Today I would like to tell you a little about my country – China. As it is a very old civilization I will not be able to cover very much information. However, I hope you will want to know more about China after you have read my article.
China is called Zhongguo in Mandarin. An ancient name for China is ‘Hua Xia’ .The first character zhōng means "middle" or "central," and guó means "country" or "state". The term can be literally translated as "Middle Kingdom" or "Central Kingdom." In ancient times the term referred to the "Central States" along the Yellow River valley.
China is a cultural region and an ancient civilization in East Asia. It is one of the world's oldest civilizations, consisting of states and cultures dating back more than six thousand years. The stalemate of the last Chinese Civil War has resulted in two political entities using the name China. The full name is ‘Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China’ and the other is ‘Macau Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China’. This is important to me because I am from Hong Kong.
You may already know that China is composed of 56 nations. So it is no wonder that there are many different dialects. In fact, China has 29 different dialects. The dialects most often spoken are Mandarin, spoken by over 70% of the population, and Wu (Shanghainese), Yue (Cantonese), Min, Xiang, Gan, and Hakka. The other widely spoken dialects by ethnic minorities include Zhuang (Thai), Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur (Turkish), Hmong and Korean.
Now I would like to tell you a little bit about Chinese food and drink:
Chinese people think ‘eating is the most important thing’. So China has a long history with food and as result they know and make a lot of great Chinese food and present it well. Some Chinese dining specialties are tea, alcohol and Chinese cuisine.
Tea has a thousand year history in China. They accumulated a great deal of knowledge and subsequently developed a unique culture for tea. China has its own special alcohol. It is very strong because it is made up of 60 per cent pure alcohol. Actually the name of this drink translates as ‘burn alcohol’ and you can see why.
Around A.C.2900 to A.C.2100 they learnt how to make fruit alcohol. Around A.C.202 they introduced red wine. After this they produced some alcohol for medicinal purposes but they thought is was too good for just that so they also used it in celebrations.
Originally Chinese food was divided into different food categories for different classes. The most delicious recipes were used only in the Palace. The next level of food was for local government officials and the remainder was for the local people.
The most famous of these are ‘Shandong’, ‘Anhui’, ‘Cantonese’, ‘Fujian’, ‘Hunan’, ‘Jiangsu’, ‘Szechuan’ and ‘Zhejiang’ cuisine. These are the Eight Great Traditional cuisines in China.
But what is common in all Chinese food is the fact that they cut the food into small bite size pieces before they cook, which makes it easy to eat. And they almost always use chopsticks to eat. I think this is a sensible way to prepare food.
As you can see China has a rich and vibrant history with its own unique cuisine and food traditions. China has developed from many different cultures and as a result is a land of many mysteries. Many countries try to imitate Chinese culture, though China is not a technologically advanced country, which makes us very happy because we are proud or our culture and our country.
