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It's spring time and thus flowers time. Things are brightening up around me so time to start sharing flower pictures. Today's offerings are some Kwa...

Close-up of two fully open Kwanzan cherry blossoms, a vibrant shade of pink, with multiple layers of delicate petals. The center of the blossoms shows tiny, darker details. Fresh, bright green leaves surround the blooms on a brown branch. The picture is taken angled upward, with an out-of-focus background that includes more distant leaves, and the side of a modern building as well as a bit of the overcast sky.

A close-up shot of a blossoming magnolia tree, its bare branches filled with vibrant pink flowers in various stages of bloom. In the foreground, slightly out of focus, a large, partially opened flower dominates the view, its smooth petals showcasing a gradient of pink hues. Other blossoms, some still tightly budded, dot the branches, creating a dense floral display. Behind the tree is a glimpse of a modern building with dark windows and green foliage at its base, offering some depth to the photo.

A branch of a Japanese Flowering Plum, showcasing a pair of its elegant white flowers with pink centers. Coppery-red foliage adds a vibrant contrast. The two solitary blossoms are framed by an urban background with a modern building to the left and a patch of sky to the right, along with some parked cars and distant trees.

It's spring time and thus flowers time. Things are brightening up around me so time to start sharing flower pictures.

Today's offerings are some Kwanzan cherry blossoms, some tulip magnolias, and some Japanese flowering plums. These are all popular trees in grounds around Wuhan, and the business park I'm in uses them extensively, along with others. (They're actually very careful to ensure that there are blooming trees most times outside of winter.)

Some more details in alt text.

#flowers #cherry #plum #magnolia #spring

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@ZDL@ZDL@mstdn.social

27.3.2025 06:42It's spring time and thus flowers time. Things are brightening up around me so time to start sharing flower pictures. Today's offerings are some Kwa...
https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/810763053...

So I've grown weary of Wuhan's weather mocking me with sunny weeks but gloomy weekends that prevent me from taking good photos of tea. Today I'm going...

https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/808546994...

This little keychain is a 求签筒 (lot casting cylinder) stripped down to its bare essence: a milled brass tube, narrowing a little at the middle and flaring out mildly at each end to invoke the feeling of a piece of bamboo. I've set it on a 5mm grid so you can see that it's about 3.5cm tall and 1.5cm wide. Inscribed on this side is a large, complex piece of calligraphic text I have no hope of decoding. (If anybody in the audience can transliterate and translate it, I will put this translation here along with credit.) The keychain itself a small piece of dark brown knotwork with plastic decorations meant to resemble agate beads, gold and lapis lazuli decorations, and even turquoise beads with golden "hats". It's very cheap material, but the appearance is decent for the price.

The other side of the brass tube reveals more text. There are four characters across the top I can't make out, plus a large character that I am guessing (educatedly) has the ancient seal script form of the character 签 (meaning "fortune").

To show how the system works, I've unscrewed the business end and taken out four metal strips with a T-shaped base. The lid I opened has a little slit milled into it that is large enough, with some shaking, to get one of these four strips to come out, but not enough to get two. The T base stops the slip from falling out all the way. The strips are labelled, left to right, 上上签、上签、中签、下签 which, as stated in the main text, refer to "very good/good/mediocre/bad fortune" respectively. The strips are stamped stainless steel, it appears, and are about 3mm wide, with the T holding them inside when deployed about 5mm. They're maybe 1mm thick.

And here we have the assembled system deployed. I've shaken it until the reading has come out (in this case 上上签, so I got a good fortune!). This little keychain is basically the barest essence of the full 求签筒 system used in temples.

This picture begins the second batch of divination tools I'm presenting. This is one of many 易经 tools I've got (several of which are in the photo essay today) and my most recent purchase in the family. Portrayed are 64 metal slips each about 3.5×1.5cm in size, and about 1.5mm thick. Each end has some decorative work rounding it off and one end has a hole for stringing which I've used a cheap fake-leather thong to run through just to hold them together as a single mass. (You do not use them with the string, I just strung them together for ease of transportation.) Also in the picture are a fan-fold reference card, a mustard-coloured staple-bound reference book, and a black cotton bag. While the slips did come with a bag, I found that bag too large so I substituted this smaller bag in its place.

