, Liangzhu culture was universally recognized for its far-reaching influence. More than small-scale 100 archaeological sites scattered around the site had been unearthed by the late 1980s.
In 2007, some wall base relics of the ancient city were discovered, which then were confirmed to be the vestiges of the Liangzhu Ancient City, unfolding a mysterious picture of a city that remained obscured for nearly 4,000 years.
One year later, the Liangzhu Culture Museum was established and opened to the public.
In 2013, China added the Liangzhu Archaeological Site to its Tentative List, preparing for the official nomination proposal to UNESCO.
Last year, the nomination of the property was submitted for evaluation to the World Heritage Center, which, earlier this year, put it on the shortlist for final selection at its annual meeting.
The committee's 43rd session continues until July 10.
Video edited by Zhao Yuxiang
Cover image designed by Zhang Xuecheng
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Lotus blossoms from century-old seed
By Jiang Wei | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2019-07-08 11:51
Lotuses in full blossom at Yuanmingyuan in Beijing on June 28, 2019. [Photo/VCG]
A lotus blossomed on Sunday for the first time in Yuanmingyuan, or the Old Summer Palace, from a seed unearthed in 2017 that had been underground for a hundred years, The Beijing News reported.
In 2017, 11 100-year-old lotus seeds were discovered at Jingxiangchi inside Yuanmingyuan when staffers were doing archaeological work. It was the first time that ancient lotus seeds had been found since archaeological excavations were carried out at Yuanmingyuan.
In 2018, the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a cultivation experiment on eight of the lotus seeds. Six sprouted, grew leaves, took root and spent the winter in a greenhouse. One flower blossomed on Sunday after it was transplanted at the lotus base in Yuanmingyuan in April.
Researchers used a carbon-14 test to determine the age of the ancient lotus seed.
A Yuanmingyuan staff member explained why lotus seeds can sprout, take root and grow leaves after a hundred years underground. One is that the seeds were buried in peat soil, where the temperature is low, humidity is low and microorganisms are few, which doesn't offer conditions for sprouting. The other is that the hard shell outside a lotus seed prevents water and air from going in and out. So the lotus seeds were hibernating and their metabolism nearly stopped.
By Jiang Wei | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2019-07-08 11:51
A lotus blossomed on Sunday for the first time in Yuanmingyuan, or the Old Summer Palace, from a seed unearthed in 2017 that had been underground for a hundred years, The Beijing News reported.
In 2017, 11 100-year-old lotus seeds were discovered at Jingxiangchi inside Yuanmingyuan when staffers were doing archaeological work. It was the first time that ancient lotus seeds had been found since archaeological excavations were carried out at Yuanmingyuan.
In 2018, the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a cultivation experiment on eight of the lotus seeds. Six sprouted, grew leaves, took root and spent the winter in a greenhouse. One flower blossomed on Sunday after it was transplanted at the lotus base in Yuanmingyuan in April.
Researchers used a carbon-14 test to determine the age of the ancient lotus seed.
A Yuanmingyuan staff member explained why lotus seeds can sprout, take root and grow leaves after a hundred years underground. One is that the seeds were buried in peat soil, where the temperature is low, humidity is low and microorganisms are few, which doesn't offer conditions for sprouting. The other is that the hard shell outside a lotus seed prevents water and air from going in and out. So the lotus seeds were hibernating and their metabolism nearly stopped.
JSCh
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360,000 people participate in online crowdfunding for Great Wall protection
Source: Xinhua| 2019-07-10 15:10:21|Editor: Wu Qin
Photo shows rainbow in the sky above the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall in Chengde, north China's Hebei Province. (Xinhua/Guo Zhongxing)
BEIJING, July 10 (Xinhua) -- In less than three years, about 360,000 internet users have donated more than 45 million yuan (about 6.54 million U.S. dollars) to renovate and repair the Great Wall through a crowdfunding campaign, the Beijing Daily reported Wednesday.
