never a dull moment at the Yiling Teahouse

All the recent images I've posted are for this video (below)! please check it out

"China has demolished 300 dams and shut down most of the small hydropower stations on a major tributary of the upper Yangtze River to safeguard fish populations as part of an effort to restore the ecology of Asia’s longest waterway.

According to a report by the state news agency Xinhua on Monday, 300 of the 357 dams on Chishui He – also known as the Red River – had been dismantled by the end of December 2024.

In addition, 342 out of 373 small hydropower stations have been decommissioned, enabling many rare fish species to resume their natural reproductive cycles, the Xinhua report said.

The Red River flows for more than 400km (249 miles) through the southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan. It is regarded by ecologists as the last refuge for rare and endemic fish species in the Yangtze’s upper reaches.

Over the decades, water flows have been increasingly blocked by the dense network of hydropower stations and dams, restricting water volumes downstream and occasionally even causing some sections to dry up entirely.

This has drastically reduced the amount of suitable habitat and spawning grounds. The stations also blocked the routes of migratory fish species between breeding grounds and non-breeding areas.

Zhou Jianjun, a professor of hydraulic engineering at Tsinghua University, said that the decommissioning of hydropower stations usually referred to the cessation of electricity generation.

“The key is not whether the facilities still exist, but that, after power generation stops, the method of water control can be changed to meet ecological needs,” he said.

According to the Xinhua report, the large-scale rectification work that began in 2020 has meant that aquatic wildlife species, including the Yangtze sturgeon, have regained their habitat and vitality.

Along with the Chinese paddlefish, the freshwater sturgeon species – known as the last giant of the Yangtze – was declared extinct in the wild by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2022.

The natural population of the sturgeon has declined sharply since the 1970s, largely as a result of dam construction and the development of a shipping industry in the Yangtze River.

No naturally bred young sturgeon had been found in the entire Yangtze River since 2000, but a team of scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Hydrobiology has reported promising signs of recovery, according to Xinhua.

The team, led by Liu Fei, a researcher at the institute in Wuhan, released two batches of Yangtze sturgeon into the Red River in 2023 and 2024, which have successfully adapted to the wild environment and are thriving.

This year, the researchers decided to take it a step further and examine whether the fish could migrate naturally for reproduction. In April, they released 20 adult Yangtze sturgeon into a section of the river in Guizhou.

By mid-April, they observed the fish displaying natural spawning behaviour and successfully hatching fry, the researchers said.

“This achievement indicates that the current ecological environment of the Red River can now meet the habitat and reproductive needs of Yangtze sturgeon,” Liu told the news agency.

According to the institute’s latest monitoring results, the Red River’s aquatic biodiversity is steadily improving, with a significant increase in the number of fish species collected in various sections of the river.

China has launched a series of policy measures to protect the Yangtze’s critical role as an aquatic habitat, all centred on a 10-year fishing ban imposed in 2020 and the regulation of the small hydropower stations that have affected its biodiversity.

For example, by the end of 2021, Sichuan had essentially finished rectifying its 5,131 small hydropower stations, which included shutting down 1,223 of them, according to a local official report the following year.

The local government has also strictly prohibited sand mining in the rivers in a bid to create a more favourable environment for aquatic animals to breed and reproduce.

In a communique released in August last year, Beijing announced that aquatic biodiversity had steadily improved since the fishing ban and other measures were introduced.

Fish, invertebrates and amphibians continued to recover, while the overall water quality of the Yangtze and its tributaries was rated as “excellent”, it said. The intensity of sand mining and other projects affecting fisheries had also decreased.

OH SO YOU THINK MY ROYAL DECREES ARE RISIBLE? YOU FIND MY ROYAL POSTS LAUGHABLE?

very well, normally we would have your kneecaps amputated, but since you are such a comedian, we can make it the elbows instead.

Cnetizens: Why the thousand-year-old stone statues at the Northern Song Mausoleums aren’t covered with glass enclosures.

The director of the Cultural Relics Bureau replies: "They’ve stood here largely intact for over a millennium. Why add extra barriers?"

Visitors worry wind, rain and sunlight in the farmland will wear them down. The director explains:

Glass covers speed up decay—it’s like locking the statues in a sauna. Trapped heat and moisture create sharp temperature shifts. Salt crystals inside the stone expand and crack the carvings far faster than open-air exposure.

These statues blend naturally with the farmland landscape. Glass barriers would destroy the sense of scale and historical atmosphere.

When first built, the mausoleum complex was a restricted royal compound ringed by walls, palaces and pine trees—no farmland at all. After the Song fell, protection systems collapsed. Wars and weather destroyed buildings. Local residents gradually dismantled the abandoned structures, reusing timber and bricks in nearby villages.

By the Ming and Qing dynasties, villagers turned the empty grounds into farmland, leaving stone figures scattered amid crops.

Few people damaged the statues for three reasons: each weighs several tons and is impossible to move; folk belief held that anyone who damaged the guardian statues would be cursed with misfortune; every later dynasty passed laws punishing those who vandalized former imperial mausoleums.

Once an exclusive imperial burial ground, now ordinary farmland—this shift tells the story of history. Glass covers would only be unnecessary. As an old Chinese poem puts it: 旧时王谢堂前燕，飞入寻常百姓家

The swallows that were wont to grace the halls of Wang and Xie, Now seek the humble roofs of common men.

(cr 大鹅呀eyaeyaeya，陈帆fotochen，摄色📸，腾腾兔兔🐰)

“Not a working relationship” lmaooo. Understatement lol.

I love this director lol. He knew what he was doing. A+

And that’s why I love Heihua in this movie ^^^^

I know the movie came out in 2022 but give me a sequel I beg.

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

Remarkably, this ran from the 12th century to 1826.

Famously, there were so many tax record sticks that they were burned for fuel in a practical but slightly upsetting display of historical record autodestruction.

That said, apparently, while they were being burned in 1836, the fire overheated the furnace and set fire to the Palace of Westminster: The one that's there today is the New One.

for a particularly strong version of this kind of replacement: the word "bear" comes from a proto-Germanic word meaning "brown one" because there was a taboo against saying the animal's actual name. the taboo is gone but it was so strong in the past that we have no record of what the proto-Germanic word for "bear" even was.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.