The side of the reference card facing up shows all of the hexagrams in the middle, along with their names, in an 8×8 grid in the binary counting order. This binary counting order is called 先天次序 (xiān tiān cì xù) and dates back to the 11th century, traditionally attributed to 邵雍 (Shao Yong), a Song Dynasty scholar. (So yes, China has been using a binary counting system for about a thousand years already.)

The circle around this square is the 文王卦序 (Wén Wáng guà xù). or King Wen sequence and is an enduring mystery of the Yijing. While some features are obvious (hexagrams are paired across the circle with their opposites), other features of the ordering are inobvious, possibly ordering by philosophical concepts, numerology, or even just some mnemonic device that hasn't survived to the modern age.

Rounding out the reference on this side are:

1. Details of trigram arrangement and meaning— 伏羲八卦 (fú xī bā guà), named after the legendary Fuxi, and which is the origin and foundation of Chinese philosophical concepts of Yin and Yang, cyclic change, and a few other things.

2. Mnemonic poems for trigrams (top right) and hexagrams (bottom left and right) to help remember them.

Here we have a pair of the metal slips in extreme close-up (or as close-up as my phone allows). On the left, we see the front face of slip 34, with the characters 第三十四卦 ("34th hexagram") in the rightmost column and 雷天大壮 (the name of the hexagram, "Thunder Over Heaven: Great Strength") in the leftmost. On the right, we instead see what I believe is the meaning of the 33rd hexagram, expressed in a pair of six-character antithetical couplets: in the rightmost column, 守旧去恶之象 ("a symbol of preserving tradition and removing evil"), and in the leftmost column, 掘井无泉之意 ("the idea of digging a well without finding a spring").

This picture now replaces the metal slips with some Yijing *cards*. These are slightly larger than standard western poker cards, and naturally there's 64 of them instead of 54. In the foreground is the front of hexagram 64 showing the hexagram itself, a brief summary of each line's name, and a general overview of the hexagram's name and meaning. To the left of this is the back of a card (in this case of hexagram 72) showing detailed line-by-line reading. The rest of the deck is above it, slid back to reveal the number of cards but no detail for any but the topmost.

The Yijing reference book from earlier pictures is opened here to show what such a book looks like in pure Chinese. This book has the same stuff that's on the card, but also adds the traditional commentaries you find (Ten Wings) that really explain the meanings better than the raw text.

The reference CARD is reversed as well and this contains more charts and diagrams, explanatory texts and technique descriptions, mnemonic devices, etc. Among these include the King Wen arrangement of the trigrams (which I really don't understand), some breakdowns of how the trigrams are to be used, tabular form at the bottom left and an interesting diagram that shows the division of trigrams into 2, 4, and 8 groups at the top right (that is mostly occluded by the card deck), along with the so-called River Diagrams immediately under the card deck.

I will not be explaining the River Diagrams (河圖洛書, Hétú Luòshū) to you. I would prefer to keep my sanity intact. These diagrams are the kind of things that make seasoned students of the Yijing go bald by hair-tearing. As one wise-ass put it to me: "Think of them as Heaven’s math homework, delivered via turtle shells and dragon-horses."

I'm not going to go into them. You can't make me.

We're in the closing stretch. Still the Yijing, still a reference card as well, but this time it's a different POCKET reference. Indeed TWO of them. But lets go from foreground to background.

In the immediate foreground are a set of Yijing dice. Two eight-sided dice marked by the *name* of each trigram (not the trigram itself), one inked red, the other blue, are paired with a six-sided die for generating the a moving line for divination. You throw the dice, red die being the bottom trigram, blue being the top, and the six-sider telling you which line switches. Right behind them, are three Yijing coins for the coin consulting method.

