Looks like the big news is that Sohu is no longer in the top 3 portals in China, but has been knocked out by Tencent. 55% of Chinese Internet users used Sina last year; 51% hit Netease; 48% used Tencent, according to the Internet Guide 2007 China Internet Survey Report (in Chinese), put out by the Data Center of the Chinese Internet. The rest of the top three rankings as follows:
blog sites: Sina 33%; Qzone 19%; MSN 16%
IM: QQ 79%; MSN 34%; Sina UC 11%
search: Baidu 81%; Google 36%; Yahoo 26%
car sites: Sina Auto 17%; Sohu Auto 12%; Pacific Auto 11%
games: QQ 37%; Lianqun/Ourgame 20%; Shanda 20%
podcast/video sharing: Toodou 10%; Yoqoo 9%; Mofile 9%
C2C auctions: Taobao 55%; eBay 37%; Paipai 20%
mapping services: Baidu 33%; China e-Map 中国电子地图网 19%; Go2Map 图行天下 11%
Link to Chinese BBS post (via TOPChinaLabs).
Title: The first locomotive that runs through the heart of Peking. A train station opens in Chienmên on November 1, 1901. From "Photographic Journal," a collection of photographs taken in cities including Beijing and
Shanghai by Alfons von Mumm. Mumm left in Genova July 1900, and arrived
in Beijing in October of the same year.
One of the wonderful things about the digital world is that it makes faraway, obscure, and rare things accessible to a wider audience. The Asian Studies WWW Monitor recently logged the Digital Silk Roads Project (DSR), National Institute of Informatics (NII), The Toyo Bunko, Tokyo, Japan, and within it the Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books. Self-description of the latter:
"The purpose of the project is to make ‘invisible’ books visible from everyone. Today surprisingly many books are invisible from the general public because accessibility to precious books is restricted due to their fragility and safety. To let them come out of the dark rooms of libraries, we establish the digital archive of precious books and improve accessibility to them on the Portal site." The site contains page-by-page photos of 53 extraordinary books, such as
- 12 volumes of books and collections by Marc Aurel Stein, British archaeologist and linguist who made numerous Central Asian expeditions in the early 1900s. Example: The Thousand Buddhas, "A large color printed book of showing Buddhist paintings from the Mogao
Caves in Dunhuang. Stein collected these paintings during his second
expedition to Central Asia (1906-08). Includes L.Binyon’s essay
‘Dunhuang paintings and their place amongst Buddhist art’, together
with Stein’s descriptions of 48 Buddhist paintings";
- From Kyakhta to the source of the Yellow River, a report by Russian zoologist and explorer Nikolai Mikhailovich Przhevalskii, who in the three years of 1870-1873 "crossed the Gobi Desert with only three subordinates, reached
Beijing, and went southwest from there to explore the Ordos, Alashan,
and upper reaches of the Yangtse River before entering Tibet and
arriving at the banks of the Dri Chu (Jinsha Jiang)."
- One volume of George Ernest Morrison’s, Views of China, photographs of daily life in China taken in late 1800s, early 1900s. Morrison was an Australian journalist and Chinese Republican government advisor.
If you’re looking to buy old or rare Chinese books, bloggers MaryAnn O’Donnell and Frog in a Well ("collaborative weblogs dedicated to East Asian history") point to Kongfuzi, a Chinese language site that identifies, evaluates and ranks old book sellers across China, provides links to online resources and merchants, provides an online auction platform, and much more.
China Tech Stories alerts us to a new report from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center 中国互联网络信息中心, and no, it doesn’t match the acronym): 2006 Chinese C2C Online Sales Survey. In other words, a snapshot of what’s going on with person-to-person direct sales over the Internet, through online auctions, in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Highlights from press release (partly borrowing from Mao Xianjia’s translation at China Tech Stories):
- by the end of March 2006 there were 2 million C2C online customers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Shanghai had the highest penetration rate of 18.5%, followed by Beijing with 17.5%, and Guangzhou with 11.5%.
- Market share for the different auction sites in 2005 in the three cities, as calculated by number of purchasers and shopping frequency: Taobao is way ahead at 67.3%, eBay at 29.1%, Paipai 2.2% and Yipai 1.4%.
- In 2005 there were about 7.4 million reported online transactions across Taobao, eBay, Paipai and Yipai, with about 4.25 transactions/person on Taobao and just over 3 transactions/person on eBay.
- most frequently purchased items are apparel, cosmetics and jewelry,
computers, mobile phones, appliances, and electronic card/virtual money, with fashion and IT products the frontrunners. [We'll have to track this to see if we can get more specific data on virtual money transactions.]
- In contrast to B2C stats, women buyers and sellers outnumbered men in buying apparel, cosmetics and jewelry, food and health products, daily supplies,
toys and baby supplies, pets and pet supplies.
link to CNNIC report (in Chinese)
link to press release (in Chinese)
Tencent, the company that runs China’s most popular online chat service, QQ, has made a move into the already crowded C2C market in China. Paipai.com is Tencent’s now formally opened site, and includes online stores, a games area, and virtual products. Tencent plans to eventually leverage QQ with the new trading platform. According to a recent report from China-based Analysys International, Chinese online auctions brought in about US $1.7 billion in value in 2005, an increase of 235% from 2004. The sites’ market share breaks down as follows:
Taobao, part of the web portal Alibaba, accounted for
57.74% of the total transaction value in 2005, followed by eBay with
31.46%, 1Pai, part of Yahoo! China, with 5.75% and PaiPai with 3.76%.
(via ChinaTechNews.com)
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