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Li Shizhen (1518-1593), author of Ben Cao Gang Mu (Compendium of Materia Medica), was a pharmacist and naturalist of the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). He was born into a family of doctors in Qizhou (present-day Qichun County of Hubei Province).

Both Li Shizhen's grandfather and father were doctors. His grandfather had been an itinerant doctor, carrying medicine pills and acupuncture needles as he journeyed from place to place. Such doctors were called Lingyi (bell doctors), because they would announce their presence by ringing a bell. Li Shizhen's father, Li Yenwen attained the rank of a subordinate medical officer of the Imperial Medical Academy. He was widely respected by his peers and wrote several famous medical works such as Tale of the Ginseng, Tale of the Aiye, and Si Zhun Faming.

Li Shizhen went to the mountains with his father to pick herbs since childhood and acquired a lot of knowledge on animals, plants and medicine. In 1531, when he was only 14 years old, he passed the imperial examination at the county level (entitled Xiucai), but failed to passed the provincial examinations (entitled Juren) for three times. Then he turned his attention to medicine.

Later, he started to work in a hospital in the capital city and had the opportunity to read a lot of books on medicine. During the period, he found that there was a mess in the naming and categorization of the herbs. So he resigned in 1561 and devoted all his time to writing a book in this regard.

He collected and consulted about 800 medical books and traveled extensively, and consulting experts in each area of interest and finding individuals who worked daily with field plants, water animals, snakes, birds, minerals. After 27 years' of efforts, the first draft of Ben Cao Gang Mu (Compendium of Materia Medica) was completed in 1578 when he was 61 years old, and it was later revised three times.

The book summed up the previous medical knowledge and experience, and corrected the previous errors, lifting the Chinese medicine science to a new level. The book also contained much information on animals, plants and minerals, including 1,167 plants and 478 animals.

In the book, Li Shizhen also developed the categorization method of animals and plants, dividing them into 11 categories.

Three years after Li Shizhen died in 1593, Ben Cao Gang Mu was first published in Nanjing. Later, it was re-published for tens of times. In the 17th century, the book was introduced to Japan. In the 18th century, it went to Europe and was translated into several other languages, including Korean, Japanese, German, French, Russian and Latin.

Ben Cao Gang Mu, one of the most frequently mentioned books in the Chinese herbal tradition, contains 52 chapters. Li Shizhen wrote more than ten books, but only three survived, including Bin Hu Mai (a book on pulse diagnosis), Study on the Eight Extra Channels and Ben Cao Gang Mu.

The Pulse Studies of Bin Hu has been regarded as the guidance for generations of medical workers. Even today it is a must for students of pulse study. The Study of the Eight Extra Channels confirmed the basic methodology of diagnosis on the basis of analysis of the eight extra channels. It laid the foundation for Chinese theories on channels and clinical medicine.

The three books established his incomparable position in the history of Chinese medicine. Today, Li Shizhen's image is to be found at every traditional medical college in China and in any illustrated books about the history of Chinese medicine.

Lu Guimeng, agronomist and poet in the late Tang Dynasty (618-907), was a native of today's Wujiang, East China's Jiangsu Province.

Lu Guimeng, also called Tiansuizi, Jianghu Sanren or Mr. Puli, had been an assistant to the prefectural governor at his time. Later, he quitted his job and spent most of his life in seclusion on his estate, writing poetry and essays. Collection of Essays of Mr. Pu was one of his major works.

He engaged himself in farming and expressed his sympathy for the common people. His representative work, Lei Si Jing, occupied an important place in books of science and technology in ancient China. For the first time in history, the book described in detail the structures and measures of Quyuan plough. The book also described other important development of farming tools in the Tang Dynasty, such as the use of rake, whetstone and stone roller for threshing grain and leveling a threshing floor.

Keywords:Lu Guimeng,agronomist,poet,

Shen Nong Shi, also called Yan Emperor or Lie Shan Shi, was one of the Three Emperors in remote antiquity legends. He taught the people husbandry. As the father of agriculture, Shen Nong Shi invented wooden ploughs and herbal medicine. He also introduced the concept of markets and trade.

