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Lake Qinghai
Qinghai Lake is the largest lake in China. Located in an endorheic basin in Qinghai Province, to which it gave its name, Qinghai Lake is classified as an alkaline salt lake. The lake has fluctuated in size, shrinking over much of the 20th century but increasing since 2004. It had a surface area of , an average depth of , and a maximum depth of in 2008. Names ''Qinghai'' is the atonal pinyin romanisation of the Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese name Although modern Chinese distinguishes between the colors blue and green, this distinction did not exist in classical Chinese. The color (''qīng'') was a "single" color inclusive of both blue and green as separate shades. The name is thus variously translated as "Blue Sea", "Green Sea", "Blue-Green Sea", "Blue/Green Sea", etc. For a time after its wars with the Xiongnu, Han China connected the lake with the legendary "Western Sea" assumed to balance the East China Sea, but as the Han Empire expanded further west into t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qinghai Province
Qinghai is an inland province in Northwestern China. It is the largest province of China (excluding autonomous regions) by area and has the third smallest population. Its capital and largest city is Xining. Qinghai borders Gansu on the northeast, Xinjiang on the northwest, Sichuan on the southeast and the Tibet Autonomous Region on the southwest. Qinghai province was established in 1928 during the period of the Republic of China, and until 1949 was ruled by Chinese Muslim warlords known as the Ma clique. The Chinese name "Qinghai" is after Qinghai Lake, the largest lake in China. The lake is known as Tso ngon in Tibetan, and as Kokonor Lake in English, derived from the Mongol Oirat name for Qinghai Lake. Both Tso ngon and Kokonor are names found in historic documents to describe the region.Gangchen Khishong, 2001. ''Tibet and Manchu: An Assessment of Tibet-Manchu Relations in Five Phases of Development''. Dharmasala: Narthang Press, p.1-70. Located mostly on the Tibetan P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chinese Language
Chinese ( or ) is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and List of ethnic groups in China, many minority ethnic groups in China, as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora. Approximately 1.39 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language. Chinese languages form the Sinitic languages, Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a Language family, 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 Chinese, Mandarin with 66%, or around 800&nb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kunlun Mountains
The Kunlun Mountains constitute one of the longest mountain chains in Asia, extending for more than . In the broadest sense, the chain forms the northern edge of the Tibetan Plateau south of the Tarim Basin. Located in Western China, the Kunlun Mountains have been known as the "Forefather of Mountains" in China. The exact definition of the Kunlun Mountains varies over time. Older sources used Kunlun to mean the mountain belt that runs across the center of China, that is, Altyn Tagh along with the Qilian and Qin Mountains. Recent sources have the Kunlun range forming most of the south side of the Tarim Basin and then continuing east, south of the Altyn Tagh. Sima Qian ('' Records of the Grand Historian'', scroll 123) says that Emperor Wu of Han sent men to find the source of the Yellow River and gave the name Kunlun to the mountains at its source. The name seems to have originated as a semi-mythical location in the classical Chinese text '' Classic of Mountains and Seas''. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lake Heihai
Lake Heihai is a small salt lake, mesosaline lake in Golmud County, Haixi Prefecture, Qinghai Province, in western China. Names "Lake Heihai" is an English clarification of the pinyin romanization of Chinese, romanization of the Chinese language, Chinese name meaning . (As with Qinghai Lake, the Chinese word for "sea" is sometimes used to translate the Mongolian language, Mongolian ''naɣur'' (), which was once used ambiguously for all large bodies of water.) The lake is also known as ("Jade Pond of the Queen Mother of the West") from an old legendary location in the Kunlun Mountain (mythology), Kunlun Mountains and sometimes confused with Lake Hala in the Qilian Mountains. Geography Lake Heihai is located about south of the city of Golmud in Golmud County, Haixi Prefecture, Qinghai Province, at an elevation of or above sea level in western China. It lies in a valley roughly long and wide between the Kunlun Mountains (highest elevation about ) to the south and the Bu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qing Dynasty
The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the Ming dynasty and succeeded by the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China. At its height of power, the empire stretched from the Sea of Japan in the east to the Pamir Mountains in the west, and from the Mongolian Plateau in the north to the South China Sea in the south. Originally emerging from the Later Jin (1616–1636), Later Jin dynasty founded in 1616 and proclaimed in Shenyang in 1636, the dynasty seized control of the Ming capital Beijing and North China in 1644, traditionally considered the start of the dynasty's rule. The dynasty lasted until the Xinhai Revolution of October 1911 led to the abdication of the last emperor in February 1912. The multi-ethnic Qing dynasty Legacy of the Qing dynasty, assembled the territoria ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Upper Mongols
