Archive for the 'Travel' Category

China’s stem-cell therapy blogs

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 13, 2007
in Blogs, Education, Travel and Virtual China
. 4 Comments

A growing facet of Virtual China: Maryann O’Donnell’s Shenzhen Fieldnotes has a great post on her thoughts about finding out that her local hospital in Nanshan is a leader in alternative stem-cell therapies for foreign patients. O’Donnell compares China stem cell blogs and
China adoption blogs. These two sets of online resources are major
contributors to understandings of China, outside of China. In both
cases China is seen as a source of miracles: a child, a recovery. 

So if you want to get a different view of China, check out the growing number of blogs written by foreign patients who have traveled from around the world to get treatments at Nanshan Hospital and at Dr. Hong Huangyun’s Beijing Xishan Institute for Neuroregeneration and Functional Recovery.  You can find a blogroll of such blogs at China Stem Cell News,
a savvy, well-produced English language website that introduces readers
to the companies, hospitals, and people engaged in the stem cell
treatment market in China.

A bit of background on the phenomena.  A June 2006 Boston Globe article describes the most famous of the stem-cell therapists, Dr. Huang Hongyun:

Hundreds of patients from across the United States and around the world
have flocked to his Beijing surgery practice, where Huang implants
cells with what he says are amazing healing powers...Huang says he injects his patients with "olfactory ensheathing cells."
These cells are thought to help nerves repair themselves by releasing
growth factors. The cells have been shown to repair nerves in animals,
but there is no evidence they help people. Working at Chaoyang and West Hills (Xishan) hospitals, Huang’s team
extracts these cells from aborted fetuses and then opens up a hole in
the patient’s brain or spinal cord, injecting the cells.

The first Western scientific evaluation of Huang’s work was published in the journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, and concludes: No clinically useful sensorimotor, disability, or autonomic improvements were found.

Continue reading ‘China’s stem-cell therapy blogs’

A glimpse of Beijing highways…

Published
by
Jason Li
on March 11, 2007
in Travel
. 2 Comments

20070311_bjroads

Brought to you by PCauto, via PostShow.

virtual China: a tour on Vimeo

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 4, 2007
in Food and Drink, P2P, Travel, Video Clips and Virtual China
. 1 Comment

I like going to Google Video and Youtube every now and then and doing some searching in English and Chinese for different China-related topics.  You never know what will turn up, and the randomness is the fun of it.  Today I checked out the variety on Vimeo, a sort-of hipster’s Youtube.  Searching "China" reveals 17 pages of videos, everything from slice-of-Beijing Beijing night market and Tian’anmen kite-flying, to Meet a Chinese (self-intro of a young Chinese guy at an American prep school).  These kinds of videos let us experience certain kinds of places that we might not want to visit in real life, such as this crazy amusement park-style supermarket in Shenyang, or inside this Wuhan nightclub. 

Most seem to be made by non-Chinese folks, visiting or living in China, except for a series by Hangzhou blogger (and Lost fan) Vincent Du, who treats us to a group of Bosch friends singing for one another at a dinner–a great Chinese custom, if you ask me, even though it can be painful if you’re not used to singing in public.

Spring Festival: 小处不可随便 don’t forget the small things

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on February 20, 2007
in Education, Food and Drink, Photos and Travel
. 2 Comments

It’s hard to take care of the public commons with a population 4 times the size of the U.S. This is especially obvious when you have hundreds of millions people mixing and milling across the country, going home, and taking vacations during their Spring Festival holidays. Often times it’s not the big issues that make a difference, but the
small things that can make daily life and public spaces habitable–or
not. In this spirit, Moobol/Molive.com has a post on Not Forgetting the Small Things During Spring Festival Travels." 小处不可随便" probably has a better English translation, but for now I’ll go with "don’t forget the small things." [Update: or perhaps, "don't forget the little places."]

Small_things_1

Small_things_2

The story behind the phrase "小处不可随便" "Don’t forget the small things" is also interesting.  According to Baidu Knows, a famous KMT official got tired of people peeing around the premises and wrote a sign saying “不可随处小便” "Random Urinating Not Allowed."  His calligraphy was so prized that someone stole the sign, cut it into individual characters, and rearranged it into "小处不可随便" "Don’t forget the small things."  [Update: Literally, "don't be too casual in small places"]. This has evolved into referring to things that deface little corners of public space, like littering, spitting, and random parking.

Artifact miscellany: train schedules

Published
by
Jason Li
on February 15, 2007
in Photos and Travel
. 0 Comments

Was going over my photos from fieldwork done at Microsoft Research Asia last summer and found these photos my friend Neema and I took when we were at the Beijing railway station. We had just asked the counter in one of the waiting rooms about our schedule, and here is a photo of his copy of the schedule:

Trainschedule1

Computerization? Printing press? Nope.

Trainschedule2

It was, I believe, written on the back of some soft-card packaging (cigarettes would be my guess).

