Clippings From China & Chinese Forteana

While many elderly Chinese women spend their free time practicing public square-dancing, a grandmother in China's Sichuan province is busy pole-dancing.

Dai Dali, a 70-year-old granny, started to learn pole dancing four years ago. She is now able to pull off many intense moves, such as hanging upside down with one leg on the pole and doing splits along the pole. She has even won the Fifth China Pole Dance Championship.

Continued:
https://gbtimes.com/70-year-old-chinese-granny-i-prefer-pole-dancing

 
Yithian said:
While many elderly Chinese women spend their free time practicing public square-dancing, a grandmother in China's Sichuan province is busy pole-dancing.

Dai Dali, a 70-year-old granny, started to learn pole dancing four years ago. She is now able to pull off many intense moves, such as hanging upside down with one leg on the pole and doing splits along the pole. She has even won the Fifth China Pole Dance Championship.

Continued:
https://gbtimes.com/70-year-old-chinese-granny-i-prefer-pole-dancing
Click to expand...
One thing I noticed on a recent trip to China is that while strip clubs are illegal, pole-dancing studios (as a fitness thing) abound. Also old people are very into keeping fit there.
 
Playing polo on donkeys!

History records the deeds of faithful horses, whereas it relegates their equine cousins, the donkeys, to the role of mere pack animals. But a new analysis of bones buried with a ninth century Chinese noblewoman may help raise the status of the lowly ass: It may have served as her steed during polo matches in the royal court.

“It is about time that donkeys are getting their due recognition,” says Sandra Olsen, an archaeologist at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, Museum of Natural History who wasn’t involved with the work. She calls the new finding of their role in ancient sports “particularly exciting.”

In 2012, a team of Chinese archaeologists in Xi’an, the ancient capital of the Tang dynasty, excavated the bricked-in tomb of a woman named Cui Shi, who, according to official records, died at the age of 59 on 6 October 878 C.E. Murals on her tomb walls of workers preparing a sumptuous feast suggest she was of high status. Although looters had ransacked the tomb, they left behind a bevy of animal bones, including those of at least three donkeys.

Donkeys would have been a common sight in Xi’an in the ninth century. The bustling Tang capital was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road trade route, and donkeys were frequently used as pack animals. But humble beasts of burden aren’t usually buried alongside elite members of society, says study co-author Fiona Marshall, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Donkeys … are not associated with high-status people,” Marshall says. “They were animals used by ordinary folk.”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/polo-obsessed-chinese-noblewoman-buried-her-donkey-steed
 
They employed weighters.

A restaurant in central China has apologised for encouraging diners to weigh themselves and then order food accordingly.

The policy was introduced after a national campaign against food waste was launched. The beef restaurant in the city of Changsha placed two large scales at its entrance this week. It then asked diners to enter their measurements into an app that would then suggest menu items accordingly.

Signs reading "be thrifty and diligent, promote empty plates" and "operation empty plate" were pinned up.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53792871
 
What lies within the walls?

For nearly 650 years, the fortress walls in the Chinese city of Xi’an have served as a formidable barrier around the central city. At 12 meters high and up to 18 meters thick, they are impervious to almost everything — except subatomic particles called muons.

Now, thanks to their penetrating abilities, muons may be key to ensuring that the walls that once protected the treasures of the first Ming Dynasty — and are now a national architectural treasure in their own right — stand for centuries more.

A refined detection method has provided the highest-resolution muon scans yet produced of any archaeological structure, researchers report in the Jan. 7 Journal of Applied Physics. The scans revealed interior density fluctuations as small as a meter across inside one section of the Xi’an ramparts. The fluctuations could be signs of dangerous flaws or “hidden structures archaeologically interesting for discovery and investigation,” says nuclear physicist Zhiyi Liu of Lanzhou University in China. ...

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/muon-scan-mystery-ancient-chinese-wall
 
Mural from Tang era shows man with blond hair and beard.

Archaeologists in northern China have unearthed a centuries-old tomb decorated with stunning murals portraying daily life during the Tang dynasty, which ruled much of central and eastern China from A.D. 618 to 907.

The tomb includes never-before-seen depictions of daily life, including men threshing grain and making noodles.

One of the murals also depicts what appears to be a "Westerner" with blond hair and a beard who probably hailed from Central Asia, Victor Xiong, a professor of history at Western Michigan University who wasn't involved in the discovery, told Live Science in an email.

The tomb was discovered in 2018 during roadwork on a hillside on the outskirts of Taiyuan, the capital of China's northern Shanxi province, but archaeologists only reported on the completed excavations last month.

According to an article from China’s government-owned news agency Xinhua, an epitaph in the tomb states it was the burial place of a 63-year-old man who died in 736, as well as his wife.

The tomb consists of a single brick chamber, a door and a corridor. Scenes from life during the Tang dynasty adorn the walls of the tomb, the door, the corridor, and the platform on which the coffin was placed. The domed ceiling of the chamber is painted with what may be a dragon and phoenix.

Several figures painted near the door represent the "doorkeepers" or guardians of the tomb; they are wearing yellow robes and some have swords at their waists, according to Xinhua. Other murals portray natural landscapes, as well as men threshing grain, women grinding flour, men making noodles and women fetching water from a well. ...

https://www.livescience.com/archaeo...a-may-portray-a-westerner-man-with-blond-hair
 
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