Comments by "D W" (@DW-op7ly) on "Rise of Asia"
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The Chinese Treasure Fleet in 15th century Philippines
* It was the people of our archipelago who discovered Magellan and the Europeans in 1521, not the other way around, as most Filipinos were taught by our grade-school textbooks. Our islands and their inhabitants were well-known to a larger, richer world that of Chinese emperors and scholars and Arab traders, as early as the 9th, even 6th centuries. And certainly by 1000 A.D., our shores were regular ports of call in the trade with China, then the most powerful nation on earth.
Chinese chronicles, European archaeologists and the diggings in our pre-colonial burial grounds prove that those ancient Filipinos used fine porcelain, weights and measures imported from China, and recorded written contracts. Chao-Ju-Kua reported that Chinese traders visited Ma-I (Luzon) regularly, leaving silks, porcelain and metal utensils on the beaches of designated islands, and returning weeks later to collect payment in the form of beeswax, gold dust, carabao horn, ginger, cinnamon or garlic. It was an import-export system run on a reliable honor system with unquestioned good faith.
* When Magellan’s Spanish Armada hove into view in March 1521, the natives of Homonhon in the Visayas must have taken pity on the small black ships with tattered sails and scruffy, starving, disoriented sailors, for they sent a small rowboat packed with rice, coconuts and bananas to their rescue. On the next island, the white, bearded strangers were feted in a bamboo palace with a banquet of roast fish, pork, turtle eggs and palm wine, by a native king whose queen wore a black-and-white gown, red lips and nails, while a quartet of young, topless damsels played music on various gongs and drums.
Those early Filipinos had been more accustomed to the tall, prosperous, Chinese ships with a trio of feathery sails stiffened with battens, for the China trade had been in place for at least 500 years. During the Ming Dynasty, Filipinos enjoyed the visits of the Treasure Fleet (1405-1500) of Admiral Cheng Ho (Zhen He) a huge, 7-ft tall, powerful eunuch, who had built 1,500 massive, 500-ft ships in a giant shipyard in Nanking with the help of 30,000 workers. The luxurious ships, each manned by 1,000 sailors ruled the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
* But the Chinese were not interested in conquest or territorial aggrandizement. Their purposes were trade and diplomacy. That was what our ancestors expected when they first saw the Spanish Armada.
Filipinos had never seen white men before Magellan and never thought the strangers would be as rapacious and predatory as they would prove to be. They assumed the new foreigners to be poor and needy because they had only glass beads, a string of little bells and a red cap (Magellan’s gifts) to reciprocate the native prodigality. The white men were, in fact, so dazzled by the earrings, chains, armlets and anklets, of pure gold, worn by both the native men and women that Magellan had to warn them against showing their covetousness.
Philstar
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@storm_yu
India is a great country, but what if I tell you that Africa outperforms India when you examine absolute and intrinsic economic indicators. Do not get me wrong: India has one of the greatest diaspora models in the world which is simply amazing and truly enviable. But despite all that, India’s potentials remain latent, unlocked, just like Africa. So, as you share this plot (on click), note the following:
The population of India is 1.4 billion. The population of Africa is 1.3 billion. The GDP of India is $3.1 trillion. The GDP of Africa is $3 trillion. Did you notice something? Africa and India are just in the same pot, underperforming, despite the perception that India has higher productivity or efficiency. Indeed, the economic efficiency difference between India and Africa is the type which exists between 12 and a dozen. Sure, Africa has more natural resources. But yet, India enjoys one border which has an efficiency factor against Africa. (GDP of China is about $17.73 trillion, population is about 1.4 billion)
As I have written many times, we must look into #China, because China has the secret sauce to development. India has a literacy rate of about 78%; China has 99.8% which means every person above 15 years old can read and write in China! As you go deeper, you will see why China is supreme and totally uncorrelated with any other emerging economy.
Then, the biggest difference. When Africans and Indians graduate in American top universities, they make US permanent homes; Chinese put about 5 years, and then move back to China, and tap unlimited government-created resources to challenge the companies they worked for in the United States. That is why you hardly see Chinese at top leadership positions in leading US tech companies even as you see them running companies which challenge those firms at the global level. Like #Africa, India does not offer such pathways.
Sure, we must learn certain things from India. But India itself is learning more from China, and I think we can go straight and learn from China. China is doing the core things which transform economies. Of course #India rocks, and doing great; my point is to put things in perspective.
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
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@storm_yu you have to copy and paste on YouTube
You are not allowed to post up
HTTP links
You would know that if you ever posted up a 3rd party article to support an argument you Charmaar love child
👇
Why was China erased from Western memory
The remarkable history of Chinese invention - Why was China erased from Western memory?
Article by 龙信明
Introduction
Joseph Needham was an English medical doctor and biologist, teaching in England in the 1930s. By an accident of fate he acquired some Chinese students, and was intrigued to hear their claims of so many medical and scientific discoveries having originated in China, rather than in the West.
Needham became fully fluent in Chinese, and eventually moved to China in 1942 to investigate these claims and to research the entire history of Chinese invention. That work led to an astonishing voyage of historical discovery.
Needham originally planned to write a book cataloguing Chinese inventions, but his first volume barely scratched the surface of his subject. He slowly gatherred many of his students into this enterprise, and they eventually wrote a collection of 26 books, to catalog the history of Chinese discovery.
Myth and Misrepresentation
It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of things invented by the Chinese many hundreds of years, and often several millennia, before they appeared in the West.
All the myths about China and the Chinese being good at 'memorising and passing exams', but being unable to think independently or to be imaginative and creative, are just that - myths. Those stories were never true, not then and not now.
This isn't a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks, but encompasses the entire range of human knowledge from endocrinoloy to mathematics, from agriculture to astronomy.
How could such facts have been hidden from the entire Western world for so long? And why were they withheld?
Needham made his discoveries in the 1940s, but our Western education has never made reference to them, never acknowledged them.
We Westerners were taught that virtually all inventions and discoveries arose in Europe but, thanks to Joseph Needham, we have clear documentation proving they existed in China often 1,000 or more years before the Europeans copied them.
In all of the above, Needham has published not only old Chinese texts, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these items, from texts that can be accurately dated. These are not wild claims or
supppositions; the evidence is both conclusive and striking, and is there for anyone to examine.
Where has the world been, for so many years? How could all of this have remained hidden? How - and Why - did the West so thoroughly erase China from the world's current historical memory?
MySingaporeBlogSpot
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