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Oct 24, 2019
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They are the earliest known form of Chinese writing, and more than half of them are yet to be decoded. Find out what oracle bone inscriptions are and why they still matter 3,000 years later
JSCh
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Shangri-La Tibetan village enjoys the holidays with harmonyHarmony rules among religious in Shangri-La
Source: Xinhua | December 27, 2016, Tuesday
ZHANG Yongzheng and his wife He Axiang used to pray to different deities.
Zhang, a Tibetan ethnic, would go to a Catholic church near their home in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, while his wife, from the Naxi ethnic group, would go to a Buddhist lamasery.
“We believed in what we believed,” Zhang said. “Many of our neighbors are like us, family members believing in different religions.”
Zhang, 54, runs an inn and grows grapes in Cizhong Village in the hilly plateau of the Tibetan autonomous prefecture of Deqen in Yunnan.
Some guidebooks call Deqen a “fairytale wonderland” and many locals believe the Shangri-La described by British novelist James Hilton in his “Lost Horizon” is Deqen.
And in 2002, Zhongdian County in Deqen was authorized by the State Council to rename itself Shangri-La.
What makes Cizhong different is the Catholic church built by a French missionary 150 years ago. Today, most villagers describe themselves as Catholics, while others stick to Tibetan Buddhism.
The signs of peaceful religious and ethnic coexistence are also obvious in the town of Shengping, where a mosque’s green dome rises beside a white Buddhist pagoda.
Dozens of steps away from the mosque lies the home of Li Zhongyi, 63, whose two-story house tells of cultural blending. On the first floor are two living rooms decorated with different religious symbols. One in the Tibetan style has an incense burner, a butter lamp and a statue of the Buddha for his 90-year-old mother Drolma Lhatse, devout Buddhist and lifelong Deqen resident. She would chant sutra, burn incense and serve the living Buddha. The Hui-style room has Arabic tapestries where Li entertains his Muslim friends.
“We have different beliefs in our family,” Li said. “We tolerate and respect each other as part of our daily lives.”
Atheist Li has been a member of the Communist Party for 31 years. His eldest daughter and son-in-law are also Party members. His brothers and sisters are Muslims.
Such diverse faiths under the same roof are mainly due to the cosmopolitanism tradition and what Li described as “complex” ethnic composition of the family.
Li’s ancestors had a Han bloodline. His mother and wife are Tibetans, his brothers and sisters Hui, his brothers-in-law Han, Yi and Bai.
In Deqen, the 400,000 population is made up of 26 ethnic groups — a third Tibetan, a quarter Lisu ethnic, a fifth Han, a 10th Naxi, and the rest Yi, Hui, Bai, Miao and others.
Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam have a combined 141,000 followers in the hilly prefecture.
“In Deqen, all ethnic groups are united and religions are in peace and harmony,” said Xiao Wu, head of the local Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee.
The prefecture has never experienced major problems between religions. Staff of different religions learn from one another and the local government treats them equally, Xiao said.
When they celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary in 1998, Zhang and He agreed to just one religion. She became a Catholic.
To avoid being buried separately, many couples in Cizhong convert before the time comes.
By Huang Yiran in Cizhong and Shan Jie in Beijing Source:Global Times Published: 2019/12/25 19:43:40
Donning colorful silky Tibetan garments with woolen capes and sitting beside each other in a small church, some villagers wait for their annual holy mass on Christmas Eve.
The Cizhong Church, built in Gothic style in the early 1900s, sits in a remote village surrounded by mountains in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Southwest China's Yunnan Province.
Cizhong is also known as the "small Shangri-La," the mysterious heaven on earth.
"Today is your birthday, I beg your redemption," sang the Christians in Putonghua.
The melody is known by most Chinese people. The original song was composed in the 1980s to celebrate China's national day, but was modified by Chinese Christians as a classic carol. There are usually 70 or 80 people who attend the service on Sundays. On Christmas, about 300 attended.
At 9:00 pm, after the warm-up singing, the mass began. The ritual proceeded like it would in any other part of the world. Worshippers sang carols. Sacraments and sermons were performed. Mass is conducted in both Putonghua and Tibetan languages.
