China

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• published: 28 Jun 2011
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This Video is Produced & Edited by Aloke Mukerjee. The song You & Me was performed by *Sarah Brightman & Liu Huan during the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony in Beijing, Republic of China. Posted on June 28, 2011. (Note: My first visit to China was in the Summer of 2007. Taken up I returned in the Winter of 2007 and spent a year travelling through China and teaching English in Beijing for a spell.) *Sarah Brightman is the only artist to have been invited twice to perform at the Olympic Games, first at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games where she sang "Amigos Para Siempre" with the Spanish tenor Jose Carreras with an estimated global audience of a billion people, and sixteen years later in Beijing, this time with Chinese singer Liu Huan and performing the song "You and Me" to an estimated 4 billion people worldwide. China (瓷) is seen variously as an ancient civilization extending over a large area in East Asia, a nation and/or a multinational entity. With nearly 4,000 years of continuous history, China is one of the world's oldest civilizations. Prior to the 19th century, it possessed one of the most advanced societies and economies in the world. In mainland China, in the 1970s, reforms known as the Four Modernizations improved agriculture, industry, technology and defense, raising living standards and making the PRC one of the great powers. Historically, the cultural sphere of China has extended across East Asia as a whole, with Chinese religion, customs, and writing systems being adopted to varying degrees by neighbors such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Through its history, China was the source of many major inventions. It has also one of the world's oldest written language systems. The first evidence of human presence in the region was found at the Zhoukoudian cave. It is one of the earliest known specimens of Homo erectus, now commonly known as the Peking Man, estimated to have lived from 300,000 to 780,000 years ago. The word "China" is derived from Cin (چین), a Persian name for China popularized in Europe by Marco Polo. The first recorded use in English dates from 1555. In early usage, "china" as a term for porcelain was spelled differently from the name of the country, the two words being derived from separate Persian words. Both these words are derived from the Sanskrit word Cīna (चीन), used as a name for China as early as AD 150. China ranges from mostly plateaus and mountains in the west to lower lands in the east. Principal rivers flow from west to east, including the Yangtze (central), the Yellow River (Huang He, north-central), and the Amur (northeast), and sometimes toward the south (including the Pearl River, Mekong (river), and Brahmaputra), with most Chinese rivers emptying into the Pacific Ocean. In the east, along the shores of the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea there are extensive and densely populated alluvial plains. On the edges of the Inner Mongolian plateau in the north, grasslands can be seen. Southern China is dominated by hills and low mountain ranges. In the central-east are the deltas of China's two major rivers, the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. Most of China's arable lands lie along these rivers, and they were the centers of China's major ancient civilizations. Other major rivers include the Pearl River, Mekong, Brahmaputra and Amur. Yunnan Province is considered a part of the Greater Mekong sub-region, which also includes Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In the west, the north has a great alluvial plain, and the south has a vast calcareous tableland traversed by hill ranges of moderate elevation, and the Himalayas, containing Earth's highest point, Mount Everest. The northwest also has high plateaus with more arid desert landscapes such as the Takla-Makan and the Gobi Desert, which has been expanding. During many dynasties, the southwestern border of China has been the high mountains and deep valleys of Yunnan, which separate modern China from Burma, Laos and Vietnam.