The online campaign was initiated in September 2016 by the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation, an organization supervised by the National Cultural Heritage Administration. It also has offline cooperation with Tencent Foundation, a charitable platform of tech company Tencent.
According to its fundraising webpage, the money has been used to repair wall sections in Beijing and the provinces of Hebei and Shanxi.
It is the first time that China has advocated social forces to participate in the Great Wall protection through online crowdfunding, said the newspaper.
The organizers hope the campaign will raise awareness of the threats facing the Great Wall.
The Great Wall is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, consisting of many interconnected walls. It traverses through 15 provinces and cities.
Due to human destruction and natural weathering, some parts of the Great Wall are damaged or have collapsed, and are in urgent need of renovation.
In addition, the foundation set up two research bases of the Great Wall protection in the famous Badaling section in Beijing and Jinshanling section in Hebei Tuesday to help the public learn more about the wall's history and difficulties in preserving it, said the newspaper.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-07-10 15:10:21|Editor: Wu Qin
BEIJING, July 10 (Xinhua) -- In less than three years, about 360,000 internet users have donated more than 45 million yuan (about 6.54 million U.S. dollars) to renovate and repair the Great Wall through a crowdfunding campaign, the Beijing Daily reported Wednesday.
The online campaign was initiated in September 2016 by the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation, an organization supervised by the National Cultural Heritage Administration. It also has offline cooperation with Tencent Foundation, a charitable platform of tech company Tencent.
According to its fundraising webpage, the money has been used to repair wall sections in Beijing and the provinces of Hebei and Shanxi.
It is the first time that China has advocated social forces to participate in the Great Wall protection through online crowdfunding, said the newspaper.
The organizers hope the campaign will raise awareness of the threats facing the Great Wall.
The Great Wall is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, consisting of many interconnected walls. It traverses through 15 provinces and cities.
Due to human destruction and natural weathering, some parts of the Great Wall are damaged or have collapsed, and are in urgent need of renovation.
In addition, the foundation set up two research bases of the Great Wall protection in the famous Badaling section in Beijing and Jinshanling section in Hebei Tuesday to help the public learn more about the wall's history and difficulties in preserving it, said the newspaper.
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New China TV
Published on Jul 24, 2019
Lights, camera, opera! 2008 Beijing Olympics venue hosts #PekingOpera festival
JSCh
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Palace Museum publishes fantastic beasts book collection
CGTN | Updated: 2019-07-26 11:26
Some of the creatures in the books are extinct. [Photo/The Palace Museum]
The Palace Museum of China dived in their records and from that mission was created a new series of children's books, focused on real and imaginary creatures.
The three-book series introduces 120 types of animals recorded in the archives of the Palace Museum. Most of them were real animals, while some others are imaginative beasts with a profound connection to the Chinese culture.
The books are divided into beasts, birds, and marine animals. What makes them even more special are their authors and editors.
The series is based on the ancient books written and edited by scholars and artists of the Qing Dynasty (1644 -1911). The whole edition was launched and directed by Emperor Qianlong himself.
It took two court painters Yu Xing and Zhang Weibang more than 10 years to paint all the animals in the books of beasts and birds. The texts were jointly written by eight of Emperor Qianlong’s officials.
The book of marine life, by naturalist Nie Huang, was based on his decades of study and visits to all the rivers, lakes and seas of the country. It used to be the Emperor's favorite book as well.
Some of the creatures in the books are extinct. [Photo/The Palace Museum]
According to Yuan Jie, associate research fellow in painting and calligraphy at the Palace Museum, some of the paintings are valuable in today's scientific studies, because they record extinct creatures.
To make the content more attractive and understandable for children, each animal has an "information card". This card lists the animal's original name in ancient paintings, modern name, Latin name, photo, living habits, and environment.
The books break the borders between liberal arts and science by telling their stories from different points of view, like literature, art, zoology, geography, tradition, and history.
