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China is situated in
eastern Asia, bounded by the Pacific in the east. The third largest
country in the world, next to Canada and Russia, has an area of 9.6
million square kilometers, or one-fifteenth of the world's landmass.
China,
one of the four oldest civilizations in the world, has a written
history of 4,000 years and boasts rich cultural relics and
historical sites. It is the inventor of compass, paper, gunpowder
and printing. The Great Wall, the Grand Canal and the Karez
irrigation systems are three great ancient engineering projects
built 2,000 years ago. Now they are the symbols of the rich culture
heritage of the Chinese nation. China has gone over a long history
of primitive society, slavery society, feudal society and
semi-feudal semi-colonial society and the present socialist society.
The national
language is Mandarin or Putonghua (the common speech) , which is one
of the five working languages at the United Nations. Most of the 55
minority nationalities have their own languages. Cantonese is one of
the local dialects of southern China. As a written language, Chinese
has been used for 6,000 years.
China is
made up of 56 ethnic groups. The Han people make up 91.02 percent of
the total population, and the other 55 national minorities 8.98
percent. They are Mongolian, Hui, Tibetan, Uygur, Miao, etc.
Chinese
family names came into being some 5,000 years ago. There are more
than 5,000 family names, of which 200 to 300 are popular. In Chinese
names, family names comes first and given name second. The most
popular Chinese family names are ZHANG, WANG, LI, ZHAO, LIU, CHEN...
 China has
50,000 rivers that cover a catchment area of at least 100 square
kilometers, and 1,500 of them cover a catchment area of more than
1,000 square kilometers. Most of the rivers flow from west to east
to empty into the Pacific Ocean. The main rivers include the Yangzi
(Changjiang), the Yellow River (Huanghe), Heilongjiang, the Pearl
River, Liaohe, Haihe, Qiantangjiang and Lancang Rivers. At 6,300
kilometers long, the Yangzi is the longest river in China. The
second longest is the Yellow River at 5,464 kilometers. The Grand
Canal from Hangzhou to Beijing is a great water project in ancient
China. 1,794 kilometers in length, it is the longest canal in the
world.
Chinese
Money is called Renminbi (RMB) which
means "People's Currency".
The popular unit of RMB is Yuan. The official exchange rate between
Canadian Dollar and RMB Yuan currently is about 1 : 6.6 (1.00 Dollar
= 6.6 Yuan).
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