Things Chinese

by Du Feibao, Feibao Du, Bai Du

Guidebook about the various aspects of Chinese culture.

Content:
- Ancient Relics
- Folk Arts
- Architecture
- Calligraphy and Painting
- Articles of Everyday Use
- Clothing
- Drinks and Snacks
- Lucky Things
- Entertainment
- Medicine

Genres: China

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Jason Pym]

Over 400 entries about objects, buildings, clothing, the arts, medicine, and entertainment in Chinese culture. Though presented as describing Chinese culture as a homogeneous mass that exists even today, there is very little here that survived the revolutions of the last century or so, so more accurately it’s a book about “imperial Chinese things”, with no more modern entry than ‘ration coupons’.

There is an awful lot here that I’d never heard of before, so here are a few of the things I learned about for the first time:

Taoist priests carried a mirror with them because they believed it could help them detect monsters.

Wheelbarrows had sails (really! I looked this up, there’s photos of them).

The big stone turtles that carry stone tablets can be huge, the biggest found so far is over eight metres long. This means the tablets also weigh tens of tonnes, so how do they fit them upright in the backs of the turtles? Turns out it’s the same as the Egyptians making pyramids, they build a mount of earth over the turtle and roll the tablet up on logs, tip it into place then dig away the earth.

Hand warmers (手炉), small bronze containers of smouldering ash placed in the big, loose sleeves of traditional Chinese dress.

Imperial Beijing was a city within a city. So there was the vast, sprawling outer city filled with the great unwashed, only the south part of this had a city wall because the Ming ran out of money. The inner city (where the second ring road is today) had nine gates, and each had their own specific function: transporting coal, water, ‘night soil’, timber, grain, and liquor, and two others for the exclusive use of either the imperial family or the army. Within this inner city was then the Forbidden City. Only a few of the gates still exist today, their existence only lives on in place names.

Apart from inventing paper, the compass, and sericulture (silk) which we all know about, the Chinese also invented umbrellas.

The abacus only entered widespread use in the 15th century (Ming dynasty), I thought it was much earlier. Before this counters (made of bamboo or animal bone) were used, marked red for positive numbers and black for negative, arranged in columns for units, tens, hundreds etc.

The auspicious s-shaped talisman known as ‘As You Wish’ (如意) is said to have evolved from the Chinese backscratcher. In some places today, backscratchers (a stick with a carved hand on the end) are known as ‘old man’s joy’ (老头乐).

One of the various words for pavilion, ‘xuan’ (轩), which you see a lot in restaurant and tea house names, was originally a kind of enclosed, horse-drawn carriage. Later the word was used to mean either a pavilion (similar to 亭, but larger, can be enclosed and is usually rectangular) or more rarely in the south of China a stand-alone corridor (called 廊 in northern China). They were intended to be places of recreation, where you can play chess and drink tea. The smaller 亭 pavilions, in contrast, have no furniture. This may sound like a boring distinction, but it comes up a lot in place names if you live here.

One of the words for study (as in a room in which you study), zhai (斋，书斋) I knew from years ago when I started studying Chinese and read the English version of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (《聊斋志异》). I love this book, it’s supernatural and horror stories, but the word zhai always bugged me as I never came across it again, yet it’s in the title of such a famous book. It turns out it was originally a religious term, meaning a place of retreat for purification through abstinence. So you get Palaces of Purification (斋宫), food given to Buddhist monks as alms (斋饭), the month of Ramadan in the Muslim calendar (斋月) and so on. Later it was used to mean a gentleman’s study (书斋), also a place of quiet retreat.

Great walls of cypress wood (黄肠题凑) were placed in the tombs of kings and emperors to ward off a monster that liked to eat the brains and livers of corpses. The best example uncovered so far in the Western Han Dabaotai tomb (大葆台汉墓) was made of 90cm x 10cm planks stacked 3m high and 42m long.