Shen Nong Shi was the first Chinese herbal doctor. It is said that Shen Nong Shi tasted all kinds of herbals, even poison, to make herbal medicines. His representative work, Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (Shen Nong's Herbal Classic), was the first book on Chinese herbal medicine.

Shen Nong Shi, together with Sui Ren Shi who invented fire and cooked food, and Fu Xi Shi who invented fishery, hunting and animal husbandry are called San Huang -- Three Emperors (3,000 -2,700BC) -- in China. Historical records show that their achievements actually reflected the economic and social development in China's primitive society.

Shen Nong Shi (the Yan Emperor) and the Yellow Emperor are regarded as the ancestors of all the Chinese people.

Keywords:Shen Nong Shi,Yan Emperor,Lie Shan Shi,the father of agriculture

Yang Zhenning (Chen-Ning Yang) is a Chinese-American physicist ,who has worked on statistical mechanics and symmetry principles. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 at the age of 35, with Li Zhengdao (Tsung-Dao Lee), to become the first two Chinese Nobel-Prize winners.

Yang is also well known for his collaboration with Robert Mills in developing a gauge theory of a new class. Such "Yang-Mills theories" are now a fundamental part of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Yang Zhenning's Life

Yang Zhenning was born on September 22, 1922, in Hefei of East China's Anhui Province. Yang was brought up in a peaceful and academically inclined atmosphere of the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, where his father was a Professor of Mathematics.

When Yang was very young, he demonstrated a talent for mathematics. However, his father didn't give him any special training in mathematics, instead, he employed a history teacher for Yang. From this teacher, Yang gained much knowledge of Chinese history. As a middle school student, Yang could recite all the texts of Mencius, a famous Confucian scholar who was second only to Confucius himself.

In 1937, when the Anti-Japanese War began (known as WWII in the West), Yang and his family went back to their hometown of Hefei. After the Japanese troops entered Nanjing, Yang and his family spent time in Hankow and Hong Kong (both in East China), and Hanoi (today's Hainan Province in South China), before finally arriving at Kunming of Southwest China's Yunnan Province in March 1938, where Yang furthered his study.

In 1942, Yang Zhenning received his Bachelor of Science degree from Kunming's National Southwest Associated University. Two years later, he studied for his Master of Science degree with a full scholarship at Tsinghua University.

Yang Zhenning attended the University of Chicago on a Tsinghua University Fellowship in January 1946. There he studied for his Ph.D. with Edward Teller and after receiving it in 1948, remained for a year as an assistant to Enrico Fermi, a famous physicist. In 1949 he moved to the Harvard-affiliated Radcliffe's Institute for Advanced Study and in 1965 to New York's Stony Brook University, where he worked until 1999.

He has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Academia Sinica, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Princeton University in 1958.

In 1950, Yang Zhenning married Du Zhili, a former student of his, and had two sons and a daughter.

In 1999 Yang Zhenning returned to Tsinghua University following his retirement from Stony Brook University. His wife died in the winter of 2003. In 2005, at the age of 82, Yang Zhenning married a 28-year old woman, who is studying for a master degree at Guangdong University.

Great Contributions

Since from almost his earliest days as a physicist, Yang Zhenning has made significant contributions to the theory of the weak interactions--the forces long thought to cause elementary particles to disintegrate.

By 1953 it was recognized that there was a fundamental paradox in this field since one of the newly discovered mesons--the so-called K meson--seemed to exhibit decay modes into configurations of differing parity. Since it was believed that parity had to be conserved, this led to a severe paradox.

After exploring every conceivable alternative, Li Zhengdao and Yang Zhenning were forced to examine the experimental foundations of parity conservation itself. In early 1956, they discovered that, contrary to what had been assumed, there was no experimental evidence against parity non-conservation in the weak interactions. The experiments that had been done, it turned out, simply had no bearing on the question.

They suggested a set of experiments that would settle the matter, and, when these experiments were carried out by several groups of people over the next year, large parity-violating effects were discovered. In addition, the experiments also showed that the symmetry between particle and antiparticle, known as charge conjugation symmetry, is also broken by the weak decays.

