All this is just some kind of Chinese letter - we usually say that when we encounter something incomprehensible. For some reason, it is the Chinese letter that we associate with what seems inaccessible to our mind.

And why exactly do we say that? Where did this expression, which has already become winged, entered our lexicon - a Chinese letter. In order to understand what's going on here, we need to remember our history. Let's mentally go back to the beginning of the seventeenth century. At that time, almost nothing was known about China in Russia.

Namely, they knew that somewhere far, far away there is a state where unusually beautiful porcelain dishes were made.

It was believed that this country was not so big, because, according to eyewitnesses, it was surrounded by a protective wall. And since in Russia every large city had its own fortifications and its own protective walls, it was clear that this work was not easy and hardly big country could be fenced off from the rest of the world with one wall.

And then in 1618 a representative mission was officially created for a trip to China. It was headed by Ivan Petlin, respected by all Cossack ataman, whom Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich instructed to establish trade relations with "distant busurmans". The trip was long but successful. The Russian mission returned from China with gifts and a letter prescribing agreements in trade affairs between the two countries.

Gifts pleased the king, "Chinese grass" - tea, became very popular at court. The nobility was especially admired when it was served in cups of their fine Chinese porcelain. Merchants were afraid to touch such fragile and elegant items.

But one thing remained...

Since in those days there was no translator from Chinese, no one could read the letter and find out what the agreement really was about ...

But travel and trade nevertheless began, in those days, each document, before signing, was spoken out in front of witnesses. So the Russian envoys heard the main points of the trade agreements firsthand.

This went on for a very long time.

And only in 1675 the Chinese letter was translated. Until that time, it was kept in the archive. And when a person appeared who spoke not only Chinese, but also knew how to read hieroglyphs - it was the Russian scientist and diplomat Nikolai Spafari, at that time he just headed the Russian embassy in Beijing, the document was translated into Russian and under it, finally, was signed by the king.

Here is such a story of the emergence of this popular expression - Chinese literacy.

For a long 57 years, no one could read the document. No wonder the expression has become so popular in our speech. After all, it is time-tested, 57 years is the length human life while.

On the roads of millennia Drachuk Viktor Semenovich

"Chinese letter"

Modern Chinese writing is so different from ours in both form and method of application that it is with great difficulty that we penetrate into its essence. Everyone knows the common expression "Chinese literacy", which involuntarily breaks out when faced with something that is extremely difficult or impossible to comprehend.

And this writing is unique and the most ancient of all used by a person of our time. And it survived, the same age as the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform writing, only because it had a special path of development.

China, 3rd century BC. The foundations of ancient Chinese culture have already been laid in the country. The religious and philosophical systems of Confucianism and Taoism were formed. The first collection of literary monuments “The Book of Songs” (Shijing), a collection of ancient Chinese folk poetry (it contains more than three hundred works dating back to the 11th-7th centuries BC), and “The Book of Changes” (Yijing), a monument of Chinese natural philosophy, appeared.

The period when China was united into a centralized empire and the Great Wall of China was built. At this time, in 221 BC, a reform of Chinese writing was carried out, which streamlined the hieroglyphs and introduced a single writing system for the whole country.

By that time, Chinese writing was an established ideographic system. Each hieroglyph stood for a separate word.

The sounding Chinese language is very peculiar and whimsical. In it, tonality, raising or lowering the pitch of a sound, is of particular importance. This feature of the Chinese language is captured and assimilated with great difficulty by foreigners. The same set of sounds (and there are many monosyllabic words in Chinese), depending on the key in which it is pronounced, has a completely different meaning.

A word uttered in a low tone acquires one meaning, in an ascending tone another, and a high tone a third. Therefore, the syllable li written in Russian letters, without indicating the tone of its pronunciation, means nothing to the Chinese. However, the intoned syllable has many independent meanings: strength, rite, hill, grain, rule, stand etc. Each meaning has a special sign by which the Chinese know which concept is meant.

