Cultura China-Chinese Culture

Jiaozi are one of the major foods eaten during the Chinese New Year and year round in the northern provinces. They look like the golden ingots yuan bao used during the Ming Dynasty for money and the name sounds like the word for the earliest paper money, so serving them is believed to bring prosperity.Many families eat these at midnight on Chinese New Year's Eve. Some cooks will even hide a clean coin for the lucky to find.

Jiaozi were so named because they were horn shaped. The Chinese for "horn" is jiǎo (角), and jiaozi was originally written with the Chinese character for "horn", but later it was replaced by a specific character 餃, which has the food radical on the left and the phonetic component jiāo (交) on the right.

According to folk tales, jiaozi were invented by Zhang Zhongjing, one of the greatest practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine in history. They were originally called "tender ears" (矯耳; pinyin: jiao'er) because they were used to treat frostbitten ears. (wiki)

The Shēngxiào (Chinese: 生肖), better known in English as the Chinese Zodiac, is a scheme, and a systematic plan of future action, that relates each year to an animal and its reputed attributes, according to a 12-year cycle. It has wide currency in several East Asian countries, such as China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan.

Identifying this scheme using the term "zodiac" reflects several similarities to the Western zodiac: both have time cycles divided into 12 parts, each labels at least the majority of those parts with names of animals, and each is widely associated with a culture of attributing influence of a person's relationship to the cycle upon their personality and/or events in their life. Nevertheless, there are major differences: the "Chinese" 12-part cycle corresponds to years rather than months. The Chinese zodiac is represented by 12 animals, whereas some of the signs in the Western zodiac are not animals, despite the implication of the Greek etymology of "zodiac". The animals of the Chinese zodiac are not associated with constellations, let alone those spanned by the ecliptic plane. (wiki)

(The background music of this video is Guzen, if you want to listen the music of guqin, please cheack out the text about "Chinese calligraphy書法Caligrafia China")

La leyenda sostiene que el qin, el instrumento chino más reverenciado, tiene una historia de cerca de 5000 años, y que en su creación estuvieron involucrados figuras legendarias de la pre-historia china, tales como Fuxi, Shennong y Huang-Di, el "Emperador Amarillo".

Casi todos los libros de quin y colecciones de tablaturas publicadas antes del Siglo XX sostienen estas leyendas como el origen real del instrumento, aunque actualmente se las presenta como mitología. Se lo menciona en escritos chinos de más de 3000 años de antigüedad, y se lo ha encontrado en tumbas de más de 2500 años.

Algunas descubrimientos en tumbas del sur de China muestran instrumentos similares en los que gradualmente aumenta en tamaño y disminuye el número de cuerdas.La tradición dice que el qin tenía originariamente cinco cuerdas, pero se le agregaron dos más alrededor del año 1000 AC. Aunque se ha sugerido que las mayores cítaras del sur podrían haberse gradualmente construido más pequeñas y con menos cuerdas hasta llegar a siete, es cuestionable llamarlas "qin" o emparentarlas con el instrumento tradicional del norte. El origen exacto del quin es todavía fuente continua de debates.

En 1977, una versión de "Liu Shui" 【流水】 ("Agua fluyente",interpretada por Guan Pinghu, considerado uno de los mejores intérpretes de guqin del Siglo XX) se incluyó en la grabación que llevó el Voyager al espacio exterior. En 2003, la música de guqin fued eclarada como una de las "Obras maestras de la herencia oral e intangible de la humanidad" por la Unesco. (wiki)

Legend has it that the qin, the most revered of all Chinese musical instruments, has a history of about 5,000 years. This legend states that the legendary figures of China's pre-history — Fuxi, Shennong and Huang Di, the "Yellow Emperor" — were involved in its creation. Nearly all qin books and tablature collections published prior to the twentieth century state this as the actual origins of the qin, although this is now presently viewed as mythology. It is mentioned in Chinese writings dating back nearly 3,000 years, and examples have been found in tombs from about 2,500 years ago. The exact origins of the qin is still a very much continuing subject of debate over the past few decades.

