Thoughts on China

When I first got to Chengdu (Sichuan province) last Wednesday (2007-10-24), I ate that evening in a local restaurant down the street and the customers were all fixated on the TV screen. There was a rocket, obviously getting ready for takeoff. I tried to find out what was going on, with questions like 那是什么 (Nà shì shénme? i.e., “That is what?”), but I didn’t get any responses. As I ate my meal, the rocket took off and it looked very similar to US space missions in the 1960’s, where they showed mission control and you heard their radio transmissions as you watched (after the rocket was out of sight) artist simulations of what was happening to the spacecraft.

Here is a picture of a rocket model that’s across the way from the Mix Hostel in Chengdu (the Chang’e 1 launched from Sichuan province, where I’m staying…

It was only this morning when I saw an English version of the China Daily paper that I got the answer. I guess I was watching a very big milestone in the Chinese space program - this was the launch of the Chang’e 1, their first unmanned spacecraft that is going to orbit the moon. The name is really cool, as it is the name of the beautiful wife in the mid-Autumn festival story that drinks a potion that her husband was awarded and floats away, to stay forever on the moon, acccompanied only by a jade rabbit and a wood chopper.

To me, the appropriateness of this name underscores the fact that the Chinese have 5000 years of continuous history. Thus, this story is still told every Autumn around the country as the Chinese eat their mooncakes. The American space program names were taken from the mythology of past civilizations that are no longer here, like the Greek Apollo and Roman Mercury. So, I think it’s cool that they can take a name from their everyday culture that also has the same impact from a standpoint of ancient mythology.