Ancient China

Dear Blog,

It’s the year of 3500B.C and I am living in north-west China with my mom and dad and baby sister. It’s mostly covered with deserted land, it’s also really hot and I am trying to find food to survive. I have a small home which I love. In the winter the temperature drops to 50 degrees, so it’s not as hot as it is in the summer. They are also other people living with us to help us out. While my mom is cleaning and my dad is out working, I take care of my baby sister. Sometimes I help my mom make ceramics. Ceramics are like vases which you fetch water in. it is made with coil. When I am finish forming the vase I have to smooth the coil out so I can fetch the water or other things in.

When I am not helping my mother out or taking care of my baby sister I am studying even if I don’t go to school. I learn about important people from my culture like Nu Gua. I learn about Nu Gua through stories and legends that people tell me or from books I’ve read. I learn that Nu Gua created the first people on earth to live on the yellow river. I learn that she made statues of the people from yellow clay that lies by the river. I learn that the clays magically come to live as the first people on earth. I learn that there was water that came from a hole in the sky and flooded the people away that on some were alive by climbing mountains. I also learn that Nu Gua took a colorful ball and melted it till it turned to hot lava and she fixed the whole in the sky. I learned that she sacrifices a turtle, she took its feet to make the sky stand and she stopped the flooding by using soil to create huge dams and lakes. I learned that Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, was very happy that Nu Gua had saved the people on Earth, but Nu Gua didn’t want an award, but she asked Huang Di to take care of the people and then she disappeared. I wondered where she went. I asked a lot of people but they said they didn’t know either.

While mom is cooking dinner and I am playing with my baby sister my dad comes home, he brings home bronze a type of material. My dad works in a workshop. He works with bronze to make vessels, pots, bells, mirrors, and weapons. He also works with jade another type of material to make weapons too.Jade and bronze are the most prized materials to ancient china, so I would say that my dad has a pretty good job. He gets rewarded at the end of the week with a little of bronze and jade which are made into coins to buy things. We take those material we buy things we need like food in the market.

Where I live, in my religion when you die we believe that you have an afterlife or a second life. We believed that you do the same things you did on earth but somewhere else. Since we believed in afterlife we built tombs. In the tombs I would put my favorite things and prized possessions so I could take them with me to wherever I go in my other life. We believed that our ancestors that died would go to live in the spirit world. We also believed that they could tell the gods good or bad luck. We would hold ceremonies for our ancestors to bring us luck. When we hold ceremonies I would help my mom make some of the ceramics so we could offer it to them so they would give us good luck.

Where I live in china we have a different type of writing. We use logograms which were symbols that represent a meaning or word. Most logograms that I use for everyday are usually numbers. Like if you see a 2 it means two, but if someone else in a different culture saw that they would probably think of it as something else. In our writings every stroke or like represent something different. In my religion they were bones of Shang dynasty with our writings on them. On our coins, and wood slips also have writings on them that signifies different things. For example, on our coins it says Ban to the right and Liang to the left which is Banliang and that means half ounce. They are also lots of other things with writings on them. That is basically what life in north-western china for me and my family is like.

R.G