Another feature of the Chinese language is that it completely lacks grammatical forms and categories, it has no grammar. But there is a syntax different from ours. The order of words in a sentence is strictly defined. The same hieroglyph can be a verb, a noun, and an adjective. It all depends on what place the hieroglyph occupies in the sentence.

Hieroglyphs are written in vertical columns from right to left. The first word on the page is at the top and right, the last at the bottom and left.

Chinese writing, like most writing systems, originates from a pictogram. The oldest monuments of Chinese writing of the second millennium BC, discovered in 1899 during excavations in the province of Henan, confirm this. Signs that still retained the design of the object, but already quite schematized and reminiscent of hieroglyphs, were applied to animal bones and tortoise shells. These items were used for divination. Scientists believe that the remains of the archives of royal soothsayers have been found. The inscriptions are well preserved. Some bones are polished to a mirror finish.

The ritual of divination was a very important rite in the life of an ancient person. Not a single serious business was started without fortune-telling. The ritual went like this. A bone with signs carved on it was burned on the reverse side with a bronze stick. The signs contained a question that needed to be answered. The outlines of the cracks that appeared during cauterization of the bone resembled some kind of hieroglyph and were considered signs-answers.

In later times, when the forms of hieroglyphs changed so much that the original characters became incomprehensible, the ancient "divine" bones were considered sacred and highly valued as a healing tool. They were called "dragon bones" ("long gu"), ground into powder and added to various medicines.

The found monuments of writing, more than a hundred thousand, made it possible to trace the evolution of the inscriptions of hieroglyphs.

However, not everyone succeeded in deciphering the ancient signs of Chinese writing, although deciphering began as early as 1900. At first, experts, including Chinese, could not compose complete inscriptions. Only a few characters could be deciphered.

The decryption was done like this. They lined up a kind of series of signs of the outline of each hieroglyph, belonging to different times. Creating such an "evolutionary" series, scientists compared it with drawings on the bones, similar in outline, and found out their meaning.

Following this path, they recognized a third of all signs, more than one and a half thousand. (It is assumed that the rest of the signs could have been lost as the language developed.) It was possible to read inscriptions containing requests addressed to the spirits of the earth, mountains, rivers, sun, moon, rain, wind, which, according to the ancient Chinese, could bring or take away various natural disasters. In these divinatory inscriptions, the king is designated by the same hieroglyphs as the "supreme deity".

This deciphering, according to Professor X. Creel, is no less remarkable than the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

For four millennia, the Chinese language has not seriously changed its structure. Significantly changed only the form of inscription signs. Of course, the vocabulary has expanded, but the principles of word formation and sentence construction have remained the same. The classification of hieroglyphs, which was given almost two thousand years ago, has not lost its significance today. It was set forth in the work of the Chinese scholar Xu Shen entitled "Explanation of Ancient Symbols and Analysis of Composite Signs." Based on the method of transmitting sounding words in writing, the scientist divides the entire mass of hieroglyphs into six groups.

The first category of signs consists of hieroglyphs denoting a specific subject. According to the outline, these hieroglyphs go back to the signs-drawings. This group is called in Chinese "xiang", which literally translates as "similarity in form."

The second group of signs is called "zhi-shi". It includes hieroglyphs depicting abstract concepts. They are transmitted with the help of objects or gestures associated with these concepts, for example, the concept of "craft" is conveyed by the image of a tool.

The third group "hui-i" includes complex concepts, logical combinations. The sign is built from a combination of two or more hieroglyphs. For example, the sign woman, repeated twice, argument, three times - intrigue, man a plus word - frank, field a plus strength is young.

The fourth group - "zhuan-zhu" is translated as "deviations and rearrangements". It combines the characters used in the new meaning. Depending on the position of the hieroglyph in the text, the sign prince, for example, it can mean official or clerk.

The fifth group "chia-ze" is translated: "help through borrowing." Words that sound similar, but have different meanings - homonyms - receive one hieroglyph.