The dice and coins are arranged around a plasticized (I did that) pocket reference card that gives half of the hexagrams (8 across, 4 down) indexed by some way I can't work out. The flip side is the other half.

Behind it is another pocket-sized fanfold reference that contains much of the information (except for the massive King Wen diagram and binary counting diagram) found on the other card. It also contains explanations of trigrams, moving lines, mirrored hexagrams, etc.

Of particular interest is the diagram under the Fuxi arrangement of trigrams we previously saw. This is the table that was occluded by the card deck in the previous picture (and why I didn't bother trying to figure out how to move that deck and still have a decent picture). This table starts from the bottom with 8 columns, numbered right to left from 1 to 8, merged together in white labelled "太极". One line up the row is labelled “Two Polarities" (i.e. Yin and Yang) with 1-4 coloured red and labelled internally "yang", and 5-8 coloured black and labelled "yin". The next line up is split into four alternating pairs and labelled "Four ... Strengths? (maybe)"—literally it says four elephants—and in the top it has the "Eight Trigrams"

I don't pretend to understand that chart. Yet.

And we're at the end. I've just flipped the plasticized card over to show the rest of the hexagrams and turned the second reference card around. It continues with summaries of the features of the Yijing. Complete with the ...

*sigh*

... River Diagrams.

I'm not going to explain them here either. Sorry. Can't explain what causes mild brain trauma each time I try to work them out!

So I've grown weary of Wuhan's weather mocking me with sunny weeks but gloomy weekends that prevent me from taking good photos of tea. Today I'm going to instead offer pictures of divination systems, containing two major schools of divination: 求签筒 (qiú qiān tǒng or "fortune-seeking cylinder", sometimes called "casting lots') and the venerable 易经 (Yìjīng or "Book of Changes", a.k.a. I-Ching).

The 签筒 are typically bamboo cups with 100 inscribed bamboo slips with a number. You shake the cup until one slip falls out, that slip being your fortune. The number is a key to a fortune, read like astrology readings (i.e. vague and nigh-universal in application) which you can read yourself or get a priest to interpret. These can be found in Buddhist and Daoist temples (the latter often having 64 slips instead to index into the 易经 instead). The slips also have one of four general, overall ratings on them: 上上签，上签，中签，下签 meaning very good, good, average, or bad fortune respectively for a quick consultation. This will become important as you will see in the alt text.

The second part contains little metal imprints of the 易经, the third containing 易经 cards, the fourth containing photos of 易经 dice and coins. All of the 易经 materials are placed alongside extra printed material for full impact.

The 易经 is taken very seriously in China; it is the oldest systematic work of philosophy (albeit an unusually opaque one since the oral culture that spawned it and informed it is long lost and can only be pieced together in snippets). It is within its pages and system of hexagrams that you can find the roots of Daoism, of Confucianism, and also a deep influence on Chinese (and sinosphere in general) Buddhism. Which is why there are so many ways it is used (of which today's photo-essay is a small sampling!).

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Details in alt text, as usual, and Mastodon users will have to click through to see all photos.

#求签筒 #易经 #CastingLots #Yijing #IChing #ChineseCulture

@ZDL@mstdn.social

21.3.2025 03:57So I've grown weary of Wuhan's weather mocking me with sunny weeks but gloomy weekends that prevent me from taking good photos of tea. Today I'm going...
https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/808546994...

This is the original tea that made me a Chinese tea fanatic. In Canada I drank and appreciated tea, learning quite a bit about tea grades, and produc...

https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/799177878...

The tea and the tools for the photo shoot laid out in preparation. A window sill is covered by a black tablecloth with sun shining from above. To the left is a glass double-walled cup with a tea leaf basket ready to do the brewing. To the right is a replica bamboo scroll with The Classic of Tea inscribed on it. Behind that, closer to the background, is the burgundy brocade bag that holds the scroll. In between the cup and the scroll is a rectangular piece of paper upon which the bag holding the tea is place. The paper has some seal stamps on it (which will be detailed in later alt text). The bag with the tea will too be explored in more detail in later alt text.

