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On Tuesday this week my Paypal account received a fair amount for my January sales. There were seven altogether and, while four were on the sort of subjects I can pull out of my head quite quickly, the other three were about China or Chinese culture and needed a few hours of research.

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The work I put in on ski resorts in December paid off: I understand the piece will appear either in the current or next issue of Wuxi-Life, which seems to come out every six weeks, and their winter sports season extends into April. I missed the boat with the Harbin Ice Festival one though. It was no surprise and I’ll just dust it off with an update in good time for next year, unless anyone else snaps it up.

They also bought another piece on holidaying in the country. It’s amazing what you can find out when you really dig around on the internet. China will be one of the best places to view this year’s full eclipse of the sun in July, so I picked Hangzhou, one of the recommended viewing towns, which also has its own tourist attractions and looks to be roughly a couple of hundred miles from Wuxi. Hangzhou is on the River Qinling, which has the world’s largest tidal bore. When the tide comes in its power is so great that it can rise up to 25 or 30 feet as it roars through the town at speeds of up to 15 knots.

My Chinese culture article was about two celebration dances: the lion dance and the dragon dance. I’ve seen and heard lion dancing before, in London and in Singapore, but I didn’t know how that differed from dragon dancing. When you know this, it’s easy to tell the difference. While the lion is danced by two people, front and back, the dragon is long and windy and needs several dancers to hold up sections of its body on poles. See the difference in the photos I’ve found.

Dragon dance pic: © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons

Lion dance pic also from Wikimedia Commons: taken by Eric Benacek from Paris, France