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Longma
The ''longma'' is a fabled winged horse with dragon scales in Chinese mythology. Seeing a ''longma'' was an omen of a legendary sage-ruler, particularly one of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. Name The Chinese language, Chinese word ''longma'' combines ''long'' "Chinese dragon, dragon" and ''ma'' "horse". Compare ''hema'' ( "river horse") "hippopotamus" and ''haima'' ( "sea horse") "seahorse". In addition to naming the mythic creature, ''longma'' "dragon horse" can refer to an eminent person, such as in the Chengyu, four-character idiom ''longma jingshen'' ("vigorous spirit in old age"). ''Longma'' interconnects traditional Chinese beliefs about dragons and horses. An early example comes from the ''Zhouli'' "Rites of Zhou" (), which differentiates names for horses of different heights, measured in the ''chi'' "Chinese foot" (historically around 23–33 centimeters, see Chinese units of measurement). Horses up to 8 feet tall are called ''long'' "dragon", those ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Dragon
The Chinese dragon, also known as ''loong'', ''long'' or ''lung'', is a legendary creature in Chinese mythology, Chinese folklore, and Chinese culture at large. Chinese dragons have many Outline of life forms, animal-like forms such as Bixi (mythology), turtles and Chiwen, fish, but are most commonly depicted as snake-like with four legs. Academicians have identified four reliable theories on the origin of the Chinese dragon: snakes, Chinese alligators, thunder and nature worship. They traditionally symbolize potent and wikt:auspicious, auspicious powers, particularly control over water, rainfall, typhoons, and floods. The dragon is also a symbol of power, strength, and good luck for people who are worthy of it in East Asian cultural sphere, East Asian culture. During the days of Imperial China, the Emperor of China usually used the dragon as a symbol of his imperial strength and power. In Chinese culture, excellent and outstanding people are compared to a dragon, while incapable ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Mythology
Chinese mythology () is mythology that has been passed down in oral form or recorded in literature in the geographic area now known as Greater China. Chinese mythology includes many varied myths from regional and cultural traditions. Much of the mythology involves exciting stories full of fantastic people and beings, the use of magical powers, often taking place in an exotic mythological place or time. Like many mythologies, Chinese mythology has in the past been believed to be, at least in part, a factual recording of history. Along with Chinese folklore, Chinese mythology forms an important part of Chinese folk religion. Many stories regarding characters and events of the distant past have a double tradition: ones which present a more historicized or euhemerized version and ones which present a more mythological version. Many myths involve the creation and cosmology of the universe and its deities and inhabitants. Some mythology involves creation myths, the origin of things, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fu Xi
Fuxi or Fu Hsi (伏羲 ~ 伏犧 ~ 伏戲) is a culture hero in Chinese legend and mythology, credited along with his sister and wife Nüwa with creating humanity and the invention of music, hunting, fishing, domestication, and cooking as well as the Cangjie system of writing Chinese characters around 2,000BC. Fuxi was counted as the first of the Three Sovereigns at the beginning of the Chinese dynastic period. Origin Pangu was said to be the creation god in Chinese mythology. He was a giant sleeping within an egg of chaos. As he awoke, he stood up and divided the sky and the earth. Pangu then died after standing up, and his body turned into rivers, mountains, plants, animals, and everything else in the world, among which is a powerful being known as Huaxu (華胥). Huaxu gave birth to a twin brother and sister, Fuxi and Nüwa. Fuxi and Nüwa are said to be creatures that have faces of human and bodies of snakes. Fuxi was known as the "original god", and he was said to have be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Language
Chinese (, especially when referring to written Chinese) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in Greater China. About 1.3 billion people (or approximately 16% of the world's population) speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be variants of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered separate languages in a family. Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin (with about 800 million speakers, or 66%), followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shangh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bagua
The bagua or pakua (八卦) are a set of eight symbols that originated in China, used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. Each consists of three lines, each line either "broken" or "unbroken", respectively representing yin or yang. Due to their tripartite structure, they are often referred to as Eight Trigrams in English. The trigrams are related to Taiji philosophy, Taijiquan and the Wuxing, or "five elements". The relationships between the trigrams are represented in two arrangements: the ''Primordial'' (), "Earlier Heaven", or "Fu Xi" bagua () and the ''Manifested'' (), "Later Heaven", or "King Wen" bagua. The trigrams have correspondences in astronomy, astrology, geography, geomancy, anatomy, the family, martial arts, Chinese medicine and elsewhere. The ancient Chinese classic, I Ching (Pinyin: Yi Jing), consists of the 64 pairwise permutations of trigrams, referred to as " hexagrams", a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lo Shu Square
The Luoshu (pinyin), Lo Shu ( Wade-Giles), or Nine Halls Diagram is an ancient Chinese diagram and named for the Luo River near Luoyang, Henan. The Luoshu appears in myths concerning the invention of writing by Cangjie and other culture heroes. It is a unique normal magic square of order three. It is usually paired with the River Map or Hetunamed in reference to the Yellow Riverand used with the River Map in various contexts involving Chinese geomancy, numerology, philosophy, and early natural science. Traditions The Lo Shu is part of the legacy of ancient Chinese mathematical and divinity (cf. the I Ching ) traditions, and is an important emblem in '' Feng Shui'' ()—the art of geomancy concerned with the placement of objects in relation to the flow of qi (), or "natural energy". History A Chinese legend concerning the pre-historic Emperor Yu () tells of the Lo Shu, often in connection with the ''Yellow River Map'' (Hetu) and the eight trigrams. In ancient China there i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chess Piece
