I just returned from Beijing and found Tianjin in full prep mode for Spring festival. Firecrackers, fireworks, and other improvised explosive devices are more or less legal here and the celebratory booms have already begun. YJ’s father went out over the weekend and purchased enough firepower to occupy a small island nation so I’m guessing we’re ringing in the Year of the Pig by basically going outside and blowing shit up. Good times. The Shanghaiist posts and translates a Chinese-language blog entry on the many names of that swampy town. Like most Chinese cities, Shanghai has accumulated a host of monikers and one of the trickier parts of working in Chinese-language historical sources is keeping track of all the different names of a particular place. Anyway, fascinating information on Shanghai, might be fun to read a similar one for Yan/Yanjing/Khanbaliq/Cambuluc/Dadu/Beiping/Beijing… Will at the Imagethief posts a rebuttal written by a young student of English to Will’s own recent discussion of Starbucks in the Forbidden City. More essays from a class taught by teacher Eric MacKnight on the subject can be found here. I wandered around the Forbidden City over the weekend and I am glad to see such rigorous work