Results tagged “pekingduck”

Both Xinhua and Channel News Asia have run stories about the Beijing delicacy Peking duck as a favorite amongst athletes staying in the Olympic Village. A spokeswoman for the Olympic Village reported at a press conference that the supply of the duck dish was doubled from 300 birds per day to 600 to satisfy the demand of the 10,000 or so athletes living the village.

There was a time when we took visitors requesting to eat traditional Peking duck to one of the many Duck King (鸭王) restaurants scattered about town, knowing that they'd be getting a decent and passable version of the dish that so famously belongs to our capitol in the north. We always tempered our expectations when it came to finding the crispy fowl fat here in Shanghai. Those days are now gone. After trying Xindalu, we know exactly where we'll be taking our guests the next time they request some authentic Peking duck action.

The Peking Duck: Is the rush to study Chinese a time-wasting fad?

This is not news the government wants to hear in the run-up to the Olympics, but here's a statement that the Beijing-based Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) just sent out (h/t to the Peking Duck):

Dear Members,

Continue reading "Foreign correspondents roughed up"

You may remember (one of) 2006's big Chinese internet controversies regarding the alleged British male English teacher blogging about allegedly bonking Shanghai's finest, the enraged response from China's self-styled moral guardian Dr. Zhang Jiehai, and the subsequent online-witch hunt for the alleged perpetrators?

Shanghaiist has posted before about the controversy surrounding the new high school history textbooks in Shanghai, which were thrown under the media spotlight after an article in the New York Times by Joseph Kahn claimed that the new history books were a big departure from the old books and went so far as to nearly remove Mao from China's history. You can read what the folks over at the Peking Duck thought about it this issue here and here. It seems that only one or two people there managed to compare the new history textbooks in Shanghai, which move away from the "great man" theory of history, with a somewhat similar movement in teaching of American history towards more social and cultural history, along the lines of (and this perhaps isn't the best or only example) Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

Would you agree with the following descriptions of Shanghai? First this:

Shanghaiist was out in the neighborhood of the Nanpu Bridge taking some photos yesterday, and on our way back, we saw a crowd gathering in the parking lot across the street. We thought it was a fight or argument, and were surprised to see two men laying immobile on the ground. Considering the temperature outside we thought it might have been heat stroke, but judging from the fact that there were two men and that they both looked a bit roughed up, it seemed that perhaps there was a traffic accident and that they had collided: One of them had a moped or scooter that was laying on its side. It was only with the arrival of more cops and the cordoning off of the crime scene -- or was it the pool of blood that was seeping out of one man's head -- that we realized that this was more serious than that.

That's the headline of a recent post by Bingfeng, a Chinese guy who blogs in English about life in Shanghai, business, politics and lots of other stuff. Here's what he had to say:

Via Peking Duck and Asiapundit we learned of this posting in the Shanghai Daily:

We meant to write about this yesterday, but decided to play with our dog instead. Blame the pre-holiday malaise. Anyway, now many other blogs have made the same points we wanted to make, so we will summarize ... and then go play with our dog again.

Anyone who has lived in Shanghai for more than a few months knows that nothing stays the same here for long. The city is constantly building and rebuilding (especially in Shanghaiist's soon-to-be-former apartment building ... PLEASE MAKE THE HAMMERING / DRILLING / SAWING STOP!). It's always scary saddening maddening neat to see before-and-after photos of city locations. Peking Duck recently made a post called "Shanghai then and now" which featured the reader-submitted photos you see reproduced here. That's the same Shanghai location, and the "then" was only 24 months earlier than the "now." It's happening all over the city. Regardless of your views on all this growth and change, it's an exciting, historic -- and, yes, loud -- time to be living in Shanghai. There are quite a few comments to that Peking Duck post ... always entertaining.

If you've been following media reports about North Korea, then chances are you've also heard stories of North Koreans slipping over the borders to China, or trying to scale the walls of embassies in Beijing in order to get asylum. For most refugees, this means ending up South Korea, but don't think that just by making out of the "hermit kingdom" into China means getting to the promised land -- China is quite willing to send them back, as happened recently in Yantai, when seven North Koreans entered an international school. The refugees included five women and two men. Four of them were from one family. There's a Chinese article about it (containing mostly the same info as the English link above) here.