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Haikou is the capital of Hainan province. Hainan Island is the smallest province in China.
Haikou is the capital of Hainan province. Hainan Island is the smallest province in China.
In the narrow mountain valleys of Son La, Dien Bien and Lai Chau provinces of North Vietnam the Tai remain a very noticeable and confident minority. They are divided into White Tai and Black Tai communities, while further south, by the Lao frontier in Thanh Hoa and Nghe An Provinces, Red Tai predominate.<br/><br/> These subgroups are distinguished by the dress of their women. Vietnam’s Tai are people of the mountain valleys. Farming wet rice paddy fields they are relatively prosperous, enjoying more security and an appreciably higher standard of living than the people of the mountaintops. They are culturally confident, too, and well known throughout the north for their fine weaving and embroidery, sophisticated music and dance, as well as their business acumen in the marketplace.<br/><br/> Closely related to the neighbouring Lao, Thai, Shan of Burma and Dai of China’s Yunnan Province, they have lived for centuries in the fertile uplands between the Truong Son and Hoang Lien ranges – certainly long before the region became part of Vietnam – and have a rich literary legacy and folklore.
The streets of the capital, Hanoi, and especially the largest city, Ho Chi Minh City bustle with enthusiasm and business energy. The abandonment of socialist economics and its gradual replacement by limited market-oriented capitalism has been welcomed by the populace. People everywhere are angling to make money, and the streets are filled with small-scale private enterprises selling all manner of items.
The streets of the capital, Hanoi, and especially the largest city, Ho Chi Minh City bustle with enthusiasm and business energy. The abandonment of socialist economics and its gradual replacement by limited market-oriented capitalism has been welcomed by the populace. People everywhere are angling to make money, and the streets are filled with small-scale private enterprises selling all manner of items.
The Tacuinum (sometimes Taccuinum) Sanitatis is a medieval handbook on health and wellbeing, based on the Taqwim al‑sihha تقويم الصحة ('Maintenance of Health'), an eleventh-century Arab medical treatise by Ibn Butlan of Baghdad.<br/><br/> Ibn Butlân was a Christian physician born in Baghdad and who died in 1068. He sets forth the six elements necessary to maintain daily health: food and drink, air and the environment, activity and rest, sleep and wakefulness, secretions and excretions of humours, changes or states of mind (happiness, anger, shame, etc). According to Ibn Butlân, illnesses are the result of changes in the balance of some of these elements, therefore he recommended a life in harmony with nature in order to maintain or recover one’s health.<br/><br/> Ibn Butlân also teaches us to enjoy each season of the year, the consequences of each type of climate, wind and snow. He points out the importance of spiritual wellbeing and mentions, for example, the benefits of listening to music, dancing or having a pleasant conversation.<br/><br/> Aimed at a cultured lay audience, the text exists in several variant Latin versions, the manuscripts of which are characteristically profusely illustrated. The short paragraphs of the treatise were freely translated into Latin in mid-thirteenth-century Palermo or Naples, continuing an Italo-Norman tradition as one of the prime sites for peaceable inter-cultural contact between the Islamic and European worlds.<br/><br/> Four handsomely illustrated complete late fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Taccuinum, all produced in Lombardy, survive, in Vienna, Paris, Liège and Rome, as well as scattered illustrations from others, as well as fifteenth-century codices.
Bitter melon originated in India, and it was carried to China in the 14th century.<br/><br/> Asia's smallest and least-known nation, the Republic of Maldives, lies scattered from north to south across a 750-kilometre sweep of the Indian Ocean 500 kilometres south-west of Sri Lanka. More than 1000 islands, together with innumerable banks and reefs, are grouped in a chain of nineteen atolls which extends from a point due west of Colombo to just south of the equator.<br/><br/> The atolls, formed of great rings of coral based on the submarine Laccadive-Chagos ridge, vary greatly in size. Some are only a few kilometres square, but in the far south the great atoll of Suvadiva is sixty-five kilometres across, and has a central lagoon of more than 2000 square kilometres. The northern and central atolls are separated from each other by comparatively narrow channels of deep water, but in the south Suvadiva is cut off by the eighty-kilometre-wide One-and-a-half-Degree Channel. Addu Atoll is still more isolated, being separated from the atoll of Suvadiva by the seventy-kilometre-wide Equatorial Channel.