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Martin Rundkvist's blog. Archaeology, skepticism, Sweden. And books and music and stuff.
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
Category: China
My wife just returned from Beijing where she's been collecting interviews for a TV project. And I find that her beauty is not luxurious imagination....
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: China
My wife's from Zhejiang province, and so is this can of pickled cabbage that she bought yesterday. I like the label a lot. It's not quite Engrish: of course, we would say "people's mess hall", but the Chinese characters...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Here's a Chinese village with a poorly supported and recently concocted origin myth involving Roman soldiers.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 33 Comments •
Category: China
FG's prophet actually has made some racist statements, but they are peripheral ideas in the movement and certainly not something a FG proselytiser would shove in someone's face when making a first contact.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 11 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The rivers run almost dry in Qingtian prefecture, Zhejiang province, China, because of recently built power dams.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 21 Comments •
Category: China
"Lie Fallow" means "in your spare time, without a prior appointment" in Engrish. Everybody loves Engrish, the surreal dialect of English found on signs, in menus, on clothing etc. in the Far East. Much of it seems to stem...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 20 Comments •
Category: China
I've written a bit before about the slightly odd interior decoration in Chinese hotels. Here's a Lovecraftian table lamp that sits on the check-in desk, inspiring cosmic dread, at the Relax hotel in Hangzhou....
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: China
I am unable to access Twitter, Facebook, any Blogspot blog and often most of Google's services including Gmail.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 12 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
The Chinese have had an established tradition of their own for collecting fine art for millennia. As a rigorous discipline, archaeology is barely 200 years old.
Posted by Martin R at 12:01 PM • 12 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
In China, nature appreciation is all about visiting named and inscribed sites whose beauty is vouchsafed by famous ancient poets.
Posted by Martin R at 11:56 AM • 11 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
My mother-in-law grew up in the mountains near Fushan in the prefecture of Qingtian (pronounced CHING-tien), inland Zhejiang province. Though the prefecture's name means "Green Field", it's pretty poor and has been a major emigration area for decades. The...
Posted by Martin R at 11:47 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: China
On the flight from Amsterdam to Hangzhou Saturday, I observed some interesting behaviour on the part of my Chinese co-travellers. After the main meal, the stewardesses went around hawking tax-free goods. At this time, a bunch of people stood up...
Posted by Martin R at 8:03 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Five good popular archaeomags. If you too read these magazine issues, tell me what you think and feel free to ask questions!
Posted by Martin R at 3:48 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: China
Not even the locals, who supposedly tell "legends" about their Chinese ancestry, believe any of it or indeed know of any such legends prior to the recent foreign involvement.
Posted by Martin R at 10:02 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Roman sites in the UK and 19th century sites with imported Classical sculpture have local living micropopulations of Mediterranean land snails!
Posted by Martin R at 3:50 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
A type of archaeological assemblage that occurs commonly in our house is the chicken or pork bone dump.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Children
At the root of my disagreement with Amy Chua lies my cynicism about the value of conventional achievement.
Posted by Martin R at 4:19 PM • 51 Comments •
Category: China
A relativist present-day writer will not allow for a Victorian writer to have found out any objective knowledge about the High Middle Ages. But he will himself unproblematically claim objective knowledge about the Victorian writer's views and surrounding world.
Posted by Martin R at 3:32 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
I hope the project does find a 15th century Chinese shipwreck. But if they do, then this will in no way validate the suddenly remembered folklore. It's a ridiculous product of current Afro-Chinese economic relations.
Posted by Martin R at 4:41 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: China
In China, religious worship is basically about praying to statues for stuff.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 20 Comments •
Category: Denmark
Danes often have tripartite names. I've been wondering how these names are inherited. Specifically, which names get dropped and which ones get passed on to the kids?
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 15 Comments •
Category: NOIBN
If you look up an organisation on Wikipedia, then the article will be pretty useless if it's written by people with any sort of passionate relationship to that organisation. If they hate it, if they love it, they're not the right people to write about it.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 29 Comments •
Category: China
Courtesy of my niece-in-law in Hangzhou, here's a piece of plastic hong shao rou, 紅燒肉, red braised pork, intended as a cell phone decoration. Yum!...
Posted by Martin R at 4:21 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: China
Happy Chinese New Year, everybody! Today is the first day of the year of the Ox according to the farmers' calendar. The Rundkvist family is heavily secularised, to the extent that I have let slip almost all Western observances...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Language
In Chinese, polite figures of speech mark a distance.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 65 Comments •
Category: China
I bought two wooden model kits in Beijing last October. The kids and I finished the Imperial Dragon in late August. Since then, my daughter and I have worked on the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests (祈年殿) which...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: China
Back in October I picked up a couple of wooden model kits in a mall near the Drum Tower in Beijing. Yesterday my daughter and I finished the first one, an Imperial Chinese dragon (count the toes), brought to...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: China
Once in the early 90s two Stockholm girls went to college to major in Chinese. They became friends: one was half-Chinese, the other had spent part of her childhood in China. They would one day become the Architect and...
Posted by Martin R at 10:57 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Humour
Looking closer at this cover of a Chinese pirate edition of Disney's 1937 animated feature Snow White, we find a couple of fine Engrish phrases. "Latinum Edition" is pretty good. But wouldn't you agree that "Still the Fairest of...
Posted by Martin R at 12:45 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Skepticism
A reader has pointed out that a propaganda website friendly with the Chinese government and hostile to Falun Gong is quoting a recent blog entry of mine. She suggests that this means that I am aiding the government in its...
Posted by Martin R at 4:06 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: China
The Chinese authorities and Falun Gong: a nasty autocratic regime persecuting a nasty manipulative cult.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: China
Back in October when myself & the family were in Beijing, we spent a Friday at the city's main amusement park. The place was almost deserted, so the kids didn't have to stand in line at all. They would...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
Proto-history offers a powerful lure to all students of the past.
Posted by Martin R at 8:50 AM • 16 Comments •
Category: China
Came to Luoyang in Henan province on the Yellow River by train yesterday morning.
Posted by Martin R at 4:01 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: China
Ostentatious 19th century Qing architecture is rather amply preserved around the city centre.
Posted by Martin R at 3:05 AM • 3 Comments •
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