The sixth group is "se-sheng", which means "to coordinate the meaning with the sound." The largest group of hieroglyphs, accounting for nine-tenths of all characters. Each sign consists of two parts: a phonetic element, which indicates the sound of the word, and a "key sign".

If for thousands of years the principles of sign formation in the Chinese language have not changed significantly, then outwardly, in their styles, Chinese characters have evolved significantly.

The Chinese character is built from nine initial strokes. Their combination makes up the whole variety of hieroglyphic signs. Some strokes are repeated in one character two or three times. Inscriptions of hieroglyphs can have from 1 to 28 strokes. The evolution of the shape of the hieroglyph is primarily associated with the material on which they were reproduced. When writing on silk with thin bamboo sticks, it was easier to draw lines, both straight and curved, of the same size. A writing brush made of hair had a huge influence on the drawing of signs.

The ability to write beautifully was considered the highest art in China. Poems devoted to the art of calligraphy have been created, many prescriptions have been developed regarding the lengthening, shortening, joining and lowering of individual lines of written characters. There is even the concept of "square arrangement". This means that each character fits into a square. Skilful calligraphers, inventors of new handwritings, were as famous as the greatest artists, writers and poets. Many pretentious and hard-to-understand handwritings arose with figurative names: “tadpole writing”, “star writing”, “dragon writing”, “cloud writing”.

A very important milestone for the development of the hieroglyph pattern was the invention of paper. For a long time, uncomfortable bamboo boards and expensive silk scrolls were used for writing. When the text written on the tablets was long, they were tied into bundles, like a fan. Silk was wound on a stick in the form of a scroll. The first paper was invented by Tsai Lun, a Confucian scholar and a major government official. This happened in 105 AD. In Chinese, paper was called "zhi". It was first made from silk waste, flax tow, young bamboo bast and mulberry tree. Zhi was light and more durable than papyrus. It can be folded into notebooks.

Printing appeared early in China. Even before our era, stamps were used in China. Brief texts were carved on stone and imprinted with ink on paper. From the VIII-VIII centuries, wooden boards were used. The text on them was carved in the form of a relief. Since the 8th century, the world's first printed government bulletin began to appear in China, first called Palace Copies (Dichao), and then Capital Bulletin (Qingbao).

Since 1050, a set of separate characters has been introduced. Its inventor was the blacksmith Bi Sheng - "a man in cotton clothes", as it is said in the encyclopedic essay of that time. The font was first made from baked clay, and from the 14th century they began to be cast from bronze. The cash desk consisted of 7 thousand different letters.

Here is how, according to the description of the same encyclopedic work, a set of movable letters happened: “... he took viscous clay and carved written signs on it the height of a coin rim and made a separate letter for each sign, burned it on fire to make it solid. First, he prepared an iron plate and covered it with a mixture of soybean resin, wax and paper ash. Intending to print, he took an iron frame and laying it on an iron plate, then he placed the letters in the frame, close to one another. When the frame was filled, it formed a single printed board. He placed it over the fire to slightly warm and soften the adhesive composition; then he took a completely smooth board, put it on the board with the set and pressed so that the surface of the set became so even as a grindstone. If they wanted to print only two or three prints, then this procedure was neither quick nor convenient, but when tens of hundreds or thousands of copies were printed, it went with the speed of spirits ...

For each written sign, he had several letters; for common characters ... he names more than 20 characters in order to have a margin when they are repeated on the same page. If rare signs came across that were not prepared, he immediately cut them out and burned them on burning straw; in an instant it was ready...

At the end of printing, the letters on the iron plate were again held over the fire in order to soften the sticky mass; then he made a blow with his hand, so that the letters fell out of their own accord and were not at all soaked or stained with glue.

