Prof. Cheng Chinese Culture - Draft

So behind me is a pagoda made of abacuses. Now abacus is a Chinese method of calculation. So if you look at the abacuses here, we have the long ones and we have the short ones. So what we have here is also in the pagoda shape. Bu Bu Gao Shen. Now the abacus was invented by the Chinese in a way for calculating. It started out with tying knots on a string. So each knot would be a number. Eventually the idea came, you can use a stick and you can put round beads outside of the stick to calculate. So it became the abacus of today. It is an art and it is also a science. Example of Chinese porcelain. It's a Long Feng Pan. Long is the dragon, Feng is the phoenix. When you look at Long Feng, you know it's a couple. So it's a wedding, a wedding gift of such a huge pie. And it's done in such a beautiful way that we can use it for decoration. And so this is part of the Chinese tradition of a wedding gift. This is the great example of Chinese literature. Also great example of a piece of lacquer. Lacquer is also very famous from China. So this came out of the year 1865 in the celebration of the 70th birthday of a lady, Madame Wong. And how do I know that? Because I can read Chinese. The most important part of this piece is her life story at the age of 70. The entire piece has no punctuation marks. So you have to learn where to parse to figure out what the meaning is. Another interesting piece is who presented this beautiful piece of art to this Madame Wong? It happened to be her son-in-law. And in this case, her son-in-law said, you are given to you by your stupid son-in-law. And that is also a Chinese way to show humility.