The Upper Mongols, also known as the Köke Nuur Mongols or Qinghai Mongols, are ethnic Mongol people of Oirat and Khalkha origin who settled around the Qinghai Lake in so-called Upper Mongolia (present-day Qinghai). As part of the Khoshut Khanate of Qaidam Basin and the Qinghai Lake, they played a major role in Sino–Mongol–Tibetan politics during the 17th and 18th centuries. The Upper Mongols adopted Tibetan dress and jewelry despite still living in the traditional Mongolian ger and writing in the script. History After the disintegration of the Proto-Mongolic Xianbei state, nomadic groups such as the ( Monguor) migrated under the rule of their Khan, Tuyuhun, from their original settlements on the Liaodong Peninsula to the western region of modern Qinghai. The Tuyuhun Empire (284–670) stretched 1,500 kilometers from east to west and 1,000 kilometers from north to south. Although, the Mongols of the Gansu–Qinghai Lake areas under the rule of the Yuan dynasty submi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase ( lexeme) in the target language. For instance, the English word ''skyscraper'' has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example in German, in Portuguese, in Dutch, in Spanish, in Italian, in Turkish, and ''matenrō'' in Japanese. Calques, like direct borrowings, often function as linguistic gap-fillers, emerging when a language lacks existing vocabulary to express new ideas, technologies, or objects. This phenomenon is widespread and is often attributed to the shared conceptual frameworks across human languages. Speakers of different languages tend to perceive the world through common categori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Mongolian Language
Classical Mongolian was the literary language of Mongolian that was first introduced shortly after 1600, when Ligdan Khan set his clergy the task of translating the whole of the Tibetan Buddhist canon, consisting of the Kangyur and Tengyur, into Mongolian. This script then became the established writing system used for all Mongolian literature until the 1930s when the Mongolian Latin alphabet was introduced, which then in 1941 was replaced by the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet. Classical Mongolian was formerly used in Mongolia, China, and Russia. It is a standardized written language used in the 18th century and 20th centuries. ''Classical Mongolian'' sometimes refers to any language documents in Mongolian script that are neither Pre-classical (i.e. Middle Mongol in the Mongolian script The traditional Mongolian script, also known as the Hudum Mongol bichig, was the first Mongolian alphabet, writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the mos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wade–Giles Romanisation
Wade–Giles ( ) is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from the system produced by Thomas Francis Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles's ''A Chinese–English Dictionary'' (1892). The romanization systems in common use until the late 19th century were based on the Nanjing dialect, but Wade–Giles was based on the Beijing dialect and was the system of transcription familiar in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century. Both of these kinds of transcription were used in postal romanizations (romanized place-names standardized for postal uses). In mainland China, Wade–Giles has been mostly replaced by Hanyu Pinyin, which was officially adopted in 1958, with exceptions for the romanized forms of some of the most commonly used names of locations and persons, and other proper nouns. The romanized name for most locations, persons and other proper nouns in Taiwan is based on the Wade–Giles derived ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tarim Basin
The Tarim Basin is an endorheic basin in Xinjiang, Northwestern China occupying an area of about and one of the largest basins in Northwest China.Chen, Yaning, et al. "Regional climate change and its effects on river runoff in the Tarim Basin, China." Hydrological Processes 20.10 (2006): 2207–2216.online 426 KB) Located in China's Xinjiang region, it is sometimes used synonymously to refer to the southern half of the province, that is, Southern Xinjiang or Nanjiang (), as opposed to the northern half of the province known as Dzungaria or Beijiang. Its northern boundary is the Tian Shan mountain range and its southern boundary is the Kunlun Mountains on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The Taklamakan Desert dominates much of the basin. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr (Uyghur language, Traditional Uyghur: , ), which means 'six cities' in Uyghur language, Uyghur. The region was also called ''Little Bukhara'' or ''Little Bukharia''. Geography and relation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
East China Sea
The East China Sea is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean, located directly offshore from East China. China names the body of water along its eastern coast as "East Sea" (, ) due to direction, the name of "East China Sea" is otherwise designated as a formal name by International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and used internationally. It covers an area of roughly . The sea's northern extension between Korean Peninsula and mainland China is the Yellow Sea, separated by an imaginary line between the southwestern tip of South Korea's Jeju Island and the eastern tip of Qidong, Jiangsu, Qidong at the Yangtze River estuary. The East China Sea is bounded in the east and southeast by the middle portion of the first island chain off the eastern Eurasian continental mainland, including the Japanese island of Kyushu and the Ryukyu Islands, and in the south by the island of Taiwan. It connects with the Sea of Japan in the northeast through the Korea Strait, the South China Sea i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Four Seas
The Four Seas () were four bodies of water that metaphorically made up the boundaries of ancient China. There is a sea for each for the four cardinal directions. The West Sea is Qinghai Lake, the East Sea is the East China Sea, the North Sea is Lake Baikal, and the South Sea is the South China Sea. Two of the seas were symbolic until they were tied to genuine locations during the Han dynasty's wars with the Xiongnu. The lands "within the Four Seas", a literary name for China, are alluded to in Chinese literature and poetry. History The original Four Seas were a metaphor for the borders of pre-Han dynasty China. Only two of the Four Seas were tied to real locations, the East Sea with the East China Sea and the South Sea with the South China Sea. During the Han dynasty, wars with the Xiongnu brought them north to Lake Baikal. They recorded that the lake was a "huge sea" (hanhai) and designated it the mythical North Sea. They also encountered Qinghai Lake, which they called t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