Modern Chinese is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. It is spoken by almost a billion people. Chinese hieroglyphic writing is the best fit for the structure of a language that has no grammatical forms: no cases, no tenses, no inflection. It is convenient to convey in hieroglyphs and similar-sounding words that differ only in pitch

However, the Chinese script has so many characters that it becomes cumbersome and difficult to master. To understand the simplest text, you need to know at least two thousand hieroglyphs, and to read modern texts of medium complexity, you need to remember up to eight thousand hieroglyphs.

All this is a serious obstacle to the dissemination of Chinese literacy among the masses.

In China, repeated attempts were made to create an alphabet that could convey the sound of Chinese speech. One of them appeared in 1918 (“zhu-yin zi-mu”). It consisted of 40 letters and was used to record (transcribe) foreign titles and names. There were other alphabets - "goyu lomazi" (romanization state language), "latinhua xinwenzi" (Latinized new script).

The transition to the alphabetic-sound writing makes it difficult for the many dialects common in the country. And although the basics of the structure and vocabulary of all dialects are common, they fundamentally differ in sound and somewhat in vocabulary. A Beijinger and a Cantonese, for example, can understand each other using characters, but they read them differently. It would be much more difficult for them to understand each other if they used phonetic writing.

And another, perhaps the most important reason hinders China's transition to phonetic writing. This is an inevitable break with the old centuries-old culture, embodied in hieroglyphic writing. The peculiarity of Chinese characters is that they receive additional stylistic and semantic shades from graphic structure, and from combination with each other.

All this makes it impossible to abruptly switch to a new alphabet.

Such is it, the "Chinese letter" - a kind of synonym for ingenuity and incomprehensibility.

From the book of the Land of Genghis Khan author Penzev Konstantin Alexandrovich

Addition. Chinese literacy In the mind of a Russian citizen, China is a monolithic power inhabited exclusively by Chinese and speaking exclusively in Chinese. However, this impression is somewhat misleading. Let's start with Chinese

From the book History of St. Petersburg inside out. Notes on the margins of urban chronicles author Sherikh Dmitry Yurievich

From the book History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages author Gregorovius Ferdinand

2. Gregory X goes to Lyon. - Guelphs and Ghibellines in Florence. - Cathedral in Lyon. - Gregory X issues a law on the conclave. - Rudolph's letter of commendation in favor of the church. - View of Gregory X on the relationship of the church to the empire. - Letter given to Lausanne. - Gregory X in Florence. - His

From the book Unperverted History of Ukraine-Rus. Volume II the author Wild Andrew

Letter of federation Understanding that the defeat of Germany will entail the withdrawal of its troops from Ukraine and knowing the all-Russian sentiment, both the vast majority of the anti-Bolshevik circles of the Ukrainian population, and the Entente - the winner, Hetman makes a cool

From the book Moscow Words, Words and idioms author Muravyov Vladimir Bronislavovich

Filka's letter Filka's letter is now called a document that has no power, a fake, a fake that should not be given any importance. Moscow tradition associates this expression with the name of Philip Kolychev (1507–1569) - Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia. He was

From the book Folk Traditions of China author Martyanova Ludmila Mikhailovna

Chinese noodles Noodles or Chinese pasta are second only to rice from cereal dishes in the diet of the Chinese. It also has its own history. Noodles were invented about 2000 years ago. The first of the Chinese emperors to taste noodles was Wang Mang, who ruled for only 14 years in

From book The Ancient East author Nemirovsky Alexander Arkadievich

Literacy and Schools As we have already mentioned, literacy in Mesopotamia was quite widespread and highly respected. In the cuneiform heritage, texts of various genres stand out: works of mythological content that tell about the deeds of the gods, including their

From the book Japan: the history of the country author Tames Richard

Literacy and Literature Japan adopted from China respect for people who mastered all the complexities of the written language. Skillful calligraphers have always been valued. The "calligrapher laureates" of the Edo period include the Emperor Go-Ezei (1571-1617), the Zen monk Hakuin (1675-1768), and

From the book History of the National State and Law: Cheat Sheet author author unknown