Beijing cloverleaf maps

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 11, 2006
in Design, Photos and Travel
. 0 Comments

Thanks to Rania Ho at DancingToasters for scanning in these gorgeous maps of Beijing’s over-, under-, and around-passes.  As she writes on her blog, "it’s as if the civil engineer had "heard" there were such things as
cloverleaf interchanges in the world and then reversed engineered it in
the form of a chinese knot." If you like maps, check out her slideshow here.

Rania_map

on Chinese addresses and what a township is

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 5, 2006
in Blogs, Commerce and Travel
. 1 Comment

MaryAnn O’Donnell continues her clear-eyed thinking about the land and people of Shenzhen and Guangdong province, at her blog Shenzhen Fieldnotes.

If you want to know how Chinese addresses work and how to parse China’s various administrative naming practices–if you want to know more about the kinds of places that drive the southern China manufacturing miracle–read her post "emplacements," on Julong Village, otherwise known as "guangdong province, dongguan city, wangniudun township, julong village (广东省东莞市望牛顿镇聚龙村)".  MaryAnn writes:

…much of the guangdong boom is actually located in rural townships and
villages. administratively, townships are hybrids; they are rural
cities. this means that in niuwangdun, julong villagers can invest in
industrial production (because it is a city), but that the landuse
rights return to villagers, both collectively and individually, because
they hold eternal land rights. this loophole has provided guangdong
townships and villages with the incentive and flexibility to
industrialize in different ways from cities. on the one hand, it has
also enabled villagers to become wealthy independent of the state. in
shenzhen, this loophole inspired the rural urbanization movement, which
changed the administrative status of shenzhen’s farmers from rural to
urban, with the result that their children no longer have traditional
rights to the land. on the other hand, it has produced a distinctive
landscape of tiled multi-story housing, factories, and traditional
remnants."

Julong_village_lg

rare and old books in Virtual China

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on September 1, 2006
in Art, Auctions, Commerce, Photos, Religion, Translation and Travel
. 2 Comments

Locomotive_qianmen_1

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. 

Railway on the roof of the world

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on July 5, 2006
in News, Photos and Travel
. 0 Comments

Railway

The last stretch of the Qinghai-Tibet railway between Golmud and Lhasa has now been completed. The first train left from Goldmud, Qinghai on Saturday the 1st of July after president Hu Jintao cut the ceremonial ribbon. The day of the opening was the same as the 85th anniversary of the Communist Party of China.

President Hu Jintao called the railway a "miracle" of railway
engineering when he officially opened the new line, the China Daily
reported on Monday. But the railway has drawn criticism from advocates
of Tibetan autonomy who say the trains will bring an influx of tourists
and long-term migrants who threaten Tibet’s cultural integrity. Link to Reuters

With 1,142 kilometers section of the railway between Golmud and Lhasa
running along Kunlun Mountain and Tanggula Mountain, 960 kilometers of
the railway will be above 4,000 meters, with the highest point at 5,072
meters, at least 200 meters higher than the Peruvian railway in the
Andes, which was formerly the world’s most elevated track. Link to News.xinhuanet.com

Check out the official Chinese website which provides a map with links in Chinese to each station, photos of the opening day ceremony in Golmud, and highlights on the armed police who are protecting the first bridge of the railway, which crosses the Himalyan origin of the Yangtze River.
Wujing_at_changjiang_bridge_1

Reuters describes experiences from the journey:

"This railway is really comfortable. You can see beautiful scenery,
white clouds, herds of yaks and lots of wild animals," gushed Tibetan
Mima Cering, attending the Police Academy in Beijing.As the train climbed, many passengers attached the tubes to their
nostrils and announcements warned passengers to avoid sudden movements
that could trigger sickness, even in the pressurized cabins. About a
third of those traveling in the cheaper cabins, mostly Tibetan
students, appeared to be feeling ill.


"Now we’ve reached the top, I feel sick and nauseous and have
headaches," said Wu Jia, 32, a Chinese tourist. Older passengers,
looking uncomfortable, were lying down, children were crying and some
were being sick in the bathrooms.
Link

For more first hand reports in English, go to cnews.canoe.ca or Chinatoday.com

Young Tibetans on the internet

Published
by
Kathrine Hoersted
on June 20, 2006
in BBS, Internet cafe, News, Translation, Travel and Virtual China
. 3 Comments

Lhamo Tsering is a young Tibetan woman who lives in a village with her family in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen. In 2003 I did anthropological research for my master’s thesis and Lhamo and her family graciously offered me to live with them. I stayed with them for seven months.

Img_1343

Most village houses have electricity for lighting, but for cooking the villagers normally use open fire. Nobody has internet access or a computer in their house.

Img_0735

In the nearest town, Gyalthang town (Shangri La) [previously blogged], which is half an hour away on a bicycle, there are a few Internet cafés. Sometimes Lhamo would go with me to the Internet café and one day I had an email account set up for her.

Img_0491

The main road in Gyalthang town.

Since then, she has been emailing with those of her friends who also have email accounts and Lhamo and I have also kept in contact using email. The other day she told me that apart from emailing she has started using QQ.com to chat with her friends in Lhasa and other towns. "You can have Tibetan installed on your computer" she explains, but most of the people she knows use either Chinese or English both for emails and chats.