For the children, the books mean fun and knowledge. As for the museum, Wang Xudong, curator of the Palace Museum, hopes the books can be bridges helping to bring more children to the museum, as well as linking them to Chinese traditional culture.
Palace Museum publishes fantastic beasts book collection
CGTN | Updated: 2019-07-26 11:26
Some of the creatures in the books are extinct. [Photo/The Palace Museum]
The Palace Museum of China dived in their records and from that mission was created a new series of children's books, focused on real and imaginary creatures.
The three-book series introduces 120 types of animals recorded in the archives of the Palace Museum. Most of them were real animals, while some others are imaginative beasts with a profound connection to the Chinese culture.
The books are divided into beasts, birds, and marine animals. What makes them even more special are their authors and editors.
The series is based on the ancient books written and edited by scholars and artists of the Qing Dynasty (1644 -1911). The whole edition was launched and directed by Emperor Qianlong himself.
It took two court painters Yu Xing and Zhang Weibang more than 10 years to paint all the animals in the books of beasts and birds. The texts were jointly written by eight of Emperor Qianlong’s officials.
The book of marine life, by naturalist Nie Huang, was based on his decades of study and visits to all the rivers, lakes and seas of the country. It used to be the Emperor's favorite book as well.
Some of the creatures in the books are extinct. [Photo/The Palace Museum]
According to Yuan Jie, associate research fellow in painting and calligraphy at the Palace Museum, some of the paintings are valuable in today's scientific studies, because they record extinct creatures.
To make the content more attractive and understandable for children, each animal has an "information card". This card lists the animal's original name in ancient paintings, modern name, Latin name, photo, living habits, and environment.
The books break the borders between liberal arts and science by telling their stories from different points of view, like literature, art, zoology, geography, tradition, and history.
For the children, the books mean fun and knowledge. As for the museum, Wang Xudong, curator of the Palace Museum, hopes the books can be bridges helping to bring more children to the museum, as well as linking them to Chinese traditional culture.
CGTN | Updated: 2019-07-26 11:26
The Palace Museum of China dived in their records and from that mission was created a new series of children's books, focused on real and imaginary creatures.
The three-book series introduces 120 types of animals recorded in the archives of the Palace Museum. Most of them were real animals, while some others are imaginative beasts with a profound connection to the Chinese culture.
The books are divided into beasts, birds, and marine animals. What makes them even more special are their authors and editors.
The series is based on the ancient books written and edited by scholars and artists of the Qing Dynasty (1644 -1911). The whole edition was launched and directed by Emperor Qianlong himself.
It took two court painters Yu Xing and Zhang Weibang more than 10 years to paint all the animals in the books of beasts and birds. The texts were jointly written by eight of Emperor Qianlong’s officials.
The book of marine life, by naturalist Nie Huang, was based on his decades of study and visits to all the rivers, lakes and seas of the country. It used to be the Emperor's favorite book as well.
According to Yuan Jie, associate research fellow in painting and calligraphy at the Palace Museum, some of the paintings are valuable in today's scientific studies, because they record extinct creatures.
To make the content more attractive and understandable for children, each animal has an "information card". This card lists the animal's original name in ancient paintings, modern name, Latin name, photo, living habits, and environment.
The books break the borders between liberal arts and science by telling their stories from different points of view, like literature, art, zoology, geography, tradition, and history.
For the children, the books mean fun and knowledge. As for the museum, Wang Xudong, curator of the Palace Museum, hopes the books can be bridges helping to bring more children to the museum, as well as linking them to Chinese traditional culture.
Palace Museum publishes fantastic beasts book collection
CGTN | Updated: 2019-07-26 11:26
The Palace Museum of China dived in their records and from that mission was created a new series of children's books, focused on real and imaginary creatures.
The three-book series introduces 120 types of animals recorded in the archives of the Palace Museum. Most of them were real animals, while some others are imaginative beasts with a profound connection to the Chinese culture.
