Snowy Winter in Toronto!

Happy Lunar New Year to you all! May this year of snake bring you happiness, good health, and success in all your endeavors.

How dedicated were late imperial Chinese literati to the civil service exams? Many failed 10 times (about 30 years), but how old could they be? Even the emperors felt compelled to give honorary degrees if they failed again, say, in their late 80s, as seen in the 1852 request for a xiucai, aged 89.

Pictures from the western end of "China proper" as famously noted by the Tang-era poet Wang Wei: "I urge you to drink another cup of wine/For beyond the Yang Pass, there will be no old friends."劝君跟进一杯酒/西出阳关无故人.The first one shows remains of the earliest (Qin-Han) Great Wall from over 2000 years ago.

This's a late 18th-century scroll painting of pets allegedly of the Qianlong emperor (Cf. www.burninghou.se/p/the-empero..., a link from@bokane.org). If the naming practice was true, Qianlong liked the Chinese character 狸 (wildcats/civets), but the names didn't sound more majestic or masculine.

1. How seriously did late imperial China's rulers treat their pets and/or job of archiving their everyday lives? Here're 2 registers from the No. 1 Historical Archives of the Qing royal family's cats and dogs (with names & years of birth/death). Two cats died after 9 years & one dog after 15 years.

Another from the same site, illustrating a renowned genre (经变画) in Buddhist artworks & sculpture, transforming stories in Buddhist sutras into striking visual narratives. It skillfully merges religious teachings with vivid depictions of daily life. Many can be found in the Dunhuang caves in Gansu.

This looks quite different from another two famous Thousand-0hand Guanyin statues at Ningxiang, Hunan province, left below, and at the Summer Place in Beijing, right below:

The Thousand-Hand Guanyin(千手观音), of the same UNESCO-listed site, is a masterpiece of 12th-cent. Buddhist art. About 7.7m tall and 12.5m wide, this stunning work features hundreds of intricately carved hands radiating outward, each with an eye, symbolizing Guanyin’s compassion and wisdom.

Took many pictures during my fall 2023 visiting professorship at Peking Univ. Here's the iconic Reclining Shakyamuni Buddha entering Nirvana at the Dazu Rock Carvings in Chongqing, PRC, a UNESCO World Heritage Site (dated 9th-13th centuries) with a blend of Buddhist, Confucian & Taoist influences.

In case you are seriously interested, here is the barcode for pre-ordering the book. It should be available for shipping within China in the coming days.

Welcome to check out this valuable Chinese collection of interviews with leading scholars, mostly in different China fields.《学术之路：跨学科国际学者对谈集》（2023年商务印书馆) "Pathways of Scholarship: Reflective and Methodological Conversations with Int'l Scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences" (2023).

Pleased to share a Chinese anthology of my research articles that will be published this month. With 14 chapters, it includes most of my research articles over the last fifteen years outside the monographs. It took 4 years for retranslating/editing/revising/proofreading. More info. at t.cn/A6n3tcDh