Shanxi is a province in Northwestern China . Its capital and largest city of the province is Taiyuan , while its next most populated prefecture-level cities are Changzhi and Datong . Its one-character abbreviation is 晋 ( Jìn ), after the state of Jin that existed there during the Spring and Autumn period ( c. 770 – c. 481 BC ).
150-408: " Beijing " is from pinyin Běijīng, which is romanized from 北京 , the Chinese name for this city. The pinyin system of transliteration was approved by the Chinese government in 1958, but little used until 1979. It was gradually adopted by various news organizations, governments, and international agencies over the next decade. The Chinese characters 北 ("north") and 京 ("capital") together mean
300-545: A continental monsoon climate, and is rather arid. Average January temperatures are below 0 °C, while average July temperatures are around 21–26 °C. Winters are long, dry, and cold, while summer is warm and humid. Spring is extremely dry and prone to dust storms. Shanxi is one of the sunniest parts of China; early summer heat waves are common. Annual precipitation averages around 350 to 700 millimetres (14 to 28 in), with 60% of it concentrated between June and August. Major cities: The outline of Shanxi's territory
450-548: A | and single-storey | ɑ | forms both representing the Latin letter ⟨ A ⟩ . Variants also emerge for aesthetic reasons, to make handwriting easier, or to correct what the writer perceives to be errors in a character's form. Individual components may be replaced with visually, phonetically, or semantically similar alternatives. The boundary between character structure and style—and thus whether forms represent different characters, or are merely variants of
600-437: A brush onto silk, bamboo, or paper, and being printed using woodblocks and moveable type . Technologies invented since the 19th century allowing for wider use of characters include telegraph codes and typewriters , as well as input methods and text encodings on computers. Chinese characters are accepted as representing one of four independent inventions of writing in human history. In each instance, writing evolved from
750-551: A center for trade and banking. The " Shanxi merchants " were once synonymous with wealth. The well-preserved city and UNESCO World Heritage Site Pingyao shows many signs of its economic importance during the Qing dynasty. With the collapse of the Qing dynasty , Shanxi became part of the newly established Republic of China . From 1911 to 1949, during the period of the Republic of China's period of rule over Mainland China , Shanxi
900-416: A character's meaning. Examples of phono-semantic compounds include 河 ( hé ; 'river'), 湖 ( hú ; 'lake'), 流 ( liú ; 'stream'), 沖 ( chōng ; 'surge'), and 滑 ( huá ; 'slippery'). Each of these characters have three short strokes on their left-hand side: 氵 , a simplified combining form of ⽔ 'WATER' . This component serves
1050-607: A distinct language from Mandarin and its geographical range covers most of Shanxi. Both Jin and Mandarin are spoken in Shanxi. Shanxi is a leading producer of coal in China , possessing roughly a third of China's total coal deposits. Nevertheless, Shanxi's GDP per capita remains below the national average. The province hosts the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center . The province is also known for having by far
1200-428: A few characters in length at their shortest, to several dozen at their longest. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors by means of scapulimancy , inquiring about subjects such as the royal family, military success, and the weather. Inscriptions were made in the divination material itself before and after it had been cracked by exposure to heat; they generally include a record of the questions posed, as well as
1350-690: A given position in the compound. Components within a character may serve a specific function: phonetic components provide a hint for the character's pronunciation, and semantic components indicate some element of the character's meaning. Components that serve neither function may be classified as pure signs with no particular meaning, other than their presence distinguishing one character from another. A straightforward structural classification scheme may consist of three pure classes of semantographs , phonographs and signs —having only semantic, phonetic, and form components respectively, as well as classes corresponding to each combination of component types. Of
1500-558: A language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes . Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length. In some special cases, characters may denote non-morphemic syllables as well; due to this, written Chinese is often characterized as morphosyllabic . Logographs may be contrasted with letters in an alphabet , which generally represent phonemes ,
1650-571: A large, fortified prison complex filled with Communist prisoners. In a final act of desperation, Liang set fire to the prison and committed suicide as the entire compound burned to the ground. Soon after the Chinese Communist Revolution , Mao Zedong assigned Kang Sheng to carry out land reform in Shanxi. Kang encouraged the populace to have numerous farmers from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds denounced as "landlords," beaten, arrested, and executed. In some areas of
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#17327653817781800-422: A line, and later evolved into their present forms with less potential for graphical ambiguity in context. More complex indicatives include 凸 ('convex'), 凹 ('concave'), and 平 ('flat and level'). Compound ideographs ( 会意 ; 會意 ; huìyì )—also called logical aggregates , associative idea characters , or syssemantographs —combine other characters to convey a new, synthetic meaning. A canonical example
1950-436: A major part of Shanxi's economy. Shanxi possesses 260 billion metric tons of known coal deposits, about a third of China's total. As a result, Shanxi is a leading producer of coal in China and has more coal companies than any other province, with an annual production exceeding 300 million metric tonnes. The Datong ( 大同 ), Ningwu ( 宁武 ), Xishan ( 西山 ), Hedong ( 河东 ), Qinshui ( 沁水 ), and Huoxi ( 霍西 ) coalfields are some of
2100-542: A mature form, also called 八分 ( bāfēn ). Bamboo slips discovered during the late 20th century point to this maturation being completed during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han ( r. 141–87 BCE ). This process, called libian ( 隶变 ; 隸變 ), involved character forms being mutated and simplified, with many components being consolidated, substituted, or omitted. In turn, the components themselves were regularized to use fewer, straighter, and more well-defined strokes. The resulting clerical forms largely lacked any of
2250-419: A model first popularized in the 2nd-century Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. More recent models have analysed the methods used to create characters, how characters are structured, and how they function in a given writing system. Most characters can be analysed structurally as compounds made of smaller components ( 部件 ; bùjiàn ), which are often independent characters in their own right, adjusted to occupy
2400-474: A modern curriculum and infrastructure of Chinese medicine achieved limited success, but much of the teaching and publication that this school of medicine produced was limited to the area around Taiyuan: by 1949 three of the seven government-run hospitals were in the city. In 1934 the province produced a ten-year-plan that envisaged employing a hygiene worker in every village, but the Japanese invasion in 1937 and
2550-633: A much-praised atlas by Dutch publisher Joan Blaeu . In English, both "Pekin" and "Peking" remained common until the 1890s, when the Imperial Post Office adopted Peking. Beginning in 1979, the PRC government encouraged use of pinyin . The New York Times adopted "Beijing" in 1986, with all major American media soon following. Elsewhere in the Anglosphere , the BBC switched in 1990. "Peking"
2700-604: A primary-school education and taught domestic skills. After National Revolutionary Army military victories in the 1925 generated great interest in Shanxi for the Kuomintang 's ideology, including women's rights , Yan allowed girls to enroll in middle school and college, where they promptly formed a women's association. Yan attempted to eradicate the custom of foot binding , threatening to sentence men who married women with bound feet, and mothers who bound their daughters' feet, to hard labor in state-run factories. He discouraged