The books are divided into beasts, birds, and marine animals. What makes them even more special are their authors and editors.
The series is based on the ancient books written and edited by scholars and artists of the Qing Dynasty (1644 -1911). The whole edition was launched and directed by Emperor Qianlong himself.
It took two court painters Yu Xing and Zhang Weibang more than 10 years to paint all the animals in the books of beasts and birds. The texts were jointly written by eight of Emperor Qianlong’s officials.
The book of marine life, by naturalist Nie Huang, was based on his decades of study and visits to all the rivers, lakes and seas of the country. It used to be the Emperor's favorite book as well.
According to Yuan Jie, associate research fellow in painting and calligraphy at the Palace Museum, some of the paintings are valuable in today's scientific studies, because they record extinct creatures.
To make the content more attractive and understandable for children, each animal has an "information card". This card lists the animal's original name in ancient paintings, modern name, Latin name, photo, living habits, and environment.
The books break the borders between liberal arts and science by telling their stories from different points of view, like literature, art, zoology, geography, tradition, and history.
For the children, the books mean fun and knowledge. As for the museum, Wang Xudong, curator of the Palace Museum, hopes the books can be bridges helping to bring more children to the museum, as well as linking them to Chinese traditional culture.
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Earliest Chinese poetry collection unveiled in east China
Source: Xinhua| 2019-09-27 11:32:51|Editor: huaxia
The bamboo slips preserved in distilled water in Anhui University, Sept. 24, 2019. (Xinhua/Wang Haiyue)
Take a look at these 2,400-year-old bamboo slips, found to be the earliest version of China's classical poetry collection the "Book of Songs."
HEFEI, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- The earliest version of the "Book of Songs" in known existence was recently unveiled after Chinese researchers restored bamboo slips from 2,400 years ago.
The 93 slips, crafted during the Warring States Period (475 B.C.-221 B.C.), are 48.5 centimeters long and 0.6 centimeters wide each, and feature 58 poems from the "Book of Songs."
The inscription on the bamboo slips, Sept. 24, 2019. (Xinhua/Wang Haiyue)
Proclaimed as a Confucian classic, "The Book of Songs," which dates from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period (1100 B.C.-476 B.C.), features at least 305 poems and is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry in the world.
"This version of 'The Book of Songs' is of great value in the research of Chinese philology, linguistics, philology, literature, ancient ideology and culture," said Xu Zaiguo, a professor of Anhui University in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, East China.
Xu Zaiguo cleans the slips. (File photo provided to Xinhua)
Bamboo slips were used before paper was invented, around 100 A.C. The slips were tied together to make scrolls.
"The Book of Songs" was part of a rare collection of 1,167 bamboo slips acquired by Anhui University in 2015.
Source: Xinhua| 2019-09-27 11:32:51|Editor: huaxia
Take a look at these 2,400-year-old bamboo slips, found to be the earliest version of China's classical poetry collection the "Book of Songs."
HEFEI, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- The earliest version of the "Book of Songs" in known existence was recently unveiled after Chinese researchers restored bamboo slips from 2,400 years ago.
The 93 slips, crafted during the Warring States Period (475 B.C.-221 B.C.), are 48.5 centimeters long and 0.6 centimeters wide each, and feature 58 poems from the "Book of Songs."
Proclaimed as a Confucian classic, "The Book of Songs," which dates from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period (1100 B.C.-476 B.C.), features at least 305 poems and is the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry in the world.
"This version of 'The Book of Songs' is of great value in the research of Chinese philology, linguistics, philology, literature, ancient ideology and culture," said Xu Zaiguo, a professor of Anhui University in Hefei, capital of Anhui Province, East China.
Bamboo slips were used before paper was invented, around 100 A.C. The slips were tied together to make scrolls.
"The Book of Songs" was part of a rare collection of 1,167 bamboo slips acquired by Anhui University in 2015.
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