Chairman Mao''''s Cigar Man

FAN Guorong, aged 84, is known in his hometown as "the Old Cigar Man." The moniker is a fitting one as he has spent most of his life making cigars. In his early teens, Fan served a three-year apprenticeship and became the youngest cigar maker of his time when he started his career in the late 1940s.     

Housekeeper of Potala Palace

When he left his uncle in Nor-bu Linka, the Dalai Lama's summer palace in Lhasa, on the evening of March 10,1959, Qiampa Getsang never expected one day he would do the same job as his late uncle did to manage the palace of the Dalai Lama.     

Xie Qingliang——Inheritor of Liu Sanjie’s Ballads

Xie Qingliang lives in Dongping Village,Qingyuan Town,Yizhou City of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.In2012,he was included in China’s National Intangible Cultural Heritage Inheritor List as a champion of folk singing.Now in his 60s,Xie recalls his love of singing folk songs that stems from his childhood.Over the decades,he has garnered a bunch of honors as a folk singer.In 1989,Xie won a local folk song competition,thus earning the title of     

关公故里的“唢呐王”

He began to learn the per-forming of Suona since he was nly 13-year-old because he loved he traditional folk art so much. He racticed all the year round never inding it was so cold in the win-er or so hot in the summer. Final- he won a successful place of his wn in the field of performance of uona. He could even perform to low a Souna as large as hree-meter-long and carried by our robust He began to learn the per-forming of Suona since he was only 13-year-old because he loved the traditional…     

The Story of a College Graduate Village Official

IN July 2007, Hu Jiandang packed a small suitcase and headed for the town of Panggezhuang in Daxing District on the southern outskirts of Beijing - a decision that, as it turned out, may affect his prosperity for the rest of his life. Shortly after graduating from Beijing Sport University he was hired as as-sistant to the Party secretary of Wangchang Village. Expecting to serve as a college graduate village official, he has in fact given shape to an entire career.     

Art and Money：Selling Out in Xiaozhou

XIAOZHOU Village on the southern outskirts of Guangzhou is a place of boundless opportunity - at least for Liu Jiusheng and Xie Guozheng. Liu opened his guqin （ancient zither） workshop in the village in 2007. He loves the guqin and is a skilled player. Once he bought an old one and disassembled it, finding its construction not as complicated as he had imagined. At that moment, he was struck by the impulse to make his own zithers of superb quality, and hired 26-year-old carpenter Xie to help him realize the dream.     

Dreams That Ride the Rails A Jiashan Farmer’s Hopes

IT’S October 25 and, as he stands in front of his new house clearing the last bit of mud off his shovel, Liu Aiguo, a farmer in his fifties, struggles with mixed feelings. On the one hand, building the new house has     

Job Hunting Season

Li Zhi got two job offers before he even finished his master’s degree at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of China’s top universities in Beijing, in July,undoubtedly inspiration to those who are still interviewing. But the 26-year-old was soon plagued with insomnia as he tried to make his final decisi on.     

A Life of Dedication──David Crook

APPROPRIATELY, the memorial meeting for David Crook, writer, educator and old and devoted friend of China and her people, began with the singing of the "Internationale," as he himself had willed.For David, who died on November 1, 2000 at the age of 90, had lived most of his life, and most of the previous century, as a convinced Communist and internationalist. Born of middle-class British-Jewish parents in 1910, he began his political life in the 1930s when studying at Columbia Univers…     

千古人物数风流——山西历史名人传：春秋霸主晋文公

A sovereign and politician of the State of Jin during the Spring and Autumn period, Duke Wen (697 BC——628 BC) of Jin,also called Chong Er, has been regarded as one of the Five Hegenoms of the Spring and Autumn period. At 62, when he ended 19 years in exile, he returned to Jin as Duke Wen. Upon returning home, he straightened out the state affairs and strengthened his army, thus establishing the supremacy of Jin. The historically famous Battle of Chengpu fought between Jin and Chu had consolidated his overlordship over other states.     

The Dying Art of Shadow Play

ZHANG Zhaobin is renowned in his Hubei Province hometown of Baokang as the best shadow play performer of all time. Now 75 years old, he was originally apprenticed at the age of 12 to shadow play singers in his village. Adept at storytelling, ballad-singing, dancing, and also at playing musical instruments, Zhang is the acknowledged master of his trade throughout the whole of northwestern Hubei Province.     

A Note of Friendship

Seventy-four years after he died, Chinese composer Xian Xinghai is touching hearts again, this time through a film made on the tragic last years of his life that hit the screens in China and Kazakhstan in May. Chinese director Xinzat Yahup's biopic The Composer, the first China-Kazakh coproduction, shines a light on the man regarded as one of the greatest Chinese composers, who was forced by circumstances to spend his last years in Kazakhstan and Russia, where he took his last breath.     

Back from the Brink Rescuing the White-Headed Langur

PAN Wenshi is a living legend in the Chinese zoology community. Having spent 16 years in remote mountain regions investigating the behavioral patterns,living conditions and genetics of giant pandas,he is known to his scientific brethren as "The Father of the Panda." Given the great success of his research,most people would expect Pan to retire to a quiet life in his twilight years.     

Mo Yan Speaks About Rural China

WHEN judges in Sweden awarded Mo Yan the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature and he was suddenly thrust into the world’s limelight, he was not sitting in front of the TV waiting for the news, as he doesn’t want his grandson to grow up with TV.     

Happy Beach-Li Ronglin''''s Oil Paintings

LI Ronglin got his bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the China Academy of Art, and went on to postgraduate studies at the oil painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where he now works as a teacher. Li's achievements are an indication of his talent. While studying he was awarded the Luo Zhongli Oil Painting Scholarship and the Wang Jialian Oil Painting Scholarship. Hard     

Lu Xun at Home

正LU Xun(1881-1936)is widely considered as China’s greatest modern writer.Although he was a prolific essayist and translator,it is for his intense and often disturbing short stories that he is best known.In criticizing repressive social norms,he aimed for nothing less than the eradication of the nation’s spiritual ills.In the decades since his death editions of his works,translations and critical studies have surged,making Lu Xun an accessible writer in most major languages.But he can also be remembered through the homes in which he lived and worked.     

A Chinese Painting Legend

Born in August 1954 in Taian,Shandong Province, the renowned painter Wu Jinliang has been obsessed with painting since his childhood.Wu made a name for himself by creating a number of excellent paintings when he served in the army.After graduating from the Jinghua Fine Arts School,he continued his studies at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Wu received training from many painting masters,such as Dong Shouping,a great contemporary master of calligra-     

Henore de Balzac, an Ever-Burning Torch

We are gathered here todayto commemorate the greatFrench writer Henore de Balzac.He was born on May 20, 1799and died on August 18, 1850. Itwill be the bicentenary of his birthin a month and the 150th anniver-sary of his death in a year.Balzac was a master of criti-cal realism. In the relatively shorttime of 50 years of his life, he leftus The Human Comedy, an ex-traordinary and exceptional real-istic literary work consisting of 94novels. Just as he had expected,     

Zhang Fangbai''''s World of Oils

ZHANG Fangbai stands alone in Chinese painting circles. A graduate of the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991, he was a teacher in the Oil Painting Department of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, and also in the Fine Arts Department of the China Youth College of Political Sciences. He is now studying for his Ph.D at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.The most noticeable visual effect of Zhang Fangbai's works is his use of white, not as background, but as the very nucleus of the work. Having grown up in southern Hunan Province, the