A chess piece, or chessman, is a game piece that is placed on a chessboard to play the game of chess. It can be either White and Black in chess, white or black, and it can be one of six types: King (chess), king, Queen (chess), queen, Rook (chess), rook, Bishop (chess), bishop, Knight (chess), knight, or Pawn (chess), pawn. Chess sets generally come with sixteen pieces of each color. Additional pieces, usually an extra queen per color, may be provided for use in Promotion (chess), promotion. Number of pieces Each player begins with sixteen pieces (but see the #Usage of the term piece, subsection below for other usage of the term ''piece''). The pieces that belong to each player are distinguished by color: the lighter colored pieces are referred to as "white" and the player that owns them as "White", whereas the darker colored pieces are referred to as "black" and the player that owns them as "Black". In a standard game, each of the two players begins with the following sixteen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wuxing (Chinese Philosophy)
(; Japanese: (); Korean: (); Vietnamese: ''ngũ hành'' (五行)), usually translated as Five Phases or Five Agents, is a fivefold conceptual scheme that many traditional Chinese fields used to explain a wide array of phenomena, from cosmic cycles to the interaction between internal organs, and from the succession of political regimes to the properties of medicinal drugs. The "Five Phases" are Fire ( zh, c=, p=huǒ, labels=no), Water ( zh, c=, p=shuǐ, labels=no), Wood ( zh, c=, p=mù, labels=no), Metal or Gold ( zh, c=, p=jīn, labels=no), and Earth or Soil ( zh, c=, p=tǔ, labels=no). This order of presentation is known as the " Days of the Week" sequence. In the order of "mutual generation" ( zh, c=相生, p=xiāngshēng, labels=no), they are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. In the order of "mutual overcoming" ( zh, c=相克, p=xiāngkè, labels=no), they are Wood, Earth, Water, Fire, and Metal. The system of five phases was used for describing interactions and rel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magic Square
In recreational mathematics, a square array of numbers, usually positive integers, is called a magic square if the sums of the numbers in each row, each column, and both main diagonals are the same. The 'order' of the magic square is the number of integers along one side (''n''), and the constant sum is called the ' magic constant'. If the array includes just the positive integers 1,2,...,n^2, the magic square is said to be 'normal'. Some authors take magic square to mean normal magic square. Magic squares that include repeated entries do not fall under this definition and are referred to as 'trivial'. Some well-known examples, including the Sagrada Família magic square and the Parker square are trivial in this sense. When all the rows and columns but not both diagonals sum to the magic constant this gives a ''semimagic square (sometimes called orthomagic square). The mathematical study of magic squares typically deals with their construction, classification, and enumeration. A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luo River (Henan)
The Luo River () is a tributary of the Yellow River in China. It rises in the southeast flank of Mount Hua in Shaanxi province and flows east into Henan province, where it eventually joins the Yellow River at the city of Gongyi. The river's total length is . Although not a major river by most standards, it flows through an area of great archaeological significance in the early history of China. Principal cities or prefectures located on the river include Lushi, Luoning, Yiyang, Luoyang, Yanshi, and Gongyi. The Luo's main tributary is the Yi River, which joins it at Yanshi, after which the river is called the Yiluo River. See also * Lo Shu Square * Peiligang culture The Peiligang culture was a Neolithic culture in the Luo River (Henan), Yi-Luo river basin (in modern Henan, Henan Province, China) that existed from 7000 to 5000 BC. Over 100 sites have been identified with the Peiligang culture, nearly all o ... External links Confluence of the Luo and Yellow Rivers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yellow River
The Yellow River or Huang He (Chinese: , Standard Beijing Mandarin, Mandarin: ''Huáng hé'' ) is the second-longest river in China, after the Yangtze River, and the List of rivers by length, sixth-longest river system in the world at the estimated length of . Originating in the Bayan Har Mountains in Qinghai province of Western China, it flows through nine provinces, and it empties into the Bohai Sea near the city of Dongying in Shandong province. The Yellow River basin has an east–west extent of about and a north–south extent of about . Its total drainage area is about . The Yellow River's basin was the Yellow River civilization, birthplace of ancient Chinese, and, by extension, Far East, Far Eastern civilization, and it was the most prosperous region in early Chinese history. There are frequent devastating natural disasters in China, floods and course changes produced by the continual elevation of the river bed, sometimes above the level of its surrounding farm fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Classic Texts
Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian tradition, themselves a customary abridgment of the "Thirteen Classics". All of these pre-Qin texts were written in classical Chinese. All three canons are collectively known as the classics ( t , s , ''jīng'', lit. "warp"). The term Chinese classic texts may be broadly used in reference to texts which were written in vernacular Chinese or it may be narrowly used in reference to texts which were written in the classical Chinese which was current until the fall of the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, in 1912. These texts can include ''shi'' (, historical works), ''zi'' (, philosophical works belonging to schools of thought other than the Confucian but also including works on agriculture, Traditional Chinese medicine, med ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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