2850-563: A relatively high level of public order and security. Yan went to great lengths to eradicate social traditions which he considered antiquated. He insisted that all men in Shanxi abandon their Qing-era queues, giving police instructions to clip off the queues of anyone still wearing them. In one instance, Yan lured people into theatres in order to have his police systematically cut the hair of the audience. He attempted to combat widespread female illiteracy by creating in each district at least one vocational school in which peasant girls could be given
3000-699: A semantic component. Pictographs have often been extended from their original meanings to take on additional layers of metaphor and synecdoche , which sometimes displace the character's original sense. When this process results in excessive ambiguity between distinct senses written with the same character, it is usually resolved by new compounds being derived to represent particular senses. Indicatives ( 指事 ; zhǐshì ), also called simple ideographs or self-explanatory characters , are visual representations of abstract concepts that lack any tangible form. Examples include 上 ('up') and 下 ('down')—these characters were originally written as dots placed above and below
3150-571: A semantic function in each example, indicating the character has some meaning related to water. The remainder of each character is its phonetic component: 湖 ( hú ) is pronounced identically to 胡 ( hú ) in Standard Chinese, 河 ( hé ) is pronounced similarly to 可 ( kě ), and 沖 ( chōng ) is pronounced similarly to 中 ( zhōng ). The phonetic components of most compounds may only provide an approximate pronunciation, even before subsequent sound shifts in
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#17327653817783300-555: A small force of 6,000 men to hold off the entire Japanese army. A representative of the Japanese Army, speaking of the final defense of Taiyuan , said that "nowhere in China have the Chinese fought so obstinately". The Japanese suffered 30,000 dead and an equal number wounded in their effort to take northern Shanxi. A Japanese study found that the battles of Pingxingguan, Xinkou, and Taiyuan were responsible for over half of all
3450-429: A stylus in clay moulds used to cast ritual bronzes . Characters have also been incised into stone, or written in ink onto slips of silk, wood, and bamboo. The invention of paper for use as a writing medium occurred during the 1st century CE, and is traditionally credited to Cai Lun ( d. 121 CE ). There are numerous styles, or scripts ( 书 ; 書 ; shū ) in which characters can be written, including
3600-540: A system using two distinct types of ideographs . Ideographs could either be pictographs visually depicting objects or concepts, or fixed signs representing concepts only by shared convention. These systems are classified as proto-writing , because the techniques they used were insufficient to carry the meaning of spoken language by themselves. Various innovations were required for Chinese characters to emerge from proto-writing. Firstly, pictographs became distinct from simple pictures in use and appearance: for example,
3750-537: A three-way split into the states of Han , Zhao , and Wei in 403 BC, a traditional date sometimes taken as the start of the Warring States period ( c. 473 – 221 BC). By 221 BC, all of these states had fallen to the state of Qin , which established the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC). The Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 220) ruled Shanxi as the province of Bingzhou . During
3900-545: A time and without indicating any greater context. Qiu concludes, "We simply possess no basis for saying that they were already being used to record language." A historical connection with the symbols used by the late Neolithic Dawenkou culture ( c. 4300 – c. 2600 BCE ) in Shandong has been deemed possible by palaeographers, with Qiu concluding that they "cannot be definitively treated as primitive writing, nevertheless they are symbols which resemble most
4050-832: A transitional form between clerical and regular script which remained in use through the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE) and beyond. Cursive script ( 草书 ; 草書 ; cǎoshū ) was in use as early as 24 BCE, synthesizing elements of the vulgar writing that had originated in Qin with flowing cursive brushwork. By the Jin dynasty (266–420), the Han cursive style became known as 章草 ( zhāngcǎo ; 'orderly cursive'), sometimes known in English as 'clerical cursive', 'ancient cursive', or 'draft cursive'. Some attribute this name to
4200-521: A village near Anyang in Henan —discovered to be the site of Yin , the final Shang capital—which was excavated by a team led by Li Ji (1896–1979) from the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. To date, over 150 000 oracle bone fragments have been found. Oracle bone inscriptions recorded divinations undertaken to communicate with the spirits of royal ancestors. The inscriptions range from
4350-485: A well-developed writing system, which suggests an initial emergence predating the late 2nd millennium BCE. Although written Chinese is first attested in official divinations, it is widely believed that writing was also used for other purposes during the Shang, but that the media used in other contexts—likely bamboo and wooden slips —were less durable than bronzes or oracle bones, and have not been preserved. As early as
4500-539: A width of 385 km (239 mi) from east to west, with a total area of 156,700 km (60,500 sq mi), accounting for 1.6% of the country's total area. Shanxi is divided into eleven prefecture-level divisions : all prefecture-level cities : The 11 prefecture-level cities of Shanxi are subdivided into 118 county-level divisions (23 districts , 11 county-level cities , and 84 counties ). Those are in turn divided into 1388 township-level divisions (561 towns , 634 townships , and 193 subdistricts ). At
4650-414: A word is used to indicate a different word with a similar pronunciation, depending on context. This allowed for words that lacked a plausible pictographic representation to be written down for the first time. This technique preempted more sophisticated methods of character creation that would further expand the lexicon. The process whereby writing emerged from proto-writing took place over a long period; when
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4800-533: A writing system comprising thousands of distinct characters was non-trivial. Chinese characters are predominantly input on computers using a standard keyboard. Many input methods (IMEs) are phonetic, where typists enter characters according to schemes like pinyin or bopomofo for Mandarin, Jyutping for Cantonese, or Hepburn for Japanese. For example, 香港 ('Hong Kong') could be input as xiang1gang3 using pinyin, or as hoeng1gong2 using Jyutping. Shanxi The name Shanxi means 'west of
4950-754: Is Tokyo , Japan , whose Han script name is written 東京 ( Dongjing , or "Eastern Capital"). 東京 was also a former name of Hanoi (as Đông Kinh or " Tonkin ") in Vietnam during the Later Lê dynasty . A former name of Seoul in South Korea was Gyeongseong , written in Han script as 京城 or "Capital City". Kyoto in Japan still bears the similar-meaning characters 京都 : the character "都", du in Chinese, can also mean "capital". The history of China since
5100-627: Is 明 ('bright'), interpreted as the juxtaposition of the two brightest objects in the sky: ⽇ 'SUN' and ⽉ 'MOON' , together expressing their shared quality of brightness. Other examples include 休 ('rest'), composed of pictographs ⼈ 'MAN' and ⽊ 'TREE' , and 好 ('good'), composed of ⼥ 'WOMAN' and ⼦ 'CHILD' . Many traditional examples of compound ideographs are now believed to have actually originated as phono-semantic compounds, made obscure by subsequent changes in pronunciation. For example,
5250-428: Is a parallelogram that runs from southwest to northeast. It is a typical mountain plateau widely covered by loess . The terrain is high in the northeast and low in the southwest. The interior of the plateau is undulating, the valleys are vertical and horizontal, and the types of landforms are complex and diverse. There are mountains, hills, terraces, plains, and rivers. The area of mountains and hills accounts for 80.1% of
5400-440: Is from north to south and from basin to high mountain. The annual precipitation in the whole province is between 358 and 621 mm, and the seasonal distribution is uneven. In June–August, the precipitation is relatively concentrated, accounting for about 60% of the annual precipitation, and the precipitation distribution in the province is greatly affected by the terrain. The province has a length of 682 km (424 mi) and
