Objectives: We want to help educating students of Sinology and of other Asian sciences. In this sense, our pages should be used by students to deepen their knowledge and to enhance their studies of certain periods and themes concerning China and East Asia. And we want to be an encyclopedia for all who are interested in China and East Asia, not only people at the universities or colleges, but for everyone who likes to know more about this fascinating part of the world and of mankind. An advise to students: The net-world is a virtual world, it is śūnya 空, it is void! Commentary: When writing papers, students should use books and not the internet. Politics: We are not commercial, all our sites are free visible and copyable. If you do copy text or images from www.chinaknowledge.de you should cite this site with url and date. Sources: Our sources are scholarly standard books on China and her environment published in different European and Asian languages. We have not copied any sentences from these works except translations of Chinese literature. In such cases, authors and their books are cited. The contents of historical maps are processed on the base of Chinese atlases. Images are scanned from Chinese works not claiming copyright. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank any people - but especially my readers - who contributed to the quality of this online encylopedia. Author: Uli Theobald (Tian Yuli 田宇利, style Shudouting 數豆亭) "born in a poor family, he started to love books and especially the Classics already at the tender age of six" 1993-2000 Studies of Sinology, Politics and Modern History at Tuebingen University/Germany Master of Arts thesis "The Image of Empress Lü in Chinese Literature" Teacher for classical Chinese, research tools for Sinology, and different matters of ancient China at the Seminar for Chinese and Korean Studies, Tuebingen University Main research interests: Empresses in Chinese history Economic history, especially agriculture, diet and financial politics History of the Chinese early middle age (4th to 6th cent. CA) Music theory Science and technology policy in the PRC, focusing on space policy spent one year in the PRC and several months in other East and Southeast Asian countries (Taiwan, Japan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam) Climbing Mount Taishan, May 1997 丁丑歲登泰山