8. PSKOV JUDGING LETTER. NOVGOROD JUDGING LETTER The legal status of the dependent population according to the Pskov Judicial Charter is similar to their position according to Russkaya Pravda. The legal status of ladles, that is, people, was established. have to pay half the debt

From the book Two Faces of the East [Impressions and reflections from eleven years of work in China and seven years in Japan] author Ovchinnikov Vsevolod Vladimirovich

Chinese literacy is comprehensible and more and more needed In Russian-Chinese relations, a new remarkable trend has emerged: to move from quantitative to qualitative indicators. That is, not only to expand trade and economic cooperation and intensify

From the book Order of Secret Affairs and its people author Ziberov Dmitry Alekseevich

"GARABAR LITERATURE" This was the name of the accepted method of compiling a secret message at that time. The whole simple secret was that some letters were replaced by others. Sometimes it was also called "fancy". They also wrote the so-called "half-word", when the letters of the phrases arranged

From the book The Rise of China author Medvedev Roy Alexandrovich

Chinese Army and the Chinese Revolution

author Markevich Nikolai Andreevich

I I Grand Duke Alexei Mikhailovich, All Great and Small Russia Autocrat, Moscow, Kyiv, Vladimir, Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Smolensk, Sovereign of Pskov and the Great

From the book History of Little Russia - 4 author Markevich Nikolai Andreevich

I I I. Letter of Companion After the title. We have granted our Majesty the Tsar’s Majesty of the homeland of Malaya Russia residents, people will become Shlyakhetsky, which this year in 162, as by the grace of God, Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, and the whole army, were made under Our sovereign high hand

From the book History of Little Russia - 4 author Markevich Nikolai Andreevich

IV. Letter of Complaint by the Mercy of God We, the Great Sovereign, Tsar and Grand Duke Alexei Mikhailovich, Autocrat of All Great and Lesser Russia, and so on. and so on. and so on.

From the book Life and customs of tsarist Russia author Anishkin V. G.

"Chinese letter"

China, 3rd century BC. The foundations of ancient Chinese culture have already been laid in the country. The religious and philosophical systems of Confucianism and Taoism were formed. The first collection of literary monuments "The Book of Songs" (Shijing), a collection of ancient Chinese folk poetry (it contains more than three hundred works dating back to the 11th-7th centuries BC), and "The Book of Changes" (Yijing), a monument of Chinese natural philosophy, appeared.

By that time, Chinese writing was an established ideographic system. Each hieroglyph stood for a separate word.

Hieroglyphs are written in vertical columns from right to left. The first word on the page is at the top and on the right, the last is at the bottom and a tear.

The found monuments of writing, more than a hundred thousand, made it possible to trace the evolution of the inscriptions of hieroglyphs.

This deciphering, according to Professor X. Creel, is no less remarkable than the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The third group "hui-i" includes complex concepts, logical combinations. The sign is built from a combination of two or more hieroglyphs. For example, the sign woman repeated twice, argument, three times - intrigue, human a plus word - candid, field a plus strength - young.

The fourth group - "zhuan-zhu" is translated as "deviations and rearrangements". It combines the characters used in the new meaning. Depending on the position of the hieroglyph in the text, the sign prince, for example, can mean official or clerk.

The fifth group "chia-ze" is translated: "help through borrowing." Words that sound similar, but have different meanings - homonyms - receive one hieroglyph.

If for thousands of years the principles of sign formation in the Chinese language have not changed significantly, then outwardly, in their styles, Chinese characters have evolved significantly.

The ability to write beautifully was considered the highest art in China. Poems dedicated to the art of calligraphy have been created, many prescriptions have been developed regarding lengthening, shortening, joining

i omissions of individual lines of written characters. There is even the concept of "square arrangement". This means that each character fits into a square. Skilful calligraphers, inventors of new handwritings, were as famous as the greatest artists, writers and poets. Many pretentious and hard-to-understand handwritings arose with figurative names: “tadpole writing”, “star writing”, “dragon writing”, “cloud writing”.