There is a system of differentiating officials by the big square embroidery of either a bird (civil) or beast (military) on the front of their robes. So a fourth rank military official would have a picture of a tiger, a ninth rank official (the lowest rank) would have a picture of a sea horse. This system was first created by the Tang dynasty Empress Wu Zetian. The more I find out about her the more interesting she seems, she came up with loads of original Chinese characters, including the complex numbers (壹、贰、叁 etc) still used by accountants today (the numbers make forgery and embezzlement a lot more difficult).

The entire Chinese Buddhist canon (大藏经 Great Treasury of Sūtras) is carved on 14,000 stone tablets, kept in nine caves in a temple in southwest Beijing. Work on the book was begun by a single monk in the Sui dynasty (616) and the work was finally completed over 1,000 years later in the Qing dynasty (1655).

This book covers an impressive amount of ground, and though it only touched on each subject it sent me off to look things up more than a few times. If you’re a Chinese history and culture geek, this is worth your time, either as a primer or in case you missed something. In fact, there is enough information that sometimes it felt like overkill, as one mention of fake ornamental rock gardens is more than enough, let alone two (假山、太湖石). And though it was useful to have a good definition of ‘lou’ (楼 a wooden building with more than one storey) and ‘ge’ (阁 pavilion with doors and windows on only one side, often used to store art or documents), there were a few architectural entries that were a little too obscure (榭、金砖、景洞)

There are a couple minor problems with it, though:

This is one of those books funded and published by the Ministry of Tourism, but has been proofread by a native speaker so is written in passable if inelegant English. Very occasionally the language is so bad I had to look up what was going on, for example:

‘Lord Mengchang … entertained several thousand protégés. When he sat talking with the quests he had invited…’ Should be, ‘Lord Mengchang had an entourage of several thousand, and when talking with guests…’ etc.

Sometimes it is just unclear. We are told that the Kaiping houses are ‘pillbox’ shaped and have rooves like those ‘widely used in America, Britain, Germany and the Middle East’. I’d never heard of these, so googled them. They are private houses built like towers (碉楼, military watchtower in Chinese, not the flat cylinder that the English ‘pillbox’ suggests) by returning overseas Chinese, mostly in the 1920s and 30s, as fortified protection against the bandits and thieves of the times. The rooves, in every architectural style you can imagine, are the only place on the fortress that it’s practical to show off an individual style. So there are Arabian onion domes and American gabled rooves. They actually date all the way back to the Ming dynasty (an example still stands today) and not the Qing as the books states.

And we have translations like ‘unfolding’ to mean ‘something that cannot be folded’, ‘plagues’ instead of ‘plaques’, (what kind of person gets a commemorative plague?). Or sentences such as ‘fans are received with growing appreciation from customers at home and abroad’. But sometimes the English can be charming, like ‘four-poster fancy bedstead’, describing a single storey Chinese courtyard as a ‘bungalow’, and ending a list with ‘and what not’. I also liked ‘the chicken talisman could help ward off the dismal impact of demons’. And bonus points for translating 少数民族 as ‘ethnic group’ rather than ‘minority nationality’ (a bugbear of mine).

One other complaint is repetition which is just down to bad editing. The entry for ‘glazed tile’ is almost identical to ‘yellow tiles and vermillion walls’, ornamental windows (漏窗) are described twice, the Dong Wind and Rain Bridges are described twice in the same entry, the cliff coffin burials of the Bo people are described as unique just two pages after an entry on the cliff coffin burials of the Yue, and so on.

But on the whole, worth a gander.

[h]

The idea of a reference book of Chinese objects is a great one, but this one could have benefitted from an English editor. The translation was clunky and at times unintelligible and it brimmed with state sanctioned propaganda. I could have done with more photos and less awkward descriptions.

[Josine van Heek]

Great guidebook on all things Chinese (culturally speaking). One page of info per subject. Bought it 2006 at the airport of Kunming waiting for our plane to Lijiang to arrive. One of my better buys.

[angela tsui]

This is a book about ancient culture history that dates back to the days of dynasties king and queen traditional customs, beliefs, and well-acquainted manners.