Jottings from the Granite Studio

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 being done not only for cosmetic restoration but also using advanced methods of to preserve the site. I agree with Will that the problem is not Starbucks, per se. For me, Starbucks is just the most notable of many, many tacky and trashy souvenir stands and drink vendors that are placed willy-nilly throughout the complex. Naturally it gives Chinese writers and bloggers fuel to rouse the rabble but there are far more pressing issues of historical preservation that need to be addressed before people start worrying about a coffee stand. On a side note, why is it that I can’t get my apartment complex to put up one hoop, but the Forbidden City has a full basketball court just inside the main gate? Who do I need to call?

• Finally, a great post from John at Sinosplice on a little-understood affliction suffered by many foreigners here in China: the insidious creep of Chinglish into foreigner’s English usage. Odd terms like “name card” for business card or “net bar” for internet cafe are just the tip of a linguistic mash-up. See the comments section for even more examples.