U3A China Introduction

2010-03-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

The Qianlong Emperor:Treasures from the Forbidden City

The Qianlong emperor in formal court robe (detail) (1735) Anonymous

In 2002, recently returned from a visit to China, I was lucky enough to visit an exhibition called Treasures from the Forbidden City in the Royal Museum, Edinburgh. For sheer spectacle the articles included, from huge jade seals to a ruby and pearl encrusted gold wine cup, were the best I'd ever seen. The paintings were amazing in scope and quality: landscapes, portraits and a great many representations of flowers, fruits and animals both wild and domestic. I was impressed by the character of the Qianlong emperor, Hongli,(1711-1799) who, in a reign that spanned 63 years, patronised literary and visual arts as well as working hard to be a good ruler. Many of his own works appeared in the exhibition.

Detail of The Qianlong emperor in ceremonial armour on horseback, Like his grandfather and father before him Hongli followed the Manchurian horse-riding tradition. An intelligent and scholarly man,the emperor enjoyed hunting, tea drinking, composing poems, gardening and travelling. He was devoted to his family; his mother,the Xiaosheng dowager empress, often accompanied him on hunting trips and inspection tours of his enormous empire.

Spring's Peaceful Message This double portrait is attributed to Jesuit Guiseppe Castiglione (1688-1766) who joined Hongli's grandfather's court as a painter. It's generally agreed that this picture shows the young Qianlong emperor as a prince receiving a symbolic sprig of plum blossom from his father the Yongzheng emperor. It shows Castiglione's grasp of Chinese symbolism; plum blossom signifies trust. Towards the top right hand corner is a poem written by the emperor, a meditation on the changes made by time.

Bi disc, )(1st -2nd century AD)

'Bi' was a term used to categorise jade discs with a hole at the centre. They were commonly used in court rituals, especially when making sacrifices to heaven as heaven was believed to be round. However, they were also used as personal ornaments. This one has a poem by Hongli inscribed on the rim:

'Its beauty is a match for pieces made the Xia, the
Shang and the Zhou.
Some are inclined to envy the owner,
And the owner should no longer feel poor.
Stories fabricated in the inner court
Tell it was once worn by the lady who courageously
confronted a bear.'

(The incident referred to is one where a Lady Feng is said to have saved the Yuan emperor's (48-33BC) life by shielding him from a ferocious bear.)

The elderly Qianlong emperor in formal court robe (1792) Anonymous

Although attired in the maginificent robe of imperial yellow and physically robust, the emperor here shows unmistakeable signs of the fatigue of a long reign. Minor details such as the downward pointing fur trim on his shoulder cape contrast with the inaugural portrait (above), where the points are spread like wings. Hongli abdicated early so as not to appear to outdo his grandfather's reign of over 60 years.

Mount Pan was painted by Hongli in 1745. The emperor had a villa built on Mount Pan so that he would have somewhere to stay when he visited his ancestral tombs near Beijing. The villa is the subject of this ink on paper study,in the form of a hanging scroll. Built in 1744, it was destroyed some time during the revolution in the first decade of the twentieth century.

2010-03-08T02:02:00.000-08:00

Tones and Tongue-Twisters

This week's Chinese Unit demonstrated the amazing versatility of the Mandarin word 'ma' . According to how you say it, it can mean mother, hemp, horse, to scold or to indicate that a sentence is a question.

By chance, the text book my Chinese teacher uses includes a number of so-called 'tongue twisters', and this week's example is relevant.

The examples are : mother scolds the horse,(in bold) then underneath:

mother grows hemp, I put the horse to pasture, the horse eats hemp and (repeated) mother scolds the horse.

While we native speakers and writers delight in the many near-synonyms in the English language, it's a cause for confusion and mistakes for second language learners.

How much simpler it seems at first to discover that Chinese doesn't have all these variations. Instead of 'see', 'watch', 'glance', 'view' 'scrutinise', etc, etc the single word in Chinese is 'kan'.

Exactly what kind of seeing is taking place is indicated by an additional word, e.g. kan shi=watching TV, kan shu=reading a book, kan haizi=looking after a child. You add the nuances yourself; after all, everybody knows watching over a child is not the same as reading a book.

But we know from recent Course Units - at least the language sections - that Mandarin is able to be economical with its single-syllable parts of speech because any one of them can have four or five different meanings. It all depends on the tone.

If you are not familiar with the sounds, or if, like one unfortunate class-mate of mine, you are tone-deaf, it can be difficult to appreciate the differences. So I want to repeat descriptions that I found helpful:

First Tone

The first tone resembles the first note - doh- of the music scale. It helps to imagine you are singing the sound, like a contralto (in my case) doing a warming warming up exercise.

Second Tone

The second tone is a rising one, and you can imagine a question such as 'What?' or 'Who?'

Third Tone

The third tone has two sounds, a fall followed by a rise. The best way I know to describe this is Dame Edith Evans saying 'Handbag?' in 'The Importance of Being Earnest'.

Fourth Tone

The fourth tone is a sharp falling sound, as in 'Stop?' or 'Don't', as you might say it to a naughty child.

