Yes, in the old days it was a national centre. The Jing Wu school was fully running before 1920 in Zhabei. Huo Yuan Jia was the most famous, although many people think he’s fictional these days. You can’t compare now to then but you can still find a lot of Bau Gua Zhang, Taiji and Xinyi, for example. more ›

Even weirder stuff than the Youtube block seems to have been happening, though. Apparently, for a short while on the 17th, before the Youtube block occurred, blogsearch.google.com and live.com were both redirected to Baidu! Blogsearch.google.cn was totally inaccessible. This has been confirmed by Ken Wong (see screencaps on his blog) and other Chinese netizens. Google Blogoscoped reported that yet more exotic pages like search.ibm.com.cn were also being hijacked to Baidu. more ›

Shanghai Daily tells us that the Shanghai Health Bureau has shut down three clinics in the city for "faulty practices", albeit just temporarily. They are namely - Shanghai Zhongtai Hospital, Shanghai Shenguang Clinic and Shanghai Hong'an Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic. more ›

more ›

One of the nice features on Google Calendar is the ability to add the lunar calendar on top of the western one, which helped us verify that today, Thursday, is indeed the third day of the third month of the lunar calendar. more ›

China's hospitals and in particular, Chinese hospital food, do not necessarily have the highest of reputations. Now the whole scare factor of heading off to a Sino hospital has just raised that little bit more with the recent story that a poisoner is at large in a Harbin hospital restaurant. more ›

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the brainstorming session that resulted in this contraption: more ›

After an enthusiastic e-mail circulated its way through some expatriate distribution lists last week touting the precision of an ostensibly upgraded Google Translate tool, the verdict from at least one blog is in: meh. According to China Herald: more ›

Potatoes grown from seeds that mutated in space while aboard a Chinese spacecraft are the newest culinary fad in Shanghai. This potato, dubbed the Purple Orchid Three, is supposedly going to be popular choice for upscale Valentine's Day dinners:

Several Shanghai restaurants have developed dishes using Purple Orchid Three 'space potatoes,' claiming that the unusual colour of the vegetables represents the 'nobility and romance' of Valentine's Day, the official Xinhua news agency said. more ›

On a recent stroll near the Bund, Shanghaiist chanced upon a curious joint that was billing itself as a restaurant, design house, hair studio, live music joint, and art gallery. Ma.Design, it was called. We were intrigued. more ›

"The Japanese have the kimono and the Koreans also have their traditional.clothing. But not the Han people, although they represent the largest of China's 56 ethnic groups," said Liu, who actively promotes cuture.

Yeah, we know -- unfair fight. Pop music versus (diluted agitprop) theater. But that's what this article is about: more ›

We just came across an interesting New York Times article about art, design and architecture in China. Much of it deals with the work of Ai Weiwei, an artist and designer (and son of famed poet Ai Qing), who has created a number of interesting living spaces, such as loft complexes, where the living space is near to or combined with gallery space: more ›

After reports of 121 skulls being found in a remote ravine on the border of Qinghai and Gansu provinces, western China was already starting to look a little creepy, even if the skulls may have actually been a part of a Tibetan Buddhist ritual, as the unlinkable South China Morning Post reports: more ›