Word: 15th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...free port in the medieval world: the local rulers, known as Zamorins, charged 6-10% import duty on all items. They provided traders with guest houses and servants - and the odd courtesan, natch - and guaranteed the security of all goods. Varrier encourages me to think of it as a 15th century Hong Kong, complete with its own seamy Wanchai district...
...Chinese passport - and one wonders which part of limbo the unfortunate now inhabits. To retrace the Chinese travels in Arabia is to see how the world is not always growing more connected, as we like to think, but often less so: the ports the Chinese visited in the 15th century are obscure today, unglamorous and almost impossible to get to for even the most enterprising traveler...
...Chinese have little interest in how Westerners live. When the 15th century Admiral Zheng He first sailed across the oceans, he returned to China with stones, ivory and wood. But when Marco Polo traveled to the Middle Kingdom, he brought back to Italy a wealth of information and discoveries. If he were to go to China today, he would probably return with no more than a Beijing opera mask and a badly stitched cheongsam...
...Swiss Jura. Between 1970 and 1987 the Swiss watch industry, devastated by digital timekeeping, shed two-thirds of its workforce. But at this school, students spend two years learning what made the Swiss famous: mechanical watchmaking. "By the end they will have mastered the history of watchmaking from the 15th century to the present day," says one of the teachers. "Why try to compete with the Japanese when our specialty is high-quality mechanical watchmaking?" If further proof of the renewed respect - and market - for craftsmanship were needed, the school's next intake includes a Japanese student...
...traditional techniques of watchmaking live on in classroom 401, where seven students are studying for a two-year higher diploma. "By the end, they'll have mastered the history of watchmaking from the 15th century to the present day in both theory and practice," teacher Pascal Lindwerlin says proudly. Lindwerlin graduated from the same course himself in 1984, before spending 12 years building prototypes for a clockmaker in La Chaux-de-Fonds...