In 1977, a recording of "Flowing Water" (Liu Shui, as performed by Guan Pinghu, one of the best qin players of the 20th century) was chosen to be included in the Voyager Golden Record, a gold-plated LP recording containing music from around the world, which was sent into outer space by NASA on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts. It is the longest excerpt included on the disc. The reason to select a work played on this specific instrument is because the tonal structure of the instrument, its musical scale, is derived from fundamental physical laws related to vibration and overtones, representing the intellectual capacity of human beings on this subject. In 2003, guqin music was proclaimed as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. (wiki)

Cuando los manchúes establecieron la dinastía Qing en toda China en 1644, trajeron un sistema nuevo de división administrativa que incluía las banderas (旗, qí) (división todavía usada en la región autónoma china de Mongolia Interior), debido a lo cual fueron conocidos como qiren (旗人, qí rén), "las gentes de las banderas". Posteriormente surgió un vestido, utilizado por hombres y mujeres, recto y de una sola pieza, que se denominó qipao, "vestido de la bandera". Normalmente era de seda, adornado con cordones en las mangas y en el cuello, y se hizo popular en el palacio imperial y entre los nobles. Los chinos de etnia han fueron obligados, bajo pena de muerte, a vestir la nueva ropa en lugar de la suya tradicional, y así, durante los siguientes trescientos años se convirtió en la vestimenta china por excelencia, sobreviviendo incluso a la revolución de Xinhai, que en 1911 acabó con la dinastía Qing y estableció la República de China. Desde entonces, con pocos cambios, el qipao se ha convertido en la vestimenta arquetípica de los chinos. (wiki)

When the Manchu ruled China during the Qing Dynasty, certain social strata emerged. Among them were the Banners (qí), mostly Manchu, who as a group were called Banner People (旗人 pinyin: qí rén). Manchu women typically wore a one-piece dress that retrospectively came to be known as the qípáo (旗袍, Manchu: sijigiyan or banner gown). The generic term for both the male and the female forms of Manchu dress, essentially similar garments, was chángpáo (長袍). The qipao fitted loosely and hung straight down the body, or flared slightly in an A-line. Under the dynastic laws after 1636, all Han Chinese in the banner system were forced to wear a queue and dress in Manchurian qipao instead of traditional Han Chinese clothing (剃发易服), under penalty of death (along with the July 1645 edict (the "haircutting order") that forced all adult Han Chinese men to shave the front of their heads and comb the remaining hair into a queue, on pain of death). Until 1911, the changpao was required clothing for Chinese men of a certain class, but Han Chinese women continued to wear loose jacket and trousers, with an overskirt for formal occasions. The qipao was a new fashion item for Han Chinese women when they started wearing it around 1925.

The original qipao was wide and loose. It covered most of the woman's body, revealing only the head, hands, and the tips of the toes. The baggy nature of the clothing also served to conceal the figure of the wearer regardless of age. With time, though, the qipao were tailored to become more form fitting and revealing. The modern version, which is now recognized popularly in China as the "standard" qipao, was first developed in Shanghai in the 1920s, partly under the influence of Beijing styles. People eagerly sought a more modernized style of dress and transformed the old qipao to suit their tastes. Slender and form fitting with a high cut, it had great differences from the traditional qipao. However, it was high-class courtesans and celebrities in the city that would make these redesigned tight fitting qipao popular at that time.^[3] In Shanghai it was first known as zansae or "long dress" (長衫—Mandarin Chinese: chángshān; Shanghainese: zansae; Cantonese: chèuhngsāam), and it is this name that survives in English as the "cheongsam". (wiki)

El douhua es un postre chino hecho con una preparación extra blanda de tofu. También se llama pudin de tofu.

Tofu is thought to have originated in ancient China during the Western Han Dynasty. Chinese people have developed and enriched the recipes for tofu dishes on the basis of their own tastes, such as mapo tofu, stinky tofu, pickled tofu and uncongealed tofu pudding, etc.