Priest Ma Yongping put a baby Jesus statue in a small cradle. It all ends near midnight. The next morning, villagers bring cakes to the church and distribute them. Christians then donate their money to the church.
Harmonious village
The Cizhong village, 2,258 meters above sea level, is a multicultural community with three religions and seven ethnic groups.
Among its 1,331 residents, 40 percent are Catholics, 35 percent believe in Buddhism and 5 percent are of Dongba, an ancient religion of the Naxi people. Its seven ethnic groups include the Tibet, Han, Lisu, Naxi, Bai, Nu and Yi ethnicities.
All the different ethnic and religious groups of Cizhong live a harmonious life together in nature. It is common for a household there to have family members of different backgrounds.
In Cizhong, people celebrate festivals together. At weddings, everybody comes to enjoy wine and dance to show their blessings.
"What impresses me the most is the harmony between different ethnic groups and different religions," Yao Fei, village priest told the Global Times.
"When a Buddhism believer was sick, Catholics would offer to help. I am not a local, but the villagers are all nice to me and respect me a lot."
The atmosphere in Cizhong has won it the honor of being a model village in Yunnan Province.
Priest's story
This is Yao's 12th Christmas in Cizhong.
Born and raised in North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Yao became a Catholic under the influence of his parents. He graduated from the National Seminary of Catholic Church in 1991 after six years of study and became a full-time priest.
Yao said that people of different ethnic groups in Cizhong speak the same language, Tibetan. Customs such as weddings are the same. Only when it comes to religion are they different.
Religious ceremonies and rituals have been localized in Cizhong. Even though Christian practices follow the order of the church, many ethnic customs are retained and well respected. Yao can speak Latin. He still uses Latin in religious ceremonies.
Yao said that the first several years in Cizhong were very difficult. "I did not understand their language at all… But then I realized how important the language is, and now I could speak some basic Tibetan." He said there was no electricity in the first two years.
"In recent years every family is getting better. The policies are good to the ethnic minorities. Also, the hydroelectric station was built here. The road is good," Yao said.
"Even though Cizhong is a small place, it is very famous and important. In a Tibetan region, a Church that could be built and kept for more than 100 years is very precious," he said.
Developing tourism
The small Shangri-La of Cizhong, far away from modern world, is a dream destination for many tourists.
The village that used to rely on farming is now tapping into its tourism potential. Meanwhile, with favorable policies, residents have been lifted out of poverty in the past years.
In 2018, the average income reached 10,000 yuan ($1,431) per villager, according to Cizhong government.
The Cizhong Church was built by French preachers from 1909 to 1921. In 1987, it was labeled as a provincial-level cultural relic by the Yunnan government and was put under protection. In 2006, it was listed as a national relic.
Nowadays, tourism has become the main income for Cizhong villagers. There are 25 hotels and inns in the village and more than 20 restaurants and agritainment attractions.
More than 400 residents work in the wine making sector in Cizhong. Cizhong people also have a tradition of making wine along with the traditional Tibetan barley wine. French preachers brought the skill and grapes. Rose Honey, the grape species used to make wine in Cizhong, has been extinct in Bordeaux, its hometown, according to a statement from the Cizhong village government.
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This ancient Chinese anatomical atlas changes what we know about acupuncture and medical histor
September 2, 2020 10.53pm AEST
Authors
The accepted history of anatomy says that it was the ancient Greeks who mapped the human body for the first time. Galen, the “Father of Anatomy”, worked on animals, and wrote anatomy textbooks that lasted for the next 1,500 years. Modern anatomy started in the Renaissance with Andreas Vesalius, who challenged what had been handed down from Galen. He worked from human beings, and wrote the seminal “On the Fabric of the Human Body”.
Scientists from ancient China are never mentioned in this history of anatomy. But our new paper shows that the oldest surviving anatomical atlas actually comes from Han Dynasty China, and was written over 2,000 years ago. Our discovery changes both the history of medicine and our understanding of the basis for acupuncture – a key branch of Chinese medicine.