5550-481: Is given by Xu as 轉注 ( zhuǎnzhù ; 'reversed and refocused'); however, its definition is unclear, and it is generally disregarded by modern scholars. Modern scholars agree that the theory presented in the Shuowen Jiezi is problematic, failing to fully capture the nature of Chinese writing, both in the present, as well as at the time Xu was writing. Traditional Chinese lexicography as embodied in
5700-602: Is its second character 京 ("Capital"). This is employed, for example, as the prefix on all Beijing-issued license plates . In the Latin alphabet , the official abbreviation are the two initials of the region's characters: BJ . Beijing Capital International Airport 's IATA code is PEK , based on the previous romanization, Peking. In addition to Nanjing , several other East Asian and Southeast Asian cities have similar names in Chinese characters despite appearing dissimilar in English transliteration . The most prominent
5850-399: Is not required, and character forms may be accentuated to evoke a variety of aesthetic effects. Traditional ideals of calligraphic beauty often tie into broader philosophical concepts native to East Asia. For example, aesthetics can be conceptualized using the framework of yin and yang , where the extremes of any number of mutually reinforcing dualities are balanced by the calligrapher—such as
6000-402: Is now written with five strokes instead of eight, and a system of five basic stroke types is commonly employed in analysis—with certain compound strokes treated as sequences of basic strokes made in a single motion. Characters are constructed according to predictable visual patterns. Some components have distinct combining forms when occupying specific positions within a character—for example,
6150-413: Is possible that decades of Yan's socialist indoctrination may have prepared the people of Shanxi for Communist rule. After the death of Mao, the experiment was discontinued, and most peasants reverted to private farming under post-Maoist economic reforms . Shanxi is located on a plateau made up of higher ground to the east ( Taihang Mountains ) and the west ( Lüliang Mountains ) and a series of valleys in
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6300-457: Is regularly done with corporate brand names: for example, Coca-Cola 's Chinese name is 可口可乐 ; 可口可樂 ( Kěkǒu Kělè ; 'delicious enjoyable'). Some characters and components are pure signs , whose meaning merely derives from their having a fixed and distinct form. Basic examples of pure signs are found with the numerals beyond four, e.g. 五 ('five') and 八 ('eight'), whose forms do not give visual hints to
6450-408: Is still employed in terms such as " Pekingese ", " Peking duck ", " Peking Man " and various others, as well as being retained in the name of Peking University . The city has had many other names. The chronological list below sets out both the names of the city itself, and, in earlier times, the names of the administrative entities covering the city today. In Chinese , the abbreviation of Beijing
6600-450: The I ;Ching . According to one tradition, Chinese characters were invented during the 3rd millennium BCE by Cangjie , a scribe of the legendary Yellow Emperor . Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called 字 ( zì ) due to his frustration with the limitations of knotting, taking inspiration from his study of the tracks of animals, landscapes, and the stars in the sky. On
6750-548: The ⼑ 'KNIFE' component appears as 刂 on the right side of characters, but as ⺈ at the top of characters. The order in which components are drawn within a character is fixed. The order in which the strokes of a component are drawn is also largely fixed, but may vary according to several different standards. This is summed up in practice with a few rules of thumb, including that characters are generally assembled from left to right, then from top to bottom, with "enclosing" components started before, then closed after,
6900-646: The 3500 characters that are frequently used in Standard Chinese, pure semantographs are estimated to be the rarest, accounting for about 5% of the lexicon, followed by pure signs with 18%, and semantic–form and phonetic–form compounds together accounting for 19%. The remaining 58% are phono-semantic compounds. The Chinese palaeographer Qiu Xigui ( b. 1935 ) presents three principles of character function adapted from earlier proposals by Tang Lan [ zh ] (1901–1979) and Chen Mengjia (1911–1966), with semantographs describing all characters whose forms are wholly related to their meaning, regardless of
7050-653: The Khitans destroyed Later Jin, the third. Finally, when the fifth of the Five Dynasties ( Later Zhou ) emerged, the jiedushi of Hedong at the time, Liu Chong , rebelled and established an independent state called Northern Han , one of the Ten Kingdoms, in what is now northern and central Shanxi. Shi Jingtang , founder of the Later Jin , the third of the Five Dynasties, ceded a piece of northern China to
7200-658: The Khitans in return for military assistance. This territory, called the Sixteen Prefectures of Yanyun , included a part of northern Shanxi. The ceded territory became a major problem for the Song dynasty's defense against the Khitans for the next 100 years because it lay south of the Great Wall . The later Zhou , the last dynasty of the Five Dynasties period was founded by Guo Wei , a Han Chinese, who served as
7350-757: The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) led to considerable standardization in character forms, which prefigured later script reforms during the 20th century. This print orthography , exemplified by the 1716 Kangxi Dictionary , was later dubbed the jiu zixing ('old character shapes'). Printed Chinese characters may use different typefaces , of which there are four broad classes in use: Before computers became ubiquitous, earlier electro-mechanical communications devices like telegraphs and typewriters were originally designed for use with alphabets, often by means of alphabetic text encodings like Morse code and ASCII . Adapting these technologies for use with
7500-719: The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) which were of the same land area and borders as the previous Hedong Commandery of the Tang dynasty. During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Shanxi extended north beyond the Great Wall to include parts of Inner Mongolia , including what is now the city of Hohhot , and overlapped with the jurisdiction of the Eight Banners and the Guihua Tümed banner in that area. For centuries, Shanxi served as
7650-857: The Northern Song at modern Daming in Hebei ; the other, the northern capital of the Jurchen Jin located at Ningcheng in Inner Mongolia . The Nanjing of the Northern Song was located at Shangqiu in Henan . The Jurchen Jin located theirs at Kaifeng ,) which had been the Northern Song's "Dongjing". The Jurchen Jin also had a Dongjing ("Eastern Capital"), which was, however, located at Liaoyang in Liaoning . Apart from these, there were two Xijings ( 西 京 , "Western Capital"): one
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#17327653817787800-467: The Shuowen Jiezi describes 信 ('trust') as an ideographic compound of ⼈ 'MAN' and ⾔ 'SPEECH' , but modern analyses instead identify it as a phono-semantic compound—though with disagreement as to which component is phonetic. Peter A. Boodberg and William G. Boltz go so far as to deny that any compound ideographs were devised in antiquity, maintaining that secondary readings that are now lost are responsible for
7950-462: The Shuowen Jiezi has suggested implausible etymologies for some characters. Moreover, several categories are considered to be ill-defined: for example, it is unclear whether characters like 大 ('large') should be classified as pictographs or indicatives. However, awareness of the 'six writings' model has remained a common component of character literacy, and often serves as a tool for students memorizing characters. The broadest trend in
8100-582: The Shuowen Jiezi . For nearly two millennia, this scheme was the primary framework for character analysis used throughout the Sinosphere. Xu based most of his analysis on examples of Qin seal script that were written down several centuries before his time—these were usually the oldest specimens available to him, though he stated he was aware of the existence of even older forms. The first five categories are pictographs, indicatives, compound ideographs, phono-semantic compounds, and loangraphs. The sixth category
