Tales of the Three Countries

  Linguistic difference and its implications -Language as a key to the different origins of culture           : China vs. Korea and Japan If you are interested to grasp a good picture of the three countries in terms of their culture, history and the social fabric, I believe you need to start by getting a firm idea on the differences of their languages, especially about the strong demarcation between the Chinese and the block of Korean and Japanese. The common notion on the cultures of the three countries that they belong to the so-called “Chinese Character Cultural Sphere”  can be quite misleading and has impeded many learners and scholars in their early years from getting an objective and unbiased view on the North Asian societies and cultures. The linguistic distance between Chinese and the other two, Korean and Japanese, is bigger by far than between any two you can come up with in the Western hemisphere, so that the notion that the term “Chine...

  Make of the Lands: Geographic Overviews   China If you look at the map of China, one of the first things that catch your eyes could be its eastern coastal line that bulges out to the ocean, the Yellow sea in the north facing the Korean Peninsula and the East China Sea in the South from Shanghai down to Hong Kong. It may well be prone to the risk of over-simplification to say the China, the eastern part of the country to be exact, is geomorphically a huge alluvial fan out of the silts from the Tibet Plateau, yet it may be carrying a good insight into the formation of Chinese civilization stemming out of its geographical features. The Yellow Sea is called so since the olden time because the sea looked yellow on Chinese side from the muddy water the river pours out to the sea. Yellow River, or Huang He, is one of the many rivers that derive from Tibet Plateau and it is not the biggest by any measure, yet the river has always been given the most repute because it was the...