In addition to his work on weak interactions, Yang Zhenning, in collaboration with Li Zhengdao and others, carried out important work in statistical mechanics -- the study of systems with large numbers of particles -- and later investigated the nature of elementary particle reactions at extremely high energies.

Starting from 1965, Yang Zhenning was the Albert Einstein professor at the Institute of Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island. During the 1970s he was a member of the board of Rockefeller University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science respectively, and from 1978, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in San Diego, California.

He was also on the board of Ben-Gurion University, in Beersheba, Israel. He received the Einstein Award in 1957 and the Rumford Prize in 1980. In 1986 he received the Liberty Award and the National Medal of Science.

Ximen Bao, founder of China's first irrigation work, was once a military officer in the Wei State during the Warring States Period (475-221BC). He later became a magistrate of Ye (present-day Zhang County in Heibei Province of Central China) during the ruling of the Marquis Wen of the Wei State.

Marquis Wen was in power from 446BC to 396BC when Ye was affected by frequent floods. When Ximen Bao took up office at Ye, he came upon a local sorcery wherein a maiden was sacrificed every year as a bride for the so-called River God. Ximen Bao soon made a law to stop the sorcery, but the witch and the corrupt local official provoked the masses against him. Ximen Bao made researches himself on the conditions of the river and told people the truth. He turned the witch's trick to her own use, throwing the witch and corrupt official into the river.

After that Ximen Bao worked to bring the river under control and built 12 irrigation canals along the Zhangshui River. Since then flood seldom occurred and local agriculture production flourished. Ximen Bao was regarded as the founder of China's irrigation works for building the first canal irrigation system in Chinese history.

Keywords:Ximen Bao,irrigation,Canal

Shen Kuo was an eminent scientist of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). He was an all-round scholar of astronomy, literature, physics, chemistry, calendars, geology, meteorology and medical science. He was also an outstanding engineer, an excellent military strategist and a tactful diplomat. He even made milestone contributions to art and literature. So Shen Kuo was well known for being knowledgeable in ancient China.

Shen (1031-1095) was a native in Qian Tang of Zhejiang Province. He held a number of official posts during his life. He served as an envoy to the Liao Kingdom and led troops in battle. At one time he served as the highest financial official, and even director of the imperial observatory.

Shen Kuo completed his famous scientific work Meng Xi Bi Tan (Dream Pool Essays) after retirement. In the book, he wrote a lot about the animals and plants he had seen when traveling through the country, such as giant clam in the South Sea, crocodile in Chaozhou, Chinese wolfberry in the northwest of China and jerboa in the desert of northern China. The book also introduced some methods to kill insect pests.

Being learned in anatomy, Shen Kuo pointed out in Mengxi Bitan that human beings had pharynx and larynx, with pharynx for devouring food and larynx for ventilation. He also had profound knowledge about fossils. When visiting the Taihang Mountain in North China's Shanxi Province, he found fossilized seashells and noted the presence of ovoid stones like those often found on the seashore, leading him to conclude that at some time in the distant past, Shanxi had been located by the sea.

Mengxi Bitan (Dream Pool Essays) was widely regarded as an important scientific works in ancient China.

While in his thirties, Shen Kuo frequently dreamed of a place. In the dream, he ascended a hill, the summit of which was covered with brightly colored flowers and trees. Clear waters flowed at the base of the hill, banked on either side by dense woods. Later on, when traveling around, he was shocked to find a piece of land that was just the place in his dream. There he settled and wrote of the discoveries he had made in his lifetime. This extraordinary story is the origin of Shen's Mengxi Bitan (Dream Pool Essays).

