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Wan Hu - China first space explorer
Chinese Taikonaut Zhai Zhigang has very recently completed his first spacewalk for China, making China the third country to do so, after the former Soviet Union and the United States. Space exploration has always been a fascination for ancient civilizations and the ancient Chinese was no different.
A 1000 year old engraving marked the site
of the Battle of Red Cliff in today's Hubei, China.
Written by Luo Guanzhong ( 罗贯中) in the late Yuan and early Ming period (the exact period is not known ), the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, continue to be the most popular classical novels in Chinese Literature all these years.
The period of the Three Kingdoms, from late Eastern Han to the Western Jin Dynasty (169-265 AD) lasted about ninety years, and was an extremely chaotic period in which heroes rose to compete against one another and legends were made.
The Chinese Book of Poems
Shi Jing ( 诗经 ) or The Book of Poems is one of the most significant headstreams of Chinese Literature. Complied over a period of almost 500 years from the Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period, it contains 305 poems and was part of the Confucius’s curriculum in his time.
In the Chinese world, there was no defined universe in the beginning. There was simply a nothingness of formless chaos. The Chinese Culture was unique in not having a legend of myth about a Creator of the universe. This thinking was probably the most authentic line of reasoning, but it was not easy to be understood by commoners, nor was it easy to be employed by rulers.
Back in AD 132, in the ancient capital of Jing Shi ( present day Luoyang in Henan Province) of Eastern Han Dynasty, news broke out that an official by the name of Zhang Heng (张衡) invented a mechanical machine that was capable of predicting the time and location of earthquakes. Many people did not believe him at that time.
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