Chinese cars have finally made those who once despised them kneel.
20 years ago, Chinese cars were laughed at.
20 years later, European carmakers are desperately learning to be more Chinese.
Meanwhile, the US bans Chinese cars so that it can lag further behind.
A young American traveled to China after watching a documentary about Yin Yuzhen—a Chinese woman who spent her life planting trees in the desert—just to join her combat against desertification. And he’s been doing it for over a decade.
✨🇨🇳On May 4th, a heartwarming story! A 44-year-old guy from Shaanxi suddenly suffered a cerebral infarction in Xianfeng, leaving 8,000 catties of apples unsold!
After the hospital launched a loving initiative, delivery guys, internet celebrities, and all kinds of kind-hearted people teamed up and took action!
With online “stalls” on social media and offline sales, they sold out all the apples in just 19 hours! This act of community kindness is so amazing—love always breaks through all difficulties!
He's reading a 1,353-year-old document that a Buddhist monk spent 25 years putting together, one character at a time.
Around 1,400 years ago, an emperor of China named Taizong wanted some text carved onto a stone tablet, written in the handwriting of Wang Xizhi, considered China's greatest calligrapher. Wang Xizhi had been dead for nearly 300 years.
So a Buddhist monk named Huairen, along with 40+ helpers, took on the project. They went through the emperor's archives, private collections, old letters, anywhere Wang had ever written something. They pulled out individual characters, traced them, and resized them. When a character couldn't be found anywhere, they took pieces from other characters and built new ones, like Lego. 1,903 characters in total. The emperor spent so much from the royal treasury hunting down missing characters that the finished tablet earned a nickname: the Thousand Gold Stele.
That stone tablet still stands today, in a museum in Xi'an. For 1,353 years, people have been pressing paper onto it and rubbing ink over the carved characters to make copies. The image on his iPad is a digital scan of one of those rubbings.
Wang Xizhi (303-361 AD) is called the Sage of Calligraphy, basically the Shakespeare of Chinese handwriting. Out of 100 famous calligraphers from his lifetime, 20 belonged to his family. His children all became calligraphers. He practiced so much that legend says the pond outside his house turned black from washing his brushes.
Yet not one original Wang Xizhi work survives. Everything is a copy, a tracing, or a stone rubbing.
His most famous piece, the Lantingji Xu (Orchid Pavilion Preface), was written drunk at a poetry party in 353 AD. 324 characters. The Chinese character 之 appears in it 20 times. Wang wrote each one differently. The next morning, sober, he tried to recreate the piece more than 100 times. He never matched the original.
Three centuries later, that scroll ended up with a monk named Biancai. Emperor Taizong got fixated on owning it. He sent messengers three times. Biancai lied each time. So Taizong sent a court official disguised as a wandering scholar, who spent months befriending Biancai, then stole the scroll and rode back to the capital.
When Taizong died in 649 AD, the original Lantingji Xu was buried with him. It has been lost ever since.
In 2010, a 41-character fragment from another Wang piece (Ping'an Tie) sold at a Beijing auction for 308 million yuan, or $46 million. That's roughly $1.13 million per character. And it was a copy.
So what's on his iPad is a digital scan of a paper rubbing of a stone tablet that monks built character by character because Wang Xizhi's actual handwriting was so coveted, one emperor stole it, another was buried with it, and every Chinese calligrapher since has been chasing its ghost.
Munching snacks on a train is the right energy for that.