Shen Kuo was hundreds of years ahead of the Western scientists in the fields of astronomy, meteorology, geography, mineralogy, mathematics and the calendar. He was the first to discover that the compass does not point directly north, but to the magnetic north pole. In the field of mathematics, he developed techniques that laid the foundations for spherical trigonometry and high-order arithmetic progressions. Mengxi Bitan was a milestone in the history of Chinese science. Today, this amazing 1,000-year-old scientific work has been translated into a number of different languages, including English, French, German and Japanese.

keywords:Shen Kuo,scientist,Mengxi Bitan

Zhan Tianyou (1861-1919), a national hero for his role in building China's railroad system, was born in 1861 in southern China's Guangdong Province and died in 1919. As the chief designer of the first railway project built by Chinese engineers, he was widely regarded as the father of China's railroad.

He was intelligent and interested in machinery when he was a child. At the age of 12, Zhan went to US to study. In 1878, he was admitted to Yale University majoring in civil and railway engineering. As one of the earliest Chinese students studying abroad, he was the first Chinese that became a member of the American Engineers' Association.

After graduating from Yale University in 1881, he returned to China. When construction of the well-known Beijing-Zhangjiakou Railway began in 1905, Zhan Tianyou was appointed as the chief engineer. He succeeded in building the zigzag upwards railway after overcoming the gradient problem by switching back the line. Moreover, he initially used two locomotives instead of one -- one pulling, and another pushing the train over the area. The railway was completed in 1909, two years ahead of schedule. It added a brilliant page in the history of Chinese railway construction.

After the Beijing-Zhangjiakou railway was open to traffic, he led a team to extend the railroad to the west of Zhangjiakou. Later, he acted as chief designer in the construction of several other railways in China.

After the 1911 revolution, Zhan Tianyou was appointed chief engineer of the Yue-Han Railway Corporation and built railways from Guangzhou to Shaoguan and from Wuchang to Changsha. In 1913, he became a high official in the Ministry of Communications in the Republic of China and played an important role in setting up the national railway technical standard. In the same year, the China Engineer Association was founded and Zhan Tianyou was elected chairman. In 1916, he was awarded the doctor's degree of law by Hong Kong University.

keywords:Zhan Tianyou,railroad,zigzag railway

October 16, 2003 was a great and glorious day for China, as the country successfully launched its first manned spacecraft, Shenzhou V, from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center and sent its first astronaut to the space with the "Long March CZ-2 F" carrier rocket.

With the launch, China became the third country, after Russia and the United States, to has the ability to carry out the manned space flights . Yang Liwei ' name therefore was placed in history next to those of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard.

Yang Liwei and His Family

Yang Liwei was born in 1965 in Suizhong County of Northeast China's Liaoning Province. Yang's mother was a teacher, and his father was an accountant at a state agricultural firm.

Yang's older sisterr recalled that Yang's grades were average but he excelled in the sciences and was especially fond of playing with various kinds of electric apparatuses.

Yang has a very healthy body, partly due to the exercise he did in his childhood, As
a little boy he loved to swim and skate; he also shone in track and field events.

In September 1983, Yang Liwei joined the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) and entered the No. 8 Aviation College of the PLA Air Force. Yang graduated in 1987 with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree. In the winter of 1990, Yang married a woman ,named Zhang Yumei, and had a boy.

Space Hero Yang Liwei

In January 1998, Yang Liwei was selected as a member of the group of Chinese astronauts set to train to fly the Project 921 (later Shenzhou) spacecraft. He was one of 14 chosen from among 1,500 pilot candidates. The team underwent five years of rigorous physical, psychological, and technical training at the Astronaut Training Base in Beijing.

Yang Liwei noted the study was much more difficult than that in college. There were more than 30 subjects he had to have a well command of. Yang's English was not good, so in order to improveing in this area, he often called his wife from the astronaut station to serve ashis English learning partner. Practice makes perfect, at the exam, Yang got a score of 100 .

Besides some basic lessons in aviation dynamics, air dynam ics, geophysics, meteorology, and astronomy, the astronauts also had to learn survival skills under extreme conditions in case their capsule landed anywhere on the earth, whether on land or at sea.

After a long- time of training, on September 20, 2003, the 14 astronauts began to exercise in the real Shenzhou-5 spacecraft at the Jiuquan Launch Center. One month later, Yang was selected as one of three finalists to be the country's first astronaut.