There is an ever increasing body of evidence-based research that supports the efficacy of acupuncture for conditions as varied as migraine to osteoarthritis of the knee. The most recent draft NICE guidelines, published in August 2020, recommend the use of acupuncture as a first line treatment for chronic pain.
During an acupuncture treatment session, fine needles are inserted into the body at specific points (acupoints) in order to promote self healing. This happens because the needles (somehow) create balance in the life force or “Qi” of the person. How this happens is the subject of much research. The underlying assumption is that acupoints have some as yet undiscovered physiological property that is probably neurologically based.
Ancient Chinese texts
Mawangdui Manuscript, ink on silk, 2nd century BCE. © Hunan Province Museum
The texts we worked on are the Mawangdui medical manuscripts, which were lost to us for two millenia. They were written during the Han dynasty and were so valued that a copy was buried with the body of Lady Dai, a Han dynasty aristocrat in 168 BCE. The tombs of Lady Dai and her family were opened in 1973, and the Mawangdui manuscripts were discovered.
They are clearly precursors to the famous acupuncture texts of the Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine (Huangdi Neijing), which was copied and recopied through history, and is revered in China as the source of acupuncture theory and practice. The descriptions of meridians and points found in it are still the basis of traditional Chinese medicine today.
The earlier Mawangdui texts don’t actually mention acupuncture points, and the descriptions they give of meridians are simpler and less complete. But some passages from them have clearly been directly copied into the Yellow Emperor’s Canon, all of which shows that these texts were written first.
Illustration of traditional Chinese medicine. Wikimedia Commons
Meridian pathways have always been interpreted as being based on esoteric ideas about the flow of vital energy “Qi” rather than as empirical descriptions of the body. But what the Mawangdui text describes is a set of meridians – pathways through the body. In later texts, these are usually illustrated pictorially as lines on the skin.
A meridian is described in terms of how it progresses through the body. The arm tai yin meridian, for instance, is described as starting in the centre of the palm, running along the forearm between the two bones, and so on. We wondered: what if these descriptions are not of an esoteric energy pathway, but of physical anatomical structures?
Dissecting history
To find out, we did detailed dissections of the human body, looking for pathways which ran through it along the routes described in the Mawangdui.
This is a very different view of the body than that of the Western scientist. In modern western medicine, the body is divided into systems that each have their own distinct function: like the nervous system or cardiovascular system.
That clearly wasn’t what the writers of the Mawangdui were doing. Their descriptions are more focused on how different structures interlink to create a flow through the body. They pay no attention to the specific function of the structures. We think this is because these scientists were making their observations of the human body for the first time, and purely described what they saw.
For our research, the anatomical substance of the work had to be unearthed by carefully replicating the authors’ scientific dissections. This was problematic. They had left us no pictures of what they were describing, so we had to reconstruct from their texts. Later Chinese anatomists, from the Song dynasty, did make pictures. These works were based on the recorded dissections of a criminal gang for whom dissection was a part of their punishment.
An ancient acupuncture statue. Traditional and Modern Medicine/Flickr, CC BY
Then there was the issue of translation: so much can get lost when we translate texts, especially ancient ones, and one of us (Vivien) spent huge amounts of time cross-checking and confirming translations of the meridian descriptions. Finally, we had to look at Han-era society and show that anatomical examination would fit in their cultural context.
What we found was very exciting. Each of the Mawangdui meridians mapped onto major structures of the human body. Some of these structures are visible only to anatomists through dissection, and cannot be seen in the living person. To return to arm tai yin, for instance, the pathway is described at the elbow as going “below the sinew to the bicep”. When we look at the dissected human elbow, there is a flat band of tissue called the bicipital aponeurosis, and the arteries and nerves of the arm pass underneath it.
We think this is what the ancient Chinese anatomists were describing. There is no way to know about these structures except by doing anatomy, or reading the work of someone who has.