A closer-up view of the sealed bag holding the tea. It's a plain bag, not branded, that has some generic "this is tea"-style marking over which is slapped a vertical sticker reading "Lushan Cloud and Mist" (in Chinese, naturally) from top down in black, then across the bottom in small red type "Jiangxi Speciality Tea". The seal stamps are still a little blurry here so will be described later in a picture that has them in better focus.

The back of the bag has production information on it as is legally required of agricultural products in China. The key information is that it comes from Jiujiang, Jiangxi (thus confirming it is from Lushan, not neighbouring mountains), and has a "date" (a bit ambiguous here if this is the production date or the packing date; I'm leaning toward the latter based on what I know of tea production in Lushan) of 2025-02-08. As is increasingly common it provides instructions for how to brew the tea (which sounds crazy until you realize just how DIFFERENT and DIVERSE Chinese teas can be). In the case it says use 3-5g, add water between 85-95°C, and brew for 30 seconds.

The 30-second brew is not a joke. This tea brews up quickly and if you brew the first round for 30 seconds (after the wash), you can get a good half-dozen cups from the leaves by increasing the brewing time a bit with each round.

Here a suitable amount of the tea is placed on the fold in the middle of the paper (I fold it so it's easier to put into the cup after I've taken the photo). This tea is a very dark green in the leaf (one of the ways you identify a cloud and mist tea) and the leaves are carefully rolled lengthwise into almost a little worm shape. Here the three seal stamps are more clearly visible. The two right-most ones are a dragon design and a phoenix design which I placed there because I like the emblems. The leftmost one is an illustration stamp featuring an old-time tea pot on an old-time stove with a couplet I can't decode at the top right (but it's about tea).

Washing the tea is something I rapidly learned when I came to China and I've found that a brief wash (with different teas requiring different durations of wash) improves most teas. The wash serves two functions:

1. It cleans up any dust that may be on the leaves, both in the sense of broken-up leaves from storage and transport, and in the literal sense of dust.

2. It washes away the water-soluble tannin that makes for the unpleasant, astringent bitter of tea while leaving behind the pleasant nutty bitters of the flavourful oils in tea.

This tea needs a very quick and subtle wash; indeed because I had to pause to take a photo I overwashed it a tad. For this tea I'd usually just pour in the water and then almost immediately lift out the basket, tossing away the wash water.

Now comes the brew, and that 30s time limit makes it very challenging to get a photo without overbrewing the tea. You can see from the leaves in the basket that this is not a tippy tea, but nor does it have a lot of stem. This is a mid-grade Lushan cloud and mist (I didn't want to pay double for the premium) which still makes it one of the best teas available.

One thing to note is that the almost-black deep green of the leaves earlier has vanished, yet the liquor is a very pale green. This is one of the other aspects of cloud and mist teas in general.

After brewing we have here the drained leaves to the left, sitting in their basket and resting in the upturned lid, while to the right we have the liquor. The photo is taken straight down from above with the white paper as a backdrop to show the colour of the liquor. (Taking it from above intensifies the liquor colour: from the side it's a pale green, but from above it's a pretty bright yellow-green.)

This is the original tea that made me a Chinese tea fanatic. In Canada I drank and appreciated tea, learning quite a bit about tea grades, and production from places like India or Sri Lanka. (This is just how I'm wired: I always have to learn more.) But there wasn't a lot of representation of Chinese tea culture in Canada at the time, and instead I fell into the circle of a coffee Lothario who taught me a whole bunch about coffee (to the point I only bought green and roasted at home).