Printing appeared early in China. Even before our era, stamps were used in China. Brief texts were carved on stone and imprinted with ink on paper. Since the 7th-8th centuries, wooden boards have been used. The text on them was carved in the form of a relief. Since the 8th century, the world's first printed government bulletin began to appear in China, first called Palace Copies (Dichao), and then Capital Bulletin (Qingbao).

Here is how, according to the description of the same encyclopedic work, a set of movable letters happened: “... he took viscous clay and carved written signs on it as high as the rim of a coin, and for each sign he made a separate letter, burned it on fire to make it solid. First, he prepared an iron plate and covered it with a mixture of soybean resin, wax and paper ash. Intending to print, he took an iron frame and laying it on an iron plate, then he placed the letters in the frame, close to one another. When the frame was filled, it formed a single printed board. He placed it over the fire to slightly warm and soften the adhesive composition; then he took a completely smooth board, put it on the board with the set and pressed so that the surface of the set became so even as a grindstone. If they wanted to print only two or three prints, then this procedure was neither quick nor convenient, but when tens of hundreds or thousands of copies were printed, it went with the speed of spirits ...

All this is a serious obstacle to the dissemination of Chinese literacy among the masses.

In China, repeated attempts were made to create an alphabet that could convey the sound of Chinese speech. One of them appeared in 1918 (“zhu-yin zi-mu”). It consisted of 40 letters and was used to record (transcribe) foreign names and names. There were also other alphabets - "guoyu lomazi" (romanization of the state language), "latinhua xinwenzi" (romanized new letter).

And another, perhaps the most important reason hinders China's transition to phonetic writing. This is an inevitable break with the old centuries-old culture, embodied in hieroglyphic writing. The peculiarity of Chinese characters is that they receive additional stylistic and semantic shades both from the graphic structure and from the combination with each other.

All this makes it impossible to abruptly switch to a new alphabet.

Such is it, the "Chinese letter" - a kind of synonym for ingenuity and incomprehensibility.

Etymology and explanations of well-known phraseological units associated with the word literacy.

Despite the fact that both phraseological units have the common word "literacy" in their structure, their semantics are somewhat different:

filkina charter - a document that has no force;
Chinese writing is something incomprehensible.

Take into account the fact that in Soviet times the word "letter" changed its meaning under the influence of commendable and honorary letters, which were widely used as an encouragement.

Until the 20th century, all written documents, including decrees, acts and letters (official or personal), were called letters.

Filkin's letter, Chinese letter: meaning and history of origin, authorship of a phraseological unit

The expression filkina letter refers to XVI century. Authorship is attributed to Ivan the Terrible.

The tsar called letters (letters) from the Metropolitan of Moscow Philip, who opposed the oprichnina and guardsmen, the tsar called Filkin's letters.

Chinese writing has a slightly different story. Such a letter really existed and was received in the name of the Russian Tsar in the 17th century. the first official diplomatic mission, representatives of Russia in China. Subsequently, the mission was named the Petlin mission.

The Chinese letter remained without translation for about 50 years and, accordingly, no one knew what it was talking about.

Video: Russian lessons. Sources of phraseological units

Phraseological dictionary of the Russian language

Chinese

Chinese charter- about something incomprehensible

Chinese ceremonies joke. iron.- excessive, exaggerated politeness

Dictionary of Efremova

Chinese

adj.
1. Pertaining to China, the Chinese, associated with them.
2. Peculiar to the Chinese, characteristic of them and of China.
3. Belonging to China, the Chinese.
4. Created, derived, etc. in China or by the Chinese.

Toponymic Dictionary of the Amur Region

Chinese

group of watercourses in the Amur region: br., lp R. Agin, manual, lp R. Yankan Mal. in the Tyndinsky district; manual, lp manual Vladimirovsky (pool R. Current), man., lp R. Gilyui, brook, flows into the Zeya vdkhr.(previously pp R. Mal. Nogdy) in the Zeya district; manual, lp R. Magdagachi in the Magdagachi district; CHINA-2 - brook, flows into the Zeya vdkhr.(previously pp R. Mal. Nogdy) in the Zeya district. AT late XIX- the beginning of the 20th century, the development of gold mines was carried out using the "yellow" labor force - the Chinese, hence the name of the streams.