The implications
We therefore believe that the Mawangdui manuscripts are the world’s oldest surviving anatomical atlas based on direct observation of the human body. The authors’ purpose presumably was to record the human body in detail. Anatomical examination of this kind would have been a rare privilege, available only to a select group of scientists favoured by the Emperor. It is likely that the purpose of the texts was expressly to pass this knowledge on to others. Physicians and students of medicine could use the texts to learn about anatomy, and engage in medical debate based on a sound knowledge of the human body.
This gives us new insights into the scientific prowess of Han dynasty China, which is famous for its wealth of discoveries. That Han scientists also did anatomy would make perfect sense, and adds richness to our understanding of their science.
Our work also has fundamental implications for acupuncture theory and so for modern research. The Yellow Emperor’s Canon quite clearly draws on and develops the content of the Mawangdui. If the Mawangdui is an anatomical atlas, it is highly likely that the succeeding texts are grounded in anatomy too.
The research shines a light on the hitherto unrecognised contributions of Chinese anatomists, and repositions them at the centre of the field. This new information challenges the perceived esoteric nature of acupuncture, and roots it instead in anatomical science.
https://theconversation.com/this-an...-about-acupuncture-and-medical-history-140506
September 2, 2020 10.53pm AEST
Authors
Vivien Shaw
Lecturer in Anatomy, Bangor University
Isabelle Catherine Winder
Lecturer in Zoology, Bangor University
The accepted history of anatomy says that it was the ancient Greeks who mapped the human body for the first time. Galen, the “Father of Anatomy”, worked on animals, and wrote anatomy textbooks that lasted for the next 1,500 years. Modern anatomy started in the Renaissance with Andreas Vesalius, who challenged what had been handed down from Galen. He worked from human beings, and wrote the seminal “On the Fabric of the Human Body”.
Scientists from ancient China are never mentioned in this history of anatomy. But our new paper shows that the oldest surviving anatomical atlas actually comes from Han Dynasty China, and was written over 2,000 years ago. Our discovery changes both the history of medicine and our understanding of the basis for acupuncture – a key branch of Chinese medicine.
There is an ever increasing body of evidence-based research that supports the efficacy of acupuncture for conditions as varied as migraine to osteoarthritis of the knee. The most recent draft NICE guidelines, published in August 2020, recommend the use of acupuncture as a first line treatment for chronic pain.
During an acupuncture treatment session, fine needles are inserted into the body at specific points (acupoints) in order to promote self healing. This happens because the needles (somehow) create balance in the life force or “Qi” of the person. How this happens is the subject of much research. The underlying assumption is that acupoints have some as yet undiscovered physiological property that is probably neurologically based.
Ancient Chinese texts
The texts we worked on are the Mawangdui medical manuscripts, which were lost to us for two millenia. They were written during the Han dynasty and were so valued that a copy was buried with the body of Lady Dai, a Han dynasty aristocrat in 168 BCE. The tombs of Lady Dai and her family were opened in 1973, and the Mawangdui manuscripts were discovered.
They are clearly precursors to the famous acupuncture texts of the Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine (Huangdi Neijing), which was copied and recopied through history, and is revered in China as the source of acupuncture theory and practice. The descriptions of meridians and points found in it are still the basis of traditional Chinese medicine today.
The earlier Mawangdui texts don’t actually mention acupuncture points, and the descriptions they give of meridians are simpler and less complete. But some passages from them have clearly been directly copied into the Yellow Emperor’s Canon, all of which shows that these texts were written first.
Meridian pathways have always been interpreted as being based on esoteric ideas about the flow of vital energy “Qi” rather than as empirical descriptions of the body. But what the Mawangdui text describes is a set of meridians – pathways through the body. In later texts, these are usually illustrated pictorially as lines on the skin.
A meridian is described in terms of how it progresses through the body. The arm tai yin meridian, for instance, is described as starting in the centre of the palm, running along the forearm between the two bones, and so on. We wondered: what if these descriptions are not of an esoteric energy pathway, but of physical anatomical structures?
Dissecting history
To find out, we did detailed dissections of the human body, looking for pathways which ran through it along the routes described in the Mawangdui.
This is a very different view of the body than that of the Western scientist. In modern western medicine, the body is divided into systems that each have their own distinct function: like the nervous system or cardiovascular system.