8250-517: The Sinosphere . In Japanese , Korean , and Vietnamese , Chinese characters are known as kanji , hanja , and chữ Hán respectively. Writing traditions also emerged for some of the other languages of China , like the sawndip script used to write the Zhuang languages of Guangxi . Each of these written vernaculars used existing characters to write the language's native vocabulary, as well as
8400-749: The Song dynasty and the Liao dynasty . Later the Southern Song dynasty abandoned all of North China , including Shanxi, to the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) in 1127 after the Jingkang Incident of the Jin-Song wars . The Mongol Yuan dynasty administered China into provinces but did not establish Shanxi as a province. Shanxi only gained its present name and approximate borders during
8550-568: The Sui dynasty (581–618) required test takers to write in Literary Chinese using regular script, which contributed to the prevalence of both throughout later Chinese history. Each character of a text is written within a uniform square allotted for it. As part of the evolution from seal script into clerical script, character components became regularized as discrete series of strokes ( 笔画 ; 筆畫 ; bǐhuà ). Strokes can be considered both
8700-680: The Tang dynasty has also been full of secondary capitals with directional names. Under the Tang, these were Beidu ("north capital", at Taiyuan in Shanxi ); Nandu ("south capital", first, Chengdu in Sichuan and, later, Jiangling in Hubei ); Dongdu ("east capital", Luoyang in Henan ); and Xidu ("west capital", Fengxiang in Shaanxi ). There were two previous Beijings: one, the northern capital of
8850-470: The loanwords it borrowed from Chinese . In addition, each invented characters for local use. In written Korean and Vietnamese, Chinese characters have largely been replaced with alphabets, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written using them. At the most basic level, characters are composed of strokes that are written in a fixed order. Methods of writing characters have historically included being carved into stone, being inked with
9000-577: The "Northern Capital". The name was first used during the reign of the Ming dynasty 's Yongle Emperor , who made his northern fief a second capital, along with Nanjing ( 南京 , the "Southern Capital"), in 1403 after successfully dethroning his nephew during the Jingnan Campaign . The name was restored in 1949 at the founding of the People's Republic of China . Portugal was the first European country to contact China in modern times. In Portuguese,
9150-655: The Assistant Military Commissioner at the court of the Later Han which was ruled by Shatuo Turks . He founded his dynasty by launching a military coup against the Turkic Later Han Emperor however, his newly established dynasty was short-lived and was conquered by the Song dynasty in 960. In the early years of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), the sixteen ceded prefectures continued to be an area of contention between
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#17327653817789300-505: The Buddhist terminology introduced to China in antiquity, as well as contemporary non-Chinese words and names. For example, each character in the name 加拿大 ( Jiānádà ; 'Canada') is often used as a loangraph for its respective syllable. However, the barrier between a character's pronunciation and meaning is never total: when transcribing into Chinese, loangraphs are often chosen deliberately as to create certain connotations. This
9450-528: The Eighth Route Army and continued to advance towards Yan's capital. The lack of attention directed at their forces gave the Communists time to recruit and propagandize among the local peasant populations (who generally welcomed Communist forces enthusiastically) and to organize a network of militia units, local guerrilla bands and popular mass organizations. Genuine Communist efforts to resist
9600-489: The Japanese "special forces" under Yan totaled 15,000 troops, plus an officer corps that was distributed throughout Yan's army. These numbers were reduced to 10,000 after serious American efforts to repatriate the Japanese were partially successful. Yan's Japanese army was instrumental in helping him to retain control of most of northern Shanxi during much of the subsequent Chinese Civil War , but by 1949 casualties had reduced
9750-418: The Japanese gave them the authority to carry out sweeping and radical social and economic reforms, mostly related to land and wealth redistribution, which they defended by labeling those who resisted as Hanjian . Communist efforts to resist the Japanese also won over Shanxi's small population of patriotic intellectuals, and conservative fears of resisting them effectively gave the Communists unlimited access to
9900-465: The Japanese into his service in the manner that he did, he retained both the extensive industrial complex around Taiyuan and virtually all of the managerial and technical personnel employed by the Japanese to run it. Yan was so successful in convincing surrendered Japanese to work for him that, as word spread to other areas of north China, Japanese soldiers from those areas began to converge on Taiyuan to serve his government and army. At its greatest strength
10050-646: The Japanese. During the Battle of Xinkou , the Chinese defenders resisted the efforts of Japan's elite Itakagi Division for over a month, despite Japanese advantages in artillery and air support. By the end of October 1937, Japan's losses were four times greater than those suffered at Pingxingguan, and the Itakagi Division was close to defeat. Contemporary Communist accounts called the battle "the most fierce in North China", while Japanese accounts called
10200-523: The Nationalists or the Japanese. He then negotiated a secret anti-Japanese " United Front " with the Communists in October 1936 and invited them to establish operations in Shanxi. Yan, under the slogan "resistance against the enemy and defense of the soil", attempted to recruit young, patriotic intellectuals to his government in order to organize a local resistance to the threat of Japanese invasion. By
10350-457: The Qin small seal script was standardized for use throughout the entire country under the direction of Chancellor Li Si ( c. 280 – 208 BCE). It was traditionally believed that Qin scribes only used small seal script, and the later clerical script was a sudden invention during the early Han. However, more than one script was used by Qin scribes: a rectilinear vulgar style had also been in use in Qin for centuries prior to
10500-410: The Shang royal house. Contemporaneous inscriptions in a related but distinct style were also made on ritual bronze vessels. This oracle bone script ( 甲骨文 ; jiǎgǔwén ) was first documented in 1899, after specimens were discovered being sold as "dragon bones" for medicinal purposes, with the symbols carved into them identified as early character forms. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to
10650-586: The Shang, the oracle bone script existed as a simplified form alongside another that was used in bamboo books, in addition to elaborate pictorial forms often used in clan emblems. These other forms have been preserved in what is called bronze script ( 金文 ; jīnwén ), where inscriptions were made using a stylus in a clay mould, which was then used to cast ritual bronzes . These differences in technique generally resulted in character forms that were less angular in appearance than their oracle bone script counterparts. Study of these bronze inscriptions has revealed that
10800-620: The Sinosphere during the 20th century as a result of Western influence. Many publications outside mainland China continue to use the traditional vertical writing direction. Western influence also resulted in the generalized use of punctuation being widely adopted in print during the 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to this, the context of a passage was considered adequate to guide readers; this was enabled by characters being easier than alphabets to read when written scriptio continua , due to their more discretized shapes. The earliest attested Chinese characters were carved into bone, or marked using
10950-471: The Tang dynasty and after, present day Shanxi was called Hédōng ( 河東 ), or "east of the (Yellow) river". Empress Wu Zetian , one of China's only female rulers, was born in Shanxi in 624. During the first part of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–960), Shanxi supplied rulers of three of the Five Dynasties. Among the Ten Kingdoms, it was the only one located in northern China. Shanxi