Then I moved to China (Jiujiang, specifically). The coffee at the time was crap (and overpriced crap to boot), but the tea I had was magnificent. My "learn everything" instincts kicked in and I started haunting the streets and alleys of Jiujiang looking for tea shops, one of my "student minders" with me each time (because I needed translation and local knowledge). I quickly learned that the big and fancy shops sold only specific brands and knew nothing broadly, so I looked for the small shops, typically run by a single plantation as their in-city rep.

That's when I ran into Songbai Tea. The shop owner (who also operated a plantation) tolerated my questions, and paid careful attention to how I was tasting the tea, understanding that I actually had a palate for it, and that I could tell the difference between good tea and plain. We developed a pretty good friendship over time, bonding, basically, over today's tea: 庐山云雾茶 (Lúshān yúnwù chá or Lushan cloud and mist tea).

This tea is very famous inside China, being the trope namer, in effect, for the entire class of "cloud and mist" teas. It was an imperial tribute tea since the Song dynasty and is now a protected trademark. And it bears a special place in my heart as my introduction to the madness of Chinese tea, and is a "comfort tea" of sorts for me.

Alt text contains more info, and Mastodon users have to click through.

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@tea@a.gup.pe

#茶 #云雾茶 #中国名茶 #庐山云雾茶 #tea #CloudAndMistTea #ChineseTea #LushanCloudAndMistTea

23.2.2025 07:27This is the original tea that made me a Chinese tea fanatic. In Canada I drank and appreciated tea, learning quite a bit about tea grades, and produc...
https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/799177878...

This is another series of books I try to get as many of as possible, though it's increasingly difficult since it's been out of publication for ages. ...

https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/795624391...

The cover of the book is mostly brown in colour with a picture of a waterfall in the background. The top has a brown printed tab with white letters spelling out "LIBRARY OF CHINESE CLASSICS" and "CHINESE-ENGLISH" right beneath it. Underneath that English text is the same written in brown in Chinese.

The rest of the cover is just the three titles in Chinese characters, then English text, alternating.

Unusually for this series, the first two works are only bilingual: Classical Chinese and English. This is because of the simplicity of the text for the first, and the fact that the second is mostly for practising writing characters, not the actual content. Still, the second has two translations to English: one is a word-for-word transliteration, the other is an attempt to translate it into something coherent.

The third, however, is the normal way this series works: it is trilingual. First it presents the original text (in Classical Chinese). Then it presents it in modern vernacular Chinese. Finally it presents it in English.

The entire book is annotated very thoroughly with prefaces, footnotes, and such. It's a very good scholarly resource.

This is another series of books I try to get as many of as possible, though it's increasingly difficult since it's been out of publication for ages. Here's one such book containing three works of Chinese (mostly Confucian) education.

The first is 三字经 (Sānzì Jīng or "The Three Character Canon"). It's a traditional Chinese text used for teaching children basic Confucian and general knowledge. It consists of characters arranged in triplets, making it easy to memorize. This text covers a wide range of topics including history, philosophy, ethics, and literature.

The second is 千字文 (Qiānzì Wén or The Thousand Character Writing). It's a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters since the sixth century. It contains exactly 1,000 unique characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines of four characters each using a rhyming arrangement. The text covers various subjects and has been a fundamental part of traditional literacy education in China.

The third is 孝经 (Xiào Jīng or The Book of Filial Piety). It's a Confucian treatise on the concept of filial piety (孝). It is presented as a dialogue between Confucius and his disciple Zengzi, discussing how to behave towards seniors such as parents, elder siblings, or rulers. This text has been crucial in shaping Chinese social and moral values.

These three texts share commonalities. They were made for educational purpose. Each text is made to be easily memorized for the level of student they target. All three have critical cultural significance, carrying Chinese values across many generations. All of them form the basis, in effect, of Chinese language education teaching characters, vocabulary and the grammar of Classical Chinese. All three have widespread influence not only in China, but within the area of all areas that fall in China's sphere of influence.