That clearly wasn’t what the writers of the Mawangdui were doing. Their descriptions are more focused on how different structures interlink to create a flow through the body. They pay no attention to the specific function of the structures. We think this is because these scientists were making their observations of the human body for the first time, and purely described what they saw.
For our research, the anatomical substance of the work had to be unearthed by carefully replicating the authors’ scientific dissections. This was problematic. They had left us no pictures of what they were describing, so we had to reconstruct from their texts. Later Chinese anatomists, from the Song dynasty, did make pictures. These works were based on the recorded dissections of a criminal gang for whom dissection was a part of their punishment.
Then there was the issue of translation: so much can get lost when we translate texts, especially ancient ones, and one of us (Vivien) spent huge amounts of time cross-checking and confirming translations of the meridian descriptions. Finally, we had to look at Han-era society and show that anatomical examination would fit in their cultural context.
What we found was very exciting. Each of the Mawangdui meridians mapped onto major structures of the human body. Some of these structures are visible only to anatomists through dissection, and cannot be seen in the living person. To return to arm tai yin, for instance, the pathway is described at the elbow as going “below the sinew to the bicep”. When we look at the dissected human elbow, there is a flat band of tissue called the bicipital aponeurosis, and the arteries and nerves of the arm pass underneath it.
We think this is what the ancient Chinese anatomists were describing. There is no way to know about these structures except by doing anatomy, or reading the work of someone who has.
The implications
We therefore believe that the Mawangdui manuscripts are the world’s oldest surviving anatomical atlas based on direct observation of the human body. The authors’ purpose presumably was to record the human body in detail. Anatomical examination of this kind would have been a rare privilege, available only to a select group of scientists favoured by the Emperor. It is likely that the purpose of the texts was expressly to pass this knowledge on to others. Physicians and students of medicine could use the texts to learn about anatomy, and engage in medical debate based on a sound knowledge of the human body.
This gives us new insights into the scientific prowess of Han dynasty China, which is famous for its wealth of discoveries. That Han scientists also did anatomy would make perfect sense, and adds richness to our understanding of their science.
Our work also has fundamental implications for acupuncture theory and so for modern research. The Yellow Emperor’s Canon quite clearly draws on and develops the content of the Mawangdui. If the Mawangdui is an anatomical atlas, it is highly likely that the succeeding texts are grounded in anatomy too.
The research shines a light on the hitherto unrecognised contributions of Chinese anatomists, and repositions them at the centre of the field. This new information challenges the perceived esoteric nature of acupuncture, and roots it instead in anatomical science.
https://theconversation.com/this-an...-about-acupuncture-and-medical-history-140506
JSCh
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The Paper 澎湃新闻 @thepapercn
China state-affiliated media
Where did #Hakka culture originate? Luoyang, Henan is building a Hakka origins memorial museum which is expected to be completed next September. The museum will showcase Hakka culture and help people find and pay tribute to their ancestors. http://bit.ly/365bnk1
2:25 AM · Sep 27, 2020·Hootsuite Inc.
China state-affiliated media
Where did #Hakka culture originate? Luoyang, Henan is building a Hakka origins memorial museum which is expected to be completed next September. The museum will showcase Hakka culture and help people find and pay tribute to their ancestors. http://bit.ly/365bnk1
2:25 AM · Sep 27, 2020·Hootsuite Inc.
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Cultural relics returned from U.S. handed over to Nanjing Museum - People's Daily Online
On Nov. 14, China's National Cultural Heritage Administration handed over 361 Chinese cultural rel
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JSCh
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China Xinhua News @XHNews
China state-affiliated media
New archeological finds at China's Sanxingdui Ruins: extremely rare bronze ware among over 1,000 relics unearthed at the ruins http://xhtxs.cn/fJg
2:42 PM · May 30, 2021
China state-affiliated media
New archeological finds at China's Sanxingdui Ruins: extremely rare bronze ware among over 1,000 relics unearthed at the ruins http://xhtxs.cn/fJg
2:42 PM · May 30, 2021
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