11100-643: The United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. The mining-related companies include Daqin Railway Co. Ltd., which runs one of the busiest and most technologically advanced railways in China, connecting Datong and Qinhuangdao exclusively for coal shipping. The revenue of Daqin Railway Co. Ltd. is among the highest among Shanxi companies due to its export of coal to Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Shanxi's nominal GDP in 2011
11250-691: The Western medical personnel he met with to discuss how to suppress the epidemic inspired him to modernize and improve Shanxi's medical infrastructure which he began by funding the Research Society for the Advancement of Chinese Medicine, based in Taiyuan, in 1921. Highly unusual in China at the time, the school had a four-year curriculum and included courses in both Chinese and Western Medicine. The main skills that Yan hoped physicians trained at
11400-617: The ancient pictographic script discovered thus far in China... They undoubtedly can be viewed as the forerunners of primitive writing." The oldest attested Chinese writing comprises a body of inscriptions produced during the Late Shang period ( c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), with the very earliest examples from the reign of Wu Ding dated between 1250 and 1200 BCE. Many of these inscriptions were made on oracle bones —usually either ox scapulae or turtle plastrons—and recorded official divinations carried out by
11550-436: The answers as interpreted in the cracks. A minority of bones feature characters that were inked with a brush before their strokes were incised; the evidence of this also shows that the conventional stroke orders used by later calligraphers had already been established for many characters by this point. Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of later forms of written Chinese. The oldest known inscriptions already represent
11700-419: The apparent absence of phonetic indicators, but their arguments have been rejected by other scholars. Phono-semantic compounds ( 形声 ; 形聲 ; xíngshēng ) are composed of at least one semantic component and one phonetic component. They may be formed by one of several methods, often by adding a phonetic component to disambiguate a loangraph, or by adding a semantic component to represent a specific extension of
11850-439: The area around Taiyuan was a major national producer of coal, iron, chemicals, and munitions. Yan was able to protect the province from his rivals for the period of his rule partially due to his building of an arsenal in Taiyuan that, for the entire period of his administration, remained the only center in China capable of producing field artillery. Yan's army was successful in eradicating banditry in Shanxi, allowing him to maintain
12000-549: The basic unit of handwriting, as well as the writing system's basic unit of graphemic organization. In clerical and regular script, individual strokes traditionally belong to one of eight categories according to their technique and graphemic function. In what is known as the Eight Principles of Yong , calligraphers practice their technique using the character 永 ( yǒng ; 'eternity'), which can be written with one stroke of each type. In ordinary writing, 永
12150-482: The battle a "stalemate". In an effort to save their forces at Xinkou, Japanese forces began an effort to occupy Shanxi from a second direction, in the east. After a week of fighting, Japanese forces captured the strategic Niangzi Pass , opening the way to capturing Taiyuan. Communist guerrilla tactics were ineffective in slowing down the Japanese advance. The defenders at Xinkou, realizing that they were in danger of being outflanked, withdrew southward, past Taiyuan, leaving
12300-492: The calligrapher Zhong Yao ( c. 151 – 230), who was living in the state of Cao Wei (220–266); he is often called the "father of regular script". The earliest surviving writing in regular script comprises copies of Zhong Yao's work, including at least one copy by Wang Xizhi. Characteristics of regular script include the 'pause' ( 頓 ; dùn ) technique used to end horizontal strokes, as well as heavy tails on diagonal strokes made going down and to
12450-420: The casualties suffered by the Japanese army in North China. Yan himself was forced to withdraw after having 90% of his army destroyed, including a large force of reinforcements sent into Shanxi by the central government. Throughout 1937, numerous high-ranking Communist leaders, including Mao Zedong , lavished praise on Yan for waging an uncompromising campaign of resistance against the Japanese. Possibly because of
12600-534: The center through which the Fen River runs. The highest peak is Mount Wutai (Wutai Shan) in northeastern Shanxi with an altitude of 3,058 m. The Great Wall of China forms most of the northern border with Inner Mongolia . The Zhongtiao Mountains run along part of the southern border and separate Shanxi from the east–west part of the Yellow River. Mount Hua is to the southwest. The Yellow River forms
12750-639: The character as 明 . However, the increased usage of 朙 was followed by the proliferation of a third variant: 眀 , with ⽬ 'EYE' on the left—likely derived as a contraction of 朙 . Ultimately, 明 became the character's standard form. From the earliest inscriptions until the 20th century, texts were generally laid out vertically—with characters written from top to bottom in columns, arranged from right to left. Word boundaries are generally not indicated with spaces . A horizontal writing direction—with characters written from left to right in rows, arranged from top to bottom—only became predominant in
12900-460: The character's meaning. The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang , Henan, as part of divinations conducted by the Shang dynasty royal house. Character forms were originally highly pictographic in style, but evolved over time as writing spread across China. Numerous attempts have been made to reform the script, including
13050-455: The city is called Pequim. This name appeared in the letters of Francis Xavier in 1552. It transferred to English as "Pekin" and to French as Pékin . Jesuit missionary Martino Martini used "Peking" in De bello Tartarico historia (The Tartary [Manchu] War) (1654) and Novus Atlas Sinensis (New Atlas of China) (1655). In 1665, Martini's work was reissued as part of Atlas Maior (great atlas),
13200-510: The city's walls, initiating bloody street-to-street fighting for control of the city. At 10:00 am, April 22, the Taiyuan Campaign ended with the Communists in complete control of Shanxi. Total Nationalist casualties amounted to all 145,000 defenders, many of whom were taken as POWs. The Communists lost 45,000 men and an unknown number of civilian laborers they had drafted, all of whom were either killed or injured. The fall of Taiyuan
13350-551: The commander of the Eighth Route Army active in Shanxi and was named the vice-commander of the Second War Zone, under Yan himself. Yan initially responded warmly to the re-entry of the arrival of Communist forces, and they were greeted with enthusiasm by Yan's officials and officers. Communist forces arrived in Shanxi just in time to help defeat a decisively more powerful Japanese force attempting to move through
13500-403: The components they enclose. For example, 永 is drawn in the following order: Over a character's history, variant character forms ( 异体字 ; 異體字 ; yìtǐzì ) emerge via several processes. Variant forms have distinct structures, but represent the same morpheme; as such, they can be considered instances of the same underlying character. This is comparable to visually distinct double-storey |
13650-616: The day that these first characters were created, grain rained down from the sky; that night, the people heard the wailing of ghosts and demons, lamenting that humans could no longer be cheated. Collections of graphs and pictures have been discovered at the sites of several Neolithic settlements throughout the Yellow River valley, including Jiahu ( c. 6500 BCE ), Dadiwan and Damaidi (6th millennium BCE), and Banpo (5th millennium BCE). Symbols at each site were inscribed or drawn onto artefacts, appearing one at
13800-494: The defenders due to fears of being shot down by the advancing Communists. The People's Liberation Army , depending largely on their reinforcements of artillery, launched a major assault on April 20, 1949, and succeeded in taking all positions surrounding Taiyuan by April 22. A subsequent appeal to the defenders to surrender was refused. On the morning of April 22, 1949, the PLA bombarded Taiyuan with 1,300 pieces of artillery and breached
