Penghu National Scenic Area

National scenic area

A national scenic area (NSA) is a conservation designation used in Scotland, and currently administered by Scottish Natural Heritage. NSAs are defined as having outstanding scenic interest or unsurpassed attractiveness.

Overview

The primary purpose of the NSA designations is to conserve and enhance the natural beauty of the landscape, in a similar way to the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) designation used elsewhere in the UK.

Rest of the UK

The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This act recognises Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty in areas of countryside with significant landscape value in each of the three nations, that has been specially designated by their administrations.

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National Scenic Area

National Scenic Area is a designation for areas of natural beauty used by more than one nation.

Tourist attraction rating categories of China

Tourist Attraction Rating Categories of China (Chinese: 旅游景区质量等级) is a rating system used by the Chinese authorities to determine the quality of the attraction relative to its peers in terms of safety, cleanliness, sanitation and transportation. It is broken up into five categories which are A (or 1A, the lowest level), AA (2A), AAA (3A), AAAA (4A) and AAAAA (5A, the highest level).

Ratings

Assessment

The categories are awarded based on, amongst other factors, the importance of the site, transportation, tours as well as issues related to safety, cleanliness and sanitation. The system was established in 1999 and extended in 2004 (when the category AAAAA was introduced). The ratings are administered by the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA) and are based on the code "Categories and Rating Standard of Tourist Attractions".

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Penghu

The Penghu or Pescadores Islands are an archipelago of 64 islands and islets in the Taiwan Strait. The largest city is Magong, located on the largest island, which is also named Penghu. Covering an area of 141 square kilometers (54 sq mi), the archipelago collectively forms Penghu County of Taiwan, and is the second smallest county, after Lienchiang.

Name

The traditional English name of the islands, the Pescadores, comes from the Portuguese name Ilhas dos Pescadores ("Fishermen Islands"). The Portuguese pronunciation is [pɨʃkɐˈðoɾɨʃ] but, in English, it is typically closer to /ˌpɛskəˈdɔːrɪz/ or /-iz/. The islands have also been called Pehoe.

Pescadores was also the name given by the Spanish expedition of Hernando de Grijalva in 1537 to the Micronesian atoll Kapingamarangi.

History

Finds of fine red cord-marked pottery indicate that Penghu was visited by people from southwestern Taiwan around 5,000 years ago, though not settled permanently.

Han Chinese from southern Fujian began to establish fishing communities on the islands in the 9th and 10th centuries, and representatives were intermittently stationed there by the Southern Song and Yuan governments from around 1170.

Penghu 1

Penghu 1 is a fossil jaw (mandible) belonging to an extinct hominin species of the genus Homo from Taiwan that is Pleistocene in age.

The fossil was recovered sometime before 2008 by fishermen working in the Penghu Channel – between the Penghu Islands and mainland Taiwan – and described in 2015 by an international team of Japanese, Taiwanese, and Australian scientists. Penghu 1 is estimated to be between 10,000 and 190,000 years old.

The fossil consists of a nearly complete right lower jaw with four teeth, including molars and premolars. The specimen was assigned to the genus Homo based on jaw and tooth proportions, described as most similar to Hexian fossils of Homo erectus, but the species identity or taxonomic relationships lack consensus due to limited material. Co-author Yousuke Kaifu cautioned that additional skeletal parts are needed before species evaluation, but paleontologist Mark McMenamin argued that unique dental characteristics of the jaw were sufficient to establish the new species Homo tsaichangensis. Chinese anthropologists Xinzhi Wu and Haowen Tong tentatively assigned the mandible to archaic Homo sapiens, leaving open the possibility of elevating it to a distinct species should more fossils be discovered.