[Educational Tour of China] - Explore China, 中教之旅

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Explore China !

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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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

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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).