13950-417: The distinct process of semantic extension, where a word acquires additional senses, which often remain written with the same character. As both processes often result in a single character form being used to write several distinct meanings, loangraphs are often misidentified as being the result of semantic extension, and vice versa. Loangraphs are also used to write words borrowed from other languages, such as
14100-519: The distinct units of sound used by speakers of a language. Despite their origins in picture-writing, Chinese characters are no longer ideographs capable of representing ideas directly; their comprehension relies on the reader's knowledge of the particular language being written. The areas where Chinese characters were historically used—sometimes collectively termed the Sinosphere —have a long tradition of lexicography attempting to explain and refine their use; for most of history, analysis revolved around
14250-439: The duality between strokes made quickly or slowly, between applying ink heavily or lightly, between characters written with symmetrical or asymmetrical forms, and between characters representing concrete or abstract concepts. Woodblock printing was invented in China between the 6th and 9th centuries, followed by the invention of moveable type by Bi Sheng (972–1051) during the 11th century. The increasing use of print during
14400-666: The end of 1936 Taiyuan had become a gathering point for anti-Japanese intellectuals from all over China. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937 led the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces to invade China, and Shanxi was one of the first areas the Japanese attacked. When it became clear to Yan that his forces might not be successful in repelling the Imperial Japanese Army , he invited Communist military forces to re-enter Shanxi. Zhu De became
14550-548: The end of 2017, the total population of Shanxi is 37.02 million. The Governor of Shanxi is the highest-ranking official in the People's Government of Shanxi. However, in the province's dual party-government governing system, the Governor is subordinate to the provincial Communist Party Committee Secretary ( 中共山西省委书记 ), colloquially termed the "Shanxi Party Committee Secretary ". As is the case in almost all Chinese provinces,
14700-504: The evolution of Chinese characters over their history has been simplification, both in graphical shape ( 字形 ; zìxíng ), the "external appearances of individual graphs", and in graphical form ( 字体 ; 字體 ; zìtǐ ), "overall changes in the distinguishing features of graphic[al] shape and calligraphic style, [...] in most cases refer[ring] to rather obvious and rather substantial changes". The traditional notion of an orderly procession of script styles, each suddenly appearing and displacing
14850-406: The extent that the original objects represented are no longer obvious. This proto-writing system was limited to representing a relatively narrow range of ideas with a comparatively small library of symbols. This compelled innovations that allowed for symbols to directly encode spoken language. In each historical case, this was accomplished by some form of the rebus technique, where the symbol for
15000-557: The fact that the style was considered more orderly than a later form referred to as 今草 ( jīncǎo ; 'modern cursive'), which had first emerged during the Jin and was influenced by semi-cursive and regular script. This later form was exemplified by the work of figures like Wang Xizhi (303–361), who is often regarded as the most important calligrapher in Chinese history. An early form of semi-cursive script ( 行书 ; 行書 ; xíngshū ; 'running script') can be identified during
15150-663: The former base of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army. Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre , one of China's three satellite launch centers, is located in the middle of Shanxi with China's largest stockpile of nuclear missiles . Many private corporations, in joint ventures with the state-owned mining corporations, have invested billions of dollars in the mining industry of Shanxi . Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing made one of his largest investments ever in China in exploiting coal gas in Shanxi. Foreign investors include mining companies from Canada,
15300-460: The forms of pictographs have been simplified in order to make them easier to write. As a result, modern readers generally cannot deduce what many pictographs were originally meant to resemble; without knowing the context of their origin in picture-writing, they may be interpreted instead as pure signs. However, if a pictograph's use in compounds still reflects its original meaning, as with 日 in 晴 ('clear sky'), it can still be analysed as
15450-451: The head of Yan's "Patriotic Sacrifice League", had fought for years against the Communists in Shanxi until he was finally trapped in the massively fortified city of Taiyuan. For six months Liang put up a fierce resistance, leading both Yan's remaining Republic of China Army forces and his thousands of Japanese mercenaries. When Communist troops finally broke into the city and began to occupy large sections of it, Liang barricaded himself inside
15600-462: The highest-ranked provincial officials, Jin Yinhuan , died in a car accident. Since Xi Jinping 's ascendancy to General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party at the 18th Party Congress , numerous highly ranked officials in Shanxi have been placed under investigation for corruption-related offenses, including four incumbent members Bai Yun , Chen Chuanping , Du Shanxue , and Nie Chunyu of
15750-598: The historical forms like seal script and clerical script. Most styles used throughout the Sinosphere originated within China, though they may display regional variation. Styles that have been created outside of China tend to remain localized in their use: these include the Japanese edomoji and Vietnamese lệnh thư scripts. Calligraphy was traditionally one of the four arts to be mastered by Chinese scholars, considered to be an artful means of expressing thoughts and teachings. Chinese calligraphy typically makes use of an ink brush to write characters. Strict regularity
15900-517: The influence of solar radiation, monsoon circulation and geographical factors, Shanxi's climate has four distinct seasons, synchronous rain and heat, sufficient sunshine, significant climate difference between north and south, wide temperature difference between winter and summer, and large temperature difference between day and night. The annual average temperature in Shanxi Province is between 4.2 and 14.2 °C. The overall distribution trend
16050-401: The initial development of Chinese writing, and has remained common throughout its subsequent history. Some loangraphs ( 假借 ; jiǎjiè ; 'borrowing') are introduced to represent words previously lacking another written form—this is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as 之 and 其 . The process of characters being borrowed as loangraphs should not be conflated with
16200-587: The invasion of northern nomads in the Sixteen Kingdoms period (304–439), several regimes including the Later Zhao , Former Yan , Former Qin , and Later Yan continuously controlled Shanxi. They were followed by Northern Wei (386–534), a Xianbei kingdom, which had one of its earlier capitals at present-day Datong in northern Shanxi, and which went on to rule nearly all of northern China. The Tang dynasty (618–907) originated in Taiyuan. During
16350-580: The largest number of historic buildings among all Chinese provinces, by possessing over 70% of China's surviving buildings built during or predating the Song dynasty . Also notable are the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, which date back over 1500 years. In the Spring and Autumn period ( c. 770 – c. 481 BC ), the state of Jin was located in what is now Shanxi. It underwent
16500-488: The late Han, with its development stemming from a cursive form of neo-clerical script. Liu Desheng ( 劉德升 ; c. 147 – 188 CE) is traditionally recognized as the inventor of the semi-cursive style, though accreditations of this kind often indicate a given style's early masters, rather than its earliest practitioners. Later analysis has suggested popular origins for semi-cursive, as opposed to it being an invention of Liu. It can be characterized partly as