Phraseological dictionary (Volkova)

Chinese

Chinese charter (unfold) - sth. incomprehensible.

The simplest theorems seemed to him a Chinese letter.

Chinese Wall, in expressions: fence off with a Chinese wall, live behind a Chinese wall, etc. ( book.) - about complete isolation, isolation from external influences[by the name of the ancient wall separating China from Mongolia].

No one could break through the Chinese wall she built around her..

Chinese ceremonies (iron.) - excessive, cutesy politeness.

What is this Chinese ceremony here?

Dictionary Ushakov

Chinese

Chinese, Chinese, Chinese. adj. to China and to . Republic of China. Chinese.

Chinese letter ( unfold) - something incomprehensible. The simplest theorems seemed to him like Chinese writing. Chinese wall, in expressions: fence off, separate with a Chinese wall, live behind a Chinese wall etc. (books.) - about complete isolation, isolation from external influences (by the name of the ancient wall separating China from Mongolia). Chinese ceremonies ( iron.) - excessive, cutesy politeness. Chinese ink is a type of black ink for sketching and painting. Chinese shadows - entertainment consisting in the performance of scenes with the help of shadows cast on a banner by moving figures.

Ozhegov's dictionary

WHALE BUT YSKY, oh, oh.

1. cm. .

2. Pertaining to the Chinese, to their language, national character, way of life, culture, as well as to China, its territory, internal structure, history; like the Chinese, like in China. K. tongue(Sino-Tibetan family of languages). Chinese provinces. Chinese letter (hieroglyphic). Chinese lanterns (multi-colored paper lanterns). K. silk. Chinese embroidery. K. tea (grade). K. porcelain(bone china). K. dummy (seated porcelain figurine with a swaying torso). Chinese Wall (an ancient many kilometers wall separating China from Mongolia; also translated: about complete isolation from outside world). k. yuan(currency unit). In Chinese(adv.).

Chinese charter(colloquial) about what. completely incomprehensible.

Chinese ceremonies(ironic) about excessive manifestations of politeness, respect.

Sentences with "Chinese"

Due to the unpredictability of East Asian monuments, the problems of their repeated restoration, and the experimental nature of the work carried out, Chinese panels were included in the category of high-risk exhibits.

There were two of them, in identical red jackets made by Chinese political prisoners from extremely lousy leather; they quite plausibly quarreled, shoved each other in the chest, and took turns winning brand new five-thousand-dollar notes from the mentor, which he handed them silently and without raising his eyes.

Meanwhile, in November 1931, the scattered rural areas of China, controlled by the Chinese Red Army, united into the Chinese Soviet Republic, whose leaders declared war on Japan the following year.

Cheap Chinese workers make it possible for Europeans and Americans to consume much more goods, although often not needed.

Kublai's honor to the young Polo and his appointment as governor of Yangzhou do not seem credible, and the absence of Chinese or Mongolian official records of merchants' presence in China for nearly twenty years is, in Frances Wood's opinion, particularly suspicious.

The bath was Chinese, but the Chinese do not really like to bathe.

If you try to delve into the essence of the reasons that push Chinese and Kazakh historians to such maneuvers in the process of recapturing a seemingly indisputable ancestor from the Mongols, they are extremely clear.

For example, the shares of the manufacturer of sports shoes Pou Chen in the Chinese province of Guangdong also fell sharply in price the other day.

Funnily enough, if they sing in Chinese, there are often subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

These days, Chinese thoughtful long-suffering was suddenly interrupted: Beijing decided to enter into negotiations with representatives of the Syrian opposition, which is quite effectively seeking to overthrow the autocratic regime of Bashar al-Assad with arms in hand.