True Left

‘China is not just one entity’: major exhibition aims to showcase unseen diversity

Over 200 items from institutions in China and beyond will be on display at Cleveland Museum of Art, shining a light on the Jiangnan region and its long-running importance

Yahoo Life · us.yahoo.com

Although little-known in the west, China’s Jiangnan region has played a pivotal role in thousands of years of the country’s history.
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China’s Southern Paradise offers audiences an important opportunity to see sides of China rarely seen in the west. “China is not just one entity, in terms of climate, geography, language, ethnicity,” said Von Spee.
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The show travels all the way back to Neolithic times to exhibit grains of rice recovered from Tianluoshan, an ancient site that was discovered in the early 2000s, and that scientists believe was inhabited as far back at 7,000BC. Believed to be among the first rice cultivated anywhere on Earth
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From the stone age forward, China’s Southern Paradise covers multiple eras of Jiangnan’s history, corresponding with waves of migration that hit the region. Highlights include a rubbing of the Eulogy for Burying a Crane, an inscription in rock that dates to 6th century AD, and that has come to be known as one of the foremost masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy. It has inspired countless scholars to try to understand its eccentric memorial to the death of a beloved crane.

Von Spee said she hopes shows such as China’s Southern Paradise will help to reduce tensions between China and the United States.

Especially now, as the US and China have a strained relationship, culture is our resource to transcend this tension. There’s nothing better than having an exhibition that counters biased ideas.

Jack Ma - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

He became interested in English as a young boy and began practicing with English speakers in the Hangzhou International Hotel.
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For nine years, Ma rode 27 km (17 miles) on his bicycle every day to work as a tour guide of Hangzhou for foreigners in order to practice his English. He became pen pals with one of those foreigners, who nicknamed him "Jack" because he found it hard to pronounce his Chinese name.[17]
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In 1980, while he was riding his bike to practice English with tourists, he met Ken Morley, who was traveling with his family with the Australia-China Friendship Society.[18] Ken's son, David, became pen pals with Ma and kept in touch after the family left China. Years later, the Morleys hosted Ma in Australia, changing the course of his life completely.

from r/MapPorn

Can confirm, don't know why. People in the north tend to be bulkier and put on more weight.

Maybe it's because of Mongol blood in them?

The amount of meat people eat goes up as you go north. In the Guangdong, when you eat at home meat is almost like a condiment. Then when you go up to Shanghai, you get pieces of meat in sweet sauce, then you go up to Beijing and eating kebabs is a huge thing, PLUS they have a big drinking culture, then you go up to Harbin, and it's super cold and there's a big Russian influence, so the food (while fantastic!) can be very heavy.

Today, you could eat heavy food in the south thanks to air conditioning, but south China has been settled for thousands of years, thus the cuisine adapted to the thousands of years without air conditioning in the hot, humid climate, thus light foods, which is still often the case in rural China.

For most of human history, the only way you were eating meat on a DAILY basis, was you were physically hunting down wild animals. Either that, or Mongol-style nomads, relying mostly on meat but you herded enough cattle to feed yourself regularly. For the average subsistence farmer, meat was an occasional thing. Fish and seafood if you were close to an ocean or big river, but you simply didn't have enough animals to eat meat everyday.

Northern Chinese here.

As said before somewhere here:

Genetics definitely play a role. Southerners can be skinny on a different level to us. We call their look "bones covered by skin"... Somehow they often don't have much meat. Genetically they are closer to Vietnamese often than to us.
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My particular culture from northern china is ... I'd say is bit like Russia. Very machismo, very loud and brash. Not very delicate. I guess the Mongols influenced us all.

North-west are Turkic ethnicity and I know from Turkish ppl they love "round women"

Nobody in South China wants a fat girl, I know from having lived there.

Yes, in Guangdong 50 kilos is fat!

from r/aznidentity

Edit: this is applicable to the main population centers of east Asia.
The more north you go, the more nomadic and less this applies. The more
south you go, the more agrarian, developed and where "overt masculinity"
is less encouraged. The propaganda against asian men is based on the
more "southern" stereotype of east asians. Masculinity is very much
still promoted in places like Mongolia, vs. a place like Thailand, for
example.

Jurchen people - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Jurchen (Manchu: ᠵᡠᡧᡝᠨ Jušen, IPA: [dʒuʃən]; Chinese: 女真, Nǚzhēn [nỳ.ʈʂə́n]) is a term used to collectively describe a number of East Asian Tungusic-speaking people.[a] They lived in northeastern China, also known as Manchuria, before the 18th century. The Jurchens were renamed Manchus in 1635 by Hong Taiji.[6] Different Jurchen groups lived as hunter-gatherers, pastoralist semi-nomads, or sedentary agriculturists.

Like the Khitan people and Mongols, they took pride in feats of strength, horsemanship, archery, and hunting.
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The Qing stationed the "New Manchu" Warka foragers in Ningguta and attempted to turn them into normal agricultural farmers but then the Warka just reverted to hunter gathering and requested money to buy cattle for beef broth. The Qing wanted the Warka to become soldier-farmers and imposed this on them, but the Warka simply left their garrison at Ningguta and went back to the Sungari to their homes to herd, fish and hunt. The Qing accused them of desertion.[117]