A Date with Destiny

The China Daily has recently posted an interesting article about the Taosi (陶寺) archaeological site in Shanxi Province (山西), China, a site which dates back more than 4,100 years and which archaeologists believe may contain the ruins of the world's oldest observatory.

Photo taken from the China Daily.

The article, Date with Destiny, is a short account of archaeologist Professor He Nu's research at the Taosi site. Professor He is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Science's Institute of Archaeology and he believes that the excavations being carried out at the Taosi site may yield clues about China's Neolithic past and help archaeologists determine whether the legendary emperors Yao (堯) and Shun (舜) really existed.*

* Readers may be interested to know that I have translated numerous articles and documents for the CASS Institute of Archaeology. The Institute of Archaeology are always on the lookout for volunteer translators, so if you are looking for a fun opportunity to boost your Chinese language and translation skills, feel free to contact the site's webmaster Qiao Yu for more information.

A Date with Destiny

Harvard College Library and National Library of China Embark on Digitization Project

Academics, students and other Sinophiles will be interested to know that Harvard College Library and the National Library of China will soon be embarking on a new cooperative project : the digitization of the 51,500 rare Chinese books housed at the Harvard-Yenching Library. The Harvard-Yenching Library is home to one of the largest collections of rare Chinese books outside of China and the digitization project is expected to last 6 years.

More information about the project can be found here.

Harvard College Library and National Library of China Embark on Digitization Project

"The Last Millennium of Chinese History" Lecture Series

A three-part lecture series by Dr. Frederic Wakeman entitled The Last Millennium of Chinese History : Transition from Culture to Nation can be found on Youtube. The lectures focus on the Ming and Qing Dynasties and on the changing nature of Chinese cultural identity over the past thousand years.

I haven't had the chance to watch any of these lectures yet so I cannot vouch for the quality (or content) of the lectures. The videos, which were uploaded by the University of California, Berkeley, can be found below.

Lecture 1 : China's Longue Durée and the Mongolian Occupation



Lecture 2 : Ming Nativism and the Local Turn



Lecture 3 : Qing Culturalism and Manchu Identity

"The Last Millennium of Chinese History" Lecture Series