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The River At The Center Of The World
''The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time'' is a book by Simon Winchester. It details his travels up the Yangtze river in China and was first published in 1996. Viewing an ancient Chinese painting scroll drawn by Wang Hui gives the author the inspiration on how to structure his book. He starts his journey in Shanghai, at the Yangtze river's delta, and makes his way upriver to the headwaters. At the same time, his narration also makes a journey back in time, writing about contemporary times in Shanghai and Nanjing, and writing about events that date back increasingly farther in cities upriver. He makes the travel with a companion — a Chinese woman who is referred to in the book only as ''Lily'' to protect her identity. The chapter titled ''A New Great Wall'' is devoted to the Three Gorges Dam The Three Gorges Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam that spans the Yangtze River by the town of Sandouping, in Yiling Distric ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simon Winchester
Simon Winchester (born 28 September 1944) is a British-American author and journalist. In his career at ''The Guardian'' newspaper, Winchester covered numerous significant events, including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. Winchester has written or contributed to more than a dozen nonfiction books, has written one novel, and has contributed to several travel magazines, among them '' Condé Nast Traveler'', ''Smithsonian Magazine'', and ''National Geographic''. Early life and education Born in London, Winchester attended several boarding schools in Dorset, including Hardye's School. He spent a year hitchhiking around the United States, then in 1963 went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford, to study geology. He graduated in 1966, and found work with Falconbridge of Africa, a Canadian mining company. His first assignment was to work as a field geologist searching for copper deposits in Uganda. Career While on assignment in Uganda, Winchester happened upon a copy of Jame ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Travel Literature
The genre of travel literature encompasses outdoor literature, guide books, nature writing, and travel memoirs. One early travel memoirist in Western literature was Pausanias, a Greek geographer of the 2nd century CE. In the early modern period, James Boswell's ''Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides'' (1786) helped shape travel memoir as a genre. History Early examples of travel literature include the ''Periplus of the Erythraean Sea'' (generally considered a 1st century CE work; authorship is debated), Pausanias' ''Description of Greece'' in the 2nd century CE, ''Safarnama'' (Book of Travels) by Nasir Khusraw (1003-1077), the '' Journey Through Wales'' (1191) and '' Description of Wales'' (1194) by Gerald of Wales, and the travel journals of Ibn Jubayr (1145–1214), Marco Polo (1254–1354), and Ibn Battuta (1304–1377), all of whom recorded their travels across the known world in detail. As early as the 2nd century CE, Lucian of Samosata discussed history and tr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henry Holt And Company
Henry Holt and Company is an American book-publishing company based in New York City. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt. Currently, the company publishes in the fields of American and international fiction, biography, history and politics, science, psychology, and health, as well as books for children's literature. In the US, it operates under Macmillan Publishers. History The company publishes under several imprints, including Metropolitan Books, Times Books, Owl Books, and Picador. It also publishes under the name of Holt Paperbacks. The company has published works by renowned authors Erich Fromm, Paul Auster, Hilary Mantel, Robert Frost, Hermann Hesse, Norman Mailer, Herta Müller, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ivan Turgenev, and Noam Chomsky. From 1951 to 1985, Holt published the magazine ''Field & Stream''. Holt merged with Rinehart & Company of New York and the John C. Winston Compa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yangtze
The Yangtze or Yangzi ( or ; ) is the longest river in Asia, the third-longest in the world, and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. It rises at Jari Hill in the Tanggula Mountains (Tibetan Plateau) and flows in a generally easterly direction to the East China Sea. It is the seventh-largest river by discharge volume in the world. Its drainage basin comprises one-fifth of the land area of China, and is home to nearly one-third of the country's population. The Yangtze has played a major role in the history, culture, and economy of China. For thousands of years, the river has been used for water, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, industry, boundary-marking, and war. The prosperous Yangtze Delta generates as much as 20% of historical GDP of China, China's GDP. The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is the list of the largest hydroelectric power stations, largest hydro-electric power station in the world that is in use. In mid-2014, the Chine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Painting
Chinese painting () is one of the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world. Painting in the traditional style is known today in Chinese as ''guó huà'' (), meaning "national painting" or "native painting", as opposed to Western styles of art which became popular in China in the 20th century. It is also called ''danqing'' (). Traditional painting involves essentially the same techniques as calligraphy and is done with a brush dipped in black ink or coloured pigments; oils are not used. As with calligraphy, the most popular materials on which paintings are made are paper and silk. The finished work can be mounted on scrolls, such as hanging scrolls or handscrolls. Traditional painting can also be done on album sheets, walls, lacquerware, folding screens, and other media. The two main techniques in Chinese painting are: * Gongbi (工筆), meaning "meticulous", uses highly detailed brushstrokes that delimit details very precisely. It is often highly colored and usual ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wang Hui (Qing Dynasty)