The example from the book includes the so-called voiceless or fifth tone, as the second syllable of mama . It's aachieved by compressing the lips and then opening them as you say the English 'schwah' sound, like the 'uh' in 'after'

With tone numbers, the examples would read: (in bold) ma1 ma ma4 ma3

Then: ma1 ma zhong3 ma2, wo3 qu4 fang4 ma2, ma1 chi1 le ma2, ma1 ma ma4 ma3

The voiceless fifth tone 'ma' at the end of a sentence turns it into a question.

I'm glad I don't learn Cantonese, the Hong Kong dialect - that, I believe, has nine tones!

2010-02-24T04:14:00.000-08:00

Personality and Calligraphy

I've always been interested in graphology, or the science of discerning character through handwriting.It's fascinating to see how it applies to Chinese calligraphy, especially that which has been consciously developed as an art form.

Unit 4 sent me to my Chinese bookshelf where I found Behind the Brushstrokes:Tales from Chinese Calligraphy. It was published by Graham Brash Pte Ltd 1993 in Singapore, where I bought it.

Among the 'famous calligraphers' mentioned in the text, along with examples of their work, is Empress Wu, the first 'Dragon Lady' mentioned in the course.

According to the book, Empress Wu Zetian 'could be hot-tempered and unforgiving and is reputed to have led an extravagant and lascivious lifestyle.'

The illustration below shows her 'Flying White Style', which incorporates images of birds and flowers into the characters.

Talk about the iron hand in the velvet glove! Character will out, it seems, when it comes to Calligraphy.

2010-02-22T02:49:00.000-08:00

Chinese Calligraphy in a Spanish Classroom

When the children at Luis Casado School got to know that I could write Chinese characters they wanted to write their own names.

As the classes at the village school were small it was easy for Olga the English teacher to organise paint and brushes.

They made a quaint addition to the English Corner, I think.

2010-02-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

新年快樂 Happy Chinese New Year!

This site shows you hoe to write it

http://goodcharacters.com/newsletters/chinese-happynewyear.html

Chinese New Year

2010-02-11T07:39:00.000-08:00

London Chinatown yesterday: Gerrard Street all decked out to greet The Year of the Tiger, which begins on Friday.

The Road Home

2010-02-06T04:19:00.000-08:00

On Thursday I was lucky enough to catch one of the regular series of free matinee screenings at the BFI. An added bonus was that it was a Chinese film by my favourite director. I think films are excellent for language learning and cultural information.

I first discovered Chinese films when I taught English in Singapore,which at the time (1990-93) had the highest per capita cinema attendance in the world,apart from India. This was despite very heavy censorship which,made plots hard to follow at times.

When there was a big drive by the UK government in the late eighties to put media education into the national curriculum, I was able to get funding for a part-time Media MA. My dissertation subject was Chinese director Zhang Yimou, best known nowadays for directing blockbusters like The House of Flying Daggers (2004)He was chosen to design the opening ceremnony for the Beijing Olympics.

Earlier, his films were regularly banned in China for criticising the government, whether disguised as set-in-the-past tales like Raise the Red Lantern(1991) or overtly in films like To Live (1994) about the pressures on a family living through the Cultural Revolution. A mastery of location shooting, ironic humour, colour, precise framing and use of local characters as actors (as well as the beautiful and talented Gong Li) made him China's foremost director.

It is these smaller-budget films, often about women struggling against oppression, that in my opinion are his most successful films.

The Road Home (1990) is a love story on a domestic scale, almost totally lacking the subversive elements that landed the the director in trouble in the past. A young man returns to his native village on the death of his father and narrates in flashback the story of his parents' courtship. His elderly mother insists on a traditional funeral procession, one of the meanings of the film's title. Open to a variety of interpretations, as are all Zhang's works, the film combines great visual impact through the changing seasons in remote rural China with an interest in day-to-day routines of ordinary Chinese people.

I hope you have the opportunity to see this and other eamples of Zhang Yimou's small-scale dramas, which are sometimes screened on TV.

The Road Home: www.imdb.com/title/tt023560/

Recommended Book

2010-01-30T07:57:00.000-08:00

Jean McDermid recommends a novel that sounds like a good read:

Under Fishbone Clouds Sam Meekings

This is a novel, interspersed with folk legends, about the members of a family during all the upheavals in the years from 1946 to the present. Sam Meekings married a Chinese girl and, I gather, wrote the book in reponse to tales and accounts told him by his wife's grandmother. I heard him read extracts from it at the Edinburgh Book Festival and I highly recommend it. It is very moving, insightful and beautifully written.

Chinese Music

2010-01-27T07:24:00.000-08:00

Found a great website for listening to all types of Chinese music from Traditional music right through to modern pop.
http://www.iBiblio.Org/chinese-music/

2010-01-26T07:42:00.000-08:00

Hello to all students on the U3A China Introduction course. I'm really pleased to be able to be in touch with other China enthusiasts, even (especially) those of you who are just beginners. Careful! You'll get hooked.

I hope you'll enjoy contributing to this blog - anything and everything related to China and your experience- books you can recommend, reminiscences of visits, exhibitons, talks you've attended or heard about.

Although I can't go to China very often these days I have contacts there and I like to keep in touch. I'm also lucky enough to live in London, so I can go to classes and a lot of China-related events.

Below is a photograph of the programme for a symposium I attended at the School of African and Asian Studies. The occasion was a celebration for the seventieth birthday of Gao Xingjian, the only person of Chinese origin to win the Nobel Prize for Literature

I hope you enjoy the course!