For the general public, it was still a question as to who would be the astronaut chosen to command the Shenzhou V,as Yang's selection for the spacecraft was only leaked only 6 hours before the launch.

On October 15, 2003,Yang was launched into space from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. In space, YangA completed 14 orbits and traveled more than 600,000 km, before finishing China's first manned space flight, and again standing on Chinese soil at 7:00am, on October 16, 2003.

On November 7, 2003, Yang received the title of "Space Hero" from Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Council (CMC). He also received a badge of honour during a ceremony at Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

Other Astronauts with Chinese Connections

Although Yang was the first Chinese citizen to go into space aboard a Chinese spacecraft, there were other astronauts of Chinese origin or heritage who preceded him.

William Anders (one flight totaling, 6.13 days,Apollo 8), born in Hong Kong on October 17, 1933, and indisputably the first person born in China to have orbited the moon.

Shannon Lucid, (five flights, totaling 223.12 days, STS-51-G, STS-34, STS-43, STS-58, STS-79), born in Shanghai on January 14, 1943.

Taylor Gun-Jin Wang (one flight, totaling 7.01 days, STS-51-B), born in Shanghai on June 16, 1940 and, an American citizen since 1975.

Franklin Chang-Diaz (six flights, totaling 52.91 days, STS-61-C, STS-34, STS-46, STS-60, STS-75, STS-91), born in Costa Rica, with some Chinese ancestors despite considering himself a Hispanic-American.

Edward Tsang Lu (two flights, totaling 21.02 days: STS-84, STS-106), born in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1963.

Author: Ivana

Sericulture is the technical term for the silk industry in all its forms -- farming, harvesting, spinning, and weaving.

According to Chinese legend, the Queen of Sericulture Lei Zu, who was said to be the queen of the Yellow Emperor, started the sericulture industry. She was first mentioned in Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) written by the well-known historian Sima Qian of the Western Han Dynasty (206BC-8AD). In the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), the agricultural book by Wang Zhen, quoting the Huainan Wang's Book on Silkworm, said that Xiling Shi (queen of the Yellow Emperor) started the sericulture industry. Later, in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), more books added new information to the legend of Lei Zu.

Today, much of the historical records on how she invented sericulture are lost, but legend has it that Lei Zu got the idea all from a ruined cup of tea: when drinking a cup of tea one day, she accidentally dropped a silkworm cocoon into the hot water. When she pulled it out, it had dissolved into a mass of long, smooth strands. Lei Zu then had the brilliant idea of trying to spin the fibers -- and thus, sericulture was born.

It is hard to say how much fact there is behind the legend, but Chinese now regard Lei Zu as the initiator of China's textile industry.

keywords：Lei Zu,Sericulture ,silk industry

Li Bing, fighter against the "river deity" 2,200 years ago, was a water conservancy expert during the Warring States Period (475-221BC).

Li Bing began his career as an ordinary politician. In about 256 BC, Li was sent by King Zhao of the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC) to be governor of the Shu area, which is now Sichuan Province in Southwest China. When he arrived at the area, Li witnessed the sufferings of local people from frequent flooding of Minjiang River. Li Bing and his son then began the construction of Dujiangyan irrigation system.

It is said that he erected a stone man on the upper reaches of the Dujiangyan to measure the water level and the quantity of water diversion. Li Bing composed the rhyme easy for memory: "Dredge the riverbed when the water is deep and build low dykes when the water is low". It contains the guiding principle of dredging the waterways in ancient China.

The system brought the Minjiang River under control and distributed waters from the river to the fertile farmland of the Chengdu plains. After the completion of the project, local people were able to enjoy a better life and become self-sufficient.

Later, Li Bing led in the construction of several other water projects. Li Bing gained great fame from this accomplishment and had become a legendary figure in Chinese history. Folktales had it that Li Bing had turned into a buffalo fighting river deity.

Today, Dujiangyan is regarded as a major landmark in the development of water management and technology in China. It is still functioning perfectly. The Dujiangyan Museum was built in commemoration of Li Bing, allowing others to remember the devotion with which he served his people.