Wang Hui (; 1632–1717) was a Chinese landscape painter, one of the Four Wangs. He, and the three other Wangs, dominated orthodox art in China throughout the late Ming and early Qing periods. Of the Four Wangs, Wang Hui is considered the best-known today. Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei museums loaned works for "Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717)" in 2008 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Biography Wang Hui followed in the footprints of his great grandfathers, grandfather, father and uncles and learned painting at a very early age. He was later taught by two contemporary masters, Zhang Ke and Wang Shimin Wáng Shímǐn (; c. 1592–1680) was a Chinese landscape painter during the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty (1644–1911). Born in the Jiangsu province, Wang grew up in an artistic, scholarly environment. His grandfather was ..., who taught him to work in the tradition of copying famous Chinese paintings. This is mos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shanghai
Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowing through it. With a population of 24.89 million as of 2021, Shanghai is the most populous urban area in China with 39,300,000 inhabitants living in the Shanghai metropolitan area, the second most populous city proper in the world (after Chongqing) and the only city in East Asia with a GDP greater than its corresponding capital. Shanghai ranks second among the administrative divisions of Mainland China in human development index (after Beijing). As of 2018, the Greater Shanghai metropolitan area was estimated to produce a gross metropolitan product (nominal) of nearly 9.1 trillion RMB ($1.33 trillion), exceeding that of Mexico with GDP of $1.22 trillion, the 15th largest in the world. Shanghai is one of the world's major centers for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nanjing
Nanjing (; , Mandarin pronunciation: ), alternately romanized as Nanking, is the capital of Jiangsu province of the People's Republic of China. It is a sub-provincial city, a megacity, and the second largest city in the East China region. The city has 11 districts, an administrative area of , and a total recorded population of 9,314,685 . Situated in the Yangtze River Delta region, Nanjing has a prominent place in Chinese history and culture, having served as the capital of various Chinese dynasties, kingdoms and republican governments dating from the 3rd century to 1949, and has thus long been a major center of culture, education, research, politics, economy, transport networks and tourism, being the home to one of the world's largest inland ports. The city is also one of the fifteen sub-provincial cities in the People's Republic of China's administrative structure, enjoying jurisdictional and economic autonomy only slightly less than that of a province. Nanjing has be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Three Gorges Dam
The Three Gorges Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam that spans the Yangtze River by the town of Sandouping, in Yiling District, Yichang, Hubei province, central China, downstream of the Three Gorges. The Three Gorges Dam has been the world's largest power station in terms of installed capacity (22,500 MW) since 2012. The dam generates an average 95±20 TWh of electricity per year, depending on annual amount of precipitation in the river basin. After the extensive monsoon rainfalls of 2020, the dam's annual production nearly reached 112 TWh, breaking the previous world record of ~103 TWh set by Itaipu Dam in 2016. The dam body was completed in 2006. The power plant of the dam project was completed and fully functional as of July 4, 2012, when the last of the main water turbines in the underground plant began production. Each main water turbine has a capacity of 700 MW. Coupling the dam's 32 main turbines with two smaller generators (50 MW each) to power the p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1996 Non-fiction Books
File:1996 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: A Centennial Olympic Park bombing, bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, set off by a radical Anti-abortion violence, anti-abortionist; The center fuel tank explodes on TWA Flight 800, causing the plane to crash and killing everyone on board; Eight people 1996 Mount Everest disaster, die in a blizzard on Mount Everest; Dolly (sheep), Dolly the Sheep becomes the first mammal to have been cloned from an adult somatic cell; The Port Arthur massacre (Australia), Port Arthur Massacre occurs on Tasmania, and leads to major changes in Gun laws of Australia, Australia's gun laws; Macarena, sung by Los del Río and remixed by The Bayside Boys, becomes a major dance craze and cultural phenomenon; Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 crash-ditches off of the Comoros Islands after the plane was Aircraft hijacking, hijacked; the 1996 Summer Olympics are held in Atlanta, marking the Centennial (100th Anniversary) of the modern Olympic Gam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Books About China
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a bo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Books By Simon Winchester
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is called a b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
