Wanping Fortress

Wanping Fortress, also known as Wanping Castle (Chinese: 宛平城; pinyin: Wǎnpíng Chéng), is a Ming Dynasty fortress or "walled city" in Beijing. It was erected in 1638–1640, with the purpose of defending Beijing against Li Zicheng and the peasant uprising.

The fortress has two gates: the east gate, named Ever Prosperous Gate (永昌门, Yongchangmen), then renamed as Majestic Gate (威严门), and the west gate, named Favorably Govern Gate (顺治门, Shunzhimen).

In Chinese, the fortress is sometimes called Wanping City, and from the beginning, it functioned as a military fortress. From west to east, it measures 640 metres (2,100 ft), and from south to the north 320 metres (1,050 ft), making it a half-square shape.

The Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, surrounded by a plaza and park with numerous sculptures, occupies a large portion of the space inside the fortress' walls.

To the west of the fortress are the Yongding River and the Lugou Bridge (Marco Polo Bridge, 卢沟桥).

Wing Chun

Wing Chun (Chinese: 詠春; pinyin: yǒng chūn; Jyutping: wing⁶ ceon¹; literally: "spring chant"), also romanised as Ving Tsun or Wing Tsun, (and sometimes substituted with the characters 永春 "eternal springtime"); is a concept-based Chinese martial art and form of self-defense utilising both striking and grappling while specialising in close-range combat.

The alternative characters 永春 "eternal spring" are also associated with some other southern Chinese martial arts, including Weng Chun Kung Fu and Yong Chun .

History

The earliest known mentions of Wing Chun date to the period of Red Boat Opera.

The common legend as told by Yip Man involves the young woman Yim Wing-chun during the period after the destruction by the Qing government of the Southern Shaolin and its associated temples.

Having rebuffed the local warlord's marriage offer, Yim Wing-Chun said she'd reconsider the proposal if he could beat her in a fight. She soon crossed paths with a Buddhist nun named Ng Mui, who was one of the Shaolin Sect survivors, and asked the nun to teach her to fight. According to legend Ng Mui taught Yim Wing-Chun a new system of martial art that had been inspired by the nun's observations of a confrontation between a Snake and a Crane. This then-still nameless style enabled Yim Wing-Chun to beat the warlord in a one-on-one fight. Yim Wing-Chun thereafter married Leung Bac-Chou and taught him the style, which was later named after her.

Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937 – September 9, 1945) was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan from 1937 to 1945. It followed the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95.

China fought Japan, with some economic help from Germany (see Sino-German cooperation until 1941), the Soviet Union, the British Empire and the United States. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the war would merge into the greater conflict of World War II as a major front of what is broadly known as the Pacific War. The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the 20th century. It accounted for the majority of civilian and military casualties in the Pacific War, with anywhere between 10 and 25 million Chinese civilians and over 4 million Chinese and Japanese military personnel dying from war-related violence, famine, and other causes (see World War II casualties).

The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policy aimed at expanding its influence politically and militarily in order to secure access to raw material reserves and other economic resources in the area, particularly food and labour, and engage war with others in the policy context of aggressive modernized militarism in the Asia-Pacific, at the height of Imperial Rule Assistance Association's Hideki Tojo cabinet and with the order from Emperor Shōwa. Before 1937, China and Japan fought in small, localized engagements, so-called "incidents". In 1931, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria by Japan's Kwantung Army followed the Mukden Incident. The last of these incidents was the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 1937, which marked the beginning of total war between the two countries.