ISBN 978-7-5001-4230-0
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#books #education #China #classics

13.2.2025 12:07This is another series of books I try to get as many of as possible, though it's increasingly difficult since it's been out of publication for ages. ...
https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/795624391...

You know, every time I tell a programmer that I hate software and yearn for the days of manual processes I'm always asked "but why!?" Here's why. Th...

https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/795194867...

A screen grab of Pixelfed contradicting itself. Searching on the #books hashtag finds hundreds of posts in one part of the delivered page, but then in another part it says it can't find any posts for that hashtag.

You know, every time I tell a programmer that I hate software and yearn for the days of manual processes I'm always asked "but why!?"

Here's why.

This is simply stupidly inexcusable. This is the kind of thing that makes users hate software.

12.2.2025 07:40You know, every time I tell a programmer that I hate software and yearn for the days of manual processes I'm always asked "but why!?" Here's why. Th...
https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/795194867...

For those wondering who this @ZDL@pxlfd.ca person is that's suddenly appearing in their feed, this is @zhang.dianli@pixelfed.social at her new server ...

https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/795150316...

The front cover of the first volume of the series. It is a blue cover with mostly orange text (though some of the Chinese text is in white) There are only two English pieces of text. The title "ANTHOLOGY OF THE CREATION MYTHOLOGY IN SOUTH CHINA" is in large letters. Down at the bottom left is the imprint of the publisher which includes "WUHAN UNIVERSITY PRESS" in the text.

The Chinese text has the title, of course, as well as a character used to indicate this is the first volume. In orange reverse text below the title it says, translated, "Chinese English Comparison". To the left of the title are some short phrases written in white. This section reads in translation "Compiled by Zhao Pin, translated into English by Zhang Ying and Wu Changqing."

Above the English title is some Chinese text in white which reads, in translation: "13th Five-Year Plan National Key Books". Below that, back in orange, is text which translates to "English Translation Series of Chinese Southern Folk Literature Classics" (the series name). This is followed by "Zhang Ligong, the editor in chief of the book series, started his National Day career as the deputy editor in chief of the book."

Some plain-looking twine with beaded tassles hangs down from the top, part of the bookmark I've put into the book.

This is the front cover of the second volume. It is identical except that the paranthetical （上）—meaning "up"—has been replaced by （下）—"down". This is the traditional way of denoting first and last volume in Chinese books that span more than one binding. If a third binding is needed the word （中）—"middle"—would be used for, surprisingly, the middle volume. Any more than that (which is rare) would just use numbers.

For those wondering who this @ZDL@pxlfd.ca person is that's suddenly appearing in their feed, this is @zhang.dianli@pixelfed.social at her new server since moving social media presence away from American servers is a thing now ever since the truly lunatic have taken the reins of the US government.

For those at the new server scanning the local feed: Hello! I'm 张殿李, a German/Chinese-descended Canadian citizen currently resident in the People's Republic of China. (To be specific, I live in that city you'd never heard of until 2020 at which point it became a city **everybody** knew!)

My feed will consist primarily of, in rough descending order of prevalence: 1. Tea. 2. Booze. 3. Food. 4. Books. 5. Anything else I find interesting along the way.

These will almost all be China-relevant for reasons that I think are obvious. You can check my old profile¹ to get a taste of the kind of stuff I tend to share.

Today's pictures are a #4 entry. These books come from Wuhan University's press and are part of a **huge** series that they've curated and published containing folklore from all over China, especially focusing on minority groups in China. This is a two-volume set containing an anthology of creation mythology from the south of China.

You will find that my posts contain more information in the alt text all the time. This will be no exception.

#folklore #books #China #CreationMythology

Edited to add:

ISBN 978-7-307-22377-6
ISBN 978-7-307-22398-1

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¹ https://pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/317266702658310144

12.2.2025 04:43For those wondering who this @ZDL@pxlfd.ca person is that's suddenly appearing in their feed, this is @zhang.dianli@pixelfed.social at her new server ...
https://pxlfd.ca/p/ZDL/795150316...