This day, 15 October, in 1979, Deng Xiaoping met with a delegation of British celebrities led by Felix Green and accepted a television interview, in which he...
Among the anecdotal indicators of a country’s being developing or developed is the availability of drinkable tap water.
A developing nation which has laid down the world’s most extensive railway network can add safe water pipes to that in record time, and surely will. But, for now, it remains nominally one of those watershed development issues.
I say, “nominally”, because I didn’t enjoy the tap water which I drank in France this summer. I actually suspect it. Even if it left the water plant uncorrupted, it may have passed through heavy...
“Thank you for your tea.”
“I just tried it.”
“It has a very good taste and smell.”
As a proper tea nut, this is the kind of WeChat message I’m used to sending and receiving.
But this was odd. I hadn’t given any tea to my colleague’s girlfriend. So her message made no sense.
Then I remembered. Yes, I had given them some curry leaves earlier in the week.
With the huge minimum order of curry leaves purchasable on Taobao, I had given half to the only other person I know nearby who loves Indian...
The Stroop Test is a psychological test designed to demonstrate how closely human attention is attracted to the written word.
For adult readers, textual information trumps other forms of visual information, including colour information, in provoking the brain. We could be reading banana written, in purple letters, but the colour we perceive is still yellow, because semantics somehow shout louder.
This affected me while in our new bathroom last month. Naturally, I was wondering what kind of tea I wanted to start the day with, strumming the spectrum of camellia sinensis...
When I lived in Beijing, students hoping to study abroad would travel half a day to a certain shrine, praying to receive an “offer”. They were practicing hieroglossia.
That’s because they deemed the shrine’s name; 卧佛寺 similar enough to the English word ”offer” to place their trust in, or hedge their bets on, this place for a few hours of their lives. I was intrigued that students treated it as more than just a joke, more than just an excuse for a jaunt. I was curious about this geomantic...