16650-507: The mainstream script underwent slow, gradual evolution during the late Shang, which continued during the Zhou dynasty ( c. 1046 – 256 BCE) until assuming the form now known as small seal script ( 小篆 ; xiǎozhuàn ) within the Zhou state of Qin . Other scripts in use during the late Zhou include the bird-worm seal script ( 鸟虫书 ; 鳥蟲書 ; niǎochóngshū ), as well as
16800-518: The method by which the meaning was originally depicted, phonographs that include a phonetic component, and loangraphs encompassing existing characters that have been borrowed to write other words. Qiu also acknowledges the existence of character classes that fall outside of these principles, such as pure signs. Most of the oldest characters are pictographs ( 象形 ; xiàngxíng ), representational pictures of physical objects. Examples include 日 ('Sun'), 月 ('Moon'), and 木 ('tree'). Over time,
16950-563: The most important in Shanxi. Shanxi also contains about 500 million tonnes of bauxite deposits, about a third of total Chinese bauxite reserves. Industry in Shanxi is centered around heavy industries such as coal and chemical production, power generation, and metal refining . As part of an effort to promote diversification in non-resource industries, since 2004, some local governments in Shanxi province have required that coal mining companies set aside funds for investing in non-coal business like agriculture and produce processing. In 2006,
17100-501: The mountains', a reference to its location west of the Taihang Mountains . Shanxi borders Hebei to the east, Henan to the south, Shaanxi to the west and Inner Mongolia to the north. Shanxi's terrain is characterised by a plateau bounded partly by mountain ranges. Shanxi's culture is largely dominated by the ethnic Han majority, who make up over 99% of its population. Jin Chinese is considered by some linguists to be
17250-451: The number of Japanese soldiers under Yan's command to 3,000. The leader of the Japanese under Yan's command, Hosaku Imamura, committed suicide on the day that Taiyuan fell to Communist forces. Yan Xishan himself (along with most of the provincial treasury) was airlifted out of Taiyuan in March 1949. Shortly afterwards Republic of China Air Force planes stopped dropping food and supplies for
17400-518: The one previous, has been disproven by later scholarship and archaeological work. Instead, scripts evolved gradually, with several coexisting in a given area. Several of the Chinese classics indicate that knotted cords were used to keep records prior to the invention of writing. Works that reference the practice include chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching and the " Xici II" commentary to
17550-518: The only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes , the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate
17700-405: The phonetic series of characters using 余 ( yú ; jyu4 ), a literary first-person pronoun. The Old Chinese pronunciations of these characters were similar, but the phonetic component no longer serves as a useful hint for their pronunciation due to subsequent sound shifts. The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in
17850-432: The pictograph 大 , meaning 'large', was originally a picture of a large man, but one would need to be aware of its specific meaning in order to interpret the sequence 大 鹿 as signifying 'large deer', rather than being a picture of a large man and a deer next to one another. Due to this process of abstraction, as well as to make characters easier to write, pictographs gradually became more simplified and regularized—often to
18000-495: The pictorial qualities that remained in seal script. Around the midpoint of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), a simplified and easier form of clerical script appeared, which Qiu terms 'neo-clerical' ( 新隶体 ; 新隸體 ; xīnlìtǐ ). By the end of the Han, this had become the dominant script used by scribes, though clerical script remained in use for formal works, such as engraved stelae . Qiu describes neo-clerical as
18150-531: The primary style used for characters since. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography , states using Chinese characters have standardized their forms: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China , Singapore , and Malaysia , while traditional characters are used in Taiwan , Hong Kong , and Macau . After being introduced in order to write Literary Chinese , characters were often adapted to write local languages spoken throughout
18300-412: The promotion of small seal script by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Clerical script , which had matured by the early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), abstracted the forms of characters—obscuring their pictographic origins in favour of making them easier to write. Following the Han, regular script emerged as the result of cursive influence on clerical script, and has been
18450-484: The province as many as one in five residents were denounced as landlords, and his program was copied throughout the rest of the new People's Republic of China . Shanxi became the site of Mao's "model brigade" of Dazhai : a utopian communist scheme in Xiyang County that was supposed to be the model for all other peasants in China to emulate. If the people of Dazhai were especially suited for such an experiment, it
18600-464: The province. He has been viewed by Western biographers as a transitional figure who advocated using Western technology to protect Chinese traditions, while at the same time reforming older political, social and economic conditions in a way that paved the way for the radical changes that would occur after his rule. In 1918 there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in northern Shanxi that lasted for two months and killed 2,664 people. Yan's interactions with
18750-424: The provincial Communist Party Standing Committee. They were all removed from office around August 2014. The following were also removed from office: Thousands of Shanxi officials were disciplined during the anti-corruption campaign under Xi Jinping . This necessitated a scramble to find find suitable personnel for many vacated offices. In the aftermath of the 'political earthquake', party secretary Yuan Chunqing
18900-415: The provincial government established a policy of "subsidizing peasants by coal" which made this diversification a provincewide requirement and encouraged local governments to develop policies like subsidies and favorable tax treatment to further encourage mining companies to invest in non-coal business. There are countless military-related industries in Shanxi due to its geographic location and history as
19050-464: The provincial party secretary and Governor are not natives of Shanxi; rather, they are outsiders who are, in practice, appointed by the central party and government authorities. The province went through significant political instability since 2004, due largely to the number of scandals that have hit the province on labour safety, the environment, and the interconnected nature between the provincial political establishment and big coal companies. Yu Youjun
19200-529: The purely pictorial use of symbols disappeared, leaving only those representing spoken words, the process was complete. Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes —which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. Chinese characters are logographs , which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in
19350-525: The quantities they represent. The Shuowen Jiezi is a character dictionary authored c. 100 CE by the scholar Xu Shen ( c. 58 – c. 148 CE ). In its postface, Xu analyses what he sees as all the methods by which characters are created. Later authors iterated upon Xu's analysis, developing a categorization scheme known as the 'six writings' ( 六书 ; 六書 ; liùshū ), which identifies every character with one of six categories that had previously been mentioned in
19500-423: The regional forms used in non-Qin states. Examples of these styles were preserved as variants in the Shuowen Jiezi . Historically, Zhou forms were collectively referred to as large seal script ( 大篆 ; dàzhuàn ), a term which has fallen out of favour due to its lack of precision. Following Qin's conquest of the other Chinese states that culminated in the founding of the imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BCE,
