On the morning of July 22, a solar eclipse will darken skies over a large swathe of Asia. The eclipse’s umbra – an area of almost complete darkness, where the sun, moon and earth’s surface are perfectly aligned – will pass over north-east India, China’s middle and Japan’s Pacific Ocean islands.

The eclipse will be the 21^st century’s longest. Its period of totality, during which the moon will completely block out the sun, is expected to last for a maximum of six minutes and 39 seconds, in an area over the Pacific. In Shanghai, the city closest to the eclipse’s centre, totality will last for just under five minutes. A total eclipse will also be visible from Surat, Varanasi, Patna and Thimphu in India, as well as Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan and Hangzhou in China. Read the rest of this entry »

In proud, if imperfect English, a sign outside the History Exhibition Hall in Xinchang declares: “There standed 13 bridges and 9 memorial arches in Xinchang, which made it better than Suzhou.” The sign reappears, twice, inside the exhibition hall, and again on the wall of an unfinished information centre nearby.

Is Xinchang better than Suzhou? Perhaps, once, if goodness can be measured in bridges and memorial arches, but as the Chinglish “standed” indicates, most of these are now gone. The old town is now not much more than a single street, about a kilometre and a half long, intersected by canalised rivers and crumbling alleyways. A Taoist temple marks its northernmost point, and a Buddhist temple its southernmost. But better is a relative word, and it can be measured in other ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Our partner site, danwei.org, recently posted a series of photos apparently “buzzing around blogs and forums on the Chinese Internet,” which tell the story of a single hotel room.

The room looks a lot like it’s in a Chinese zhusu (住宿). Zhusu can be translated as ‘accommodation’ or the equally open-ended ‘lodging’. And these ‘lodgings’ are open-ended; sometimes they’re simply rooms available for rent in somebody’s home, more often they’re very basic travel hotels, near train and bus stations. Signs for zhusus are normally just the two characters, 住 and 宿, printed in red, one below the other, on a white background.

The photos, taken for the April edition of O’ZINE, are almost exact imitations of Lydon Wade’s ‘Room 107’ series. In both, the room is a venue for a porn shoot and an out of control party; it’s a place where people are roughed up and others die, and a place where the police arrive too late. Lyndon Wade prefaced his photos with,

This is where people come and leave; leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, leave half-full beer bottles on the nightstand, leave the bed unmade, hair on the toilet seat, stains on the ceiling, glitter in the carpet, holes in the wall, leave their wives, their lives, a mess for the morning maid. And after an hour, a day, a month, they leave all they have left. And you check-in.

Perhaps most interesting is that these photos seem to make as much sense in China as they did in the original, American context.

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