19650-472: The result of clerical forms being written more quickly, without formal rules of technique or composition: what would be discrete strokes in clerical script frequently flow together instead. The semi-cursive style is commonly adopted in contemporary handwriting. Regular script ( 楷书 ; 楷書 ; kǎishū ), based on clerical and semi-cursive forms, is the predominant form in which characters are written and printed. Its innovations have traditionally been credited to
19800-545: The right. It developed further during the Eastern Jin (317–420) in the hands of Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi (344–386). However, most Jin-era writers continued to use neo-clerical and semi-cursive styles in their daily writing. It was not until the Northern and Southern period (420–589) that regular script became the predominant form. The system of imperial examinations for the civil service established during
19950-420: The rural population. Subsequent atrocities committed by the Japanese in the effort to rid Shanxi of Communist guerrillas aroused the hatred of millions in the Shanxi countryside, causing the rural population to turn to the Communists for leadership against the Japanese. All of these factors explain how, within a year of re-entering Shanxi, the Communists were able to take control of most of Shanxi not firmly held by
20100-426: The same character—is often non-trivial or unclear. For example, prior to the Qin dynasty the character meaning 'bright' was written as either 明 or 朙 —with either ⽇ 'SUN' or 囧 'WINDOW' on the left, and ⽉ 'MOON' on the right. As part of the Qin programme to standardize small seal script across China, the 朙 form was promoted. Some scribes ignored this, and continued to write
20250-410: The school would learn were: a standardized system of diagnosis; sanitary science, including bacteriology ; surgical skills, including obstetrics ; and, the use of diagnostic instruments. Yan hoped that his support of the school would eventually lead to increased revenues in the domestic and international trade of Chinese drugs, improved public health , and improved public education . Yan's promotion of
20400-607: The severity of his losses in northern Shanxi, Yan abandoned a plan of defense based on positional warfare, and began to reform his army as a force capable of waging guerrilla warfare. After 1938 most of Yan's followers came to refer to his regime as a "guerrilla administration". After the surrender of Japan and the end of the Second World War , Yan Xishan was notable for his ability to recruit thousands of Japanese soldiers stationed in northwest Shanxi in 1945, including their commanding officers, into his army. By recruiting
20550-507: The site of his destroyed childhood village of Zhongli ( 鍾離 ), now Fengyang in Anhui . Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture . Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise
20700-414: The spoken language. Some characters may only have the same initial or final sound of a syllable in common with phonetic components. A phonetic series comprises all the characters created using the same phonetic component, which may have diverged significantly in their pronunciations over time. For example, 茶 ( chá ; caa4 ; 'tea') and 途 ( tú ; tou4 ; 'route') are part of
20850-418: The strategic Pingxing Pass . The Battle of Pingxingguan was the largest battle won by the Communists against the Japanese. After the Japanese responded to this defeat by outflanking the defenders and moving towards Taiyuan , the Communists avoided decisive battles and mostly attempted to harass Japanese forces and sabotage Japanese lines of supply and communication. The Japanese suffered, but mostly ignored
21000-567: The subsequent civil war made it impossible to carry these plans out. Yan's generous support for the Research Association for the Improvement of Chinese Medicine generated a body of teaching and publication in modern Chinese medicine that became one of the foundations of the national institution of modern traditional Chinese medicine that was adopted in the 1950s. Yan invested in Shanxi's industrial infrastructure, and by 1949
21150-530: The total area of the province, and the area of Pingchuan and river valleys accounts for 19.9% of the total area. Most of the province's altitude is above 1,500 meters, and the highest point is the Yedoufeng, the main peak of Wutai Mountain , with an altitude of 3061.1 meters, which is the highest peak in northern China. Shanxi is located in the inland of the mid-latitude zone and belongs to the temperate continental monsoon climate in terms of climate type. Due to
21300-500: The use of the traditional lunar calendar and encouraged the development of local boy scout organizations . Like the Communists who later succeeded Yan, he punished habitual lawbreakers to "redemption through labour" in state-run factories. After the failed attempt by the Chinese Red Army to establish bases in southern Shanxi in early 1936 Yan became convinced that the Communists were lesser threats to his rule than either
21450-526: The wars of unification. The popularity of this form grew as writing became more widespread. By the Warring States period ( c. 475 – 221 BCE), an immature form of clerical script ( 隶书 ; 隸書 ; lìshū ) had emerged based on the vulgar form developed within Qin, often called "early clerical" or "proto-clerical". The proto-clerical script evolved gradually; by the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), it had arrived at
21600-458: The western border of Shanxi with Shaanxi . The Fen and Qin rivers, tributaries of the Yellow River, run north-to-south through the province, and drain much of its area. The north of the province is drained by tributaries of the Hai River , such as Sanggan and Hutuo rivers. The largest natural lake in Shanxi is Xiechi Lake , a salt lake near Yuncheng in southwestern Shanxi. Shanxi has
21750-437: Was initially home to the jiedushi (commander) of Hedong, Li Cunxu , who overthrew the first of the Five Dynasties, Later Liang (907–923) to establish the second, Later Tang (923–936). Another jiedushi of Hedong, Shi Jingtang , overthrew Later Tang to establish the third of the Five Dynasties, Later Jin , and yet another jiedushi of Hedong, Liu Zhiyuan , established the fourth of the Five Dynasties ( Later Han ) after
21900-709: Was mostly dominated by the warlord Yan Xishan until the Chinese Communist Party took full control in 1949; Communists had already set up secret bases in 1936, but did not completely overturn Yan and the Nationalist government until 1949. Early in Yan's rule he decided that, unless he was able to modernize and revive the economy of his small, poor, remote province, he would be unable to protect Shanxi from rival warlords. Yan devoted himself to modernizing Shanxi and developing its resources during his reign over
22050-487: Was one of the few examples in the Chinese Civil War in which Nationalist forces echoed the defeated Ming loyalists who had, in the 17th century, brought entire cities to ruins resisting the invading Manchus. Many Nationalist officers were reported to have committed suicide when the city fell. The dead included Yan's nephew-in-law, who was serving as governor, and his cousin, who ran his household. Liang Huazhi ,
22200-647: Was removed from his post in September 2014, with Wang Rulin 'helicoptered' into the provincial Party Secretary office. The GDP per capita of Shanxi is below the national average. Compared to the provinces in east China, Shanxi is less developed for many reasons. Its geographic location limits its participation in international trade, which involves mostly eastern coastal provinces. Important crops in Shanxi include wheat , maize , millet , legumes , and potatoes . The local climate and dwindling water resources limit agriculture in Shanxi. Mining-related industries are
22350-519: Was sent by the central government in 2005 to become Governor but resigned in the wake of the Shanxi slave labour scandal in 2007. He was succeeded by Meng Xuenong , who had been previously sacked as Mayor of Beijing in the aftermath of the SARS outbreak. Meng himself was removed from office in 2008 after only a few months on the job due to the political fallout from the 2008 Shanxi mudslide . In 2008, provincial Political Consultative Conference Chair, one of
22500-588: Was the "Western Capital" of the Northern Song dynasty , located at Luoyang ; the other was held by the Liao and Jurchen Jin at Datong . Liaoyang was the Zhongjing ( 中京 , "Central Capital") of the Liao dynasty and, finally, another Zhongdu ("Central Capital") was planned but never completed. It was the proposed capital of the Ming dynasty mooted by the Hongwu Emperor in the 14th century, to be located on
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