Word: honge
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...once custom to lightly sprinkle, not douse, one's family and neighbors with flower stems and tree branches that had been dipped in water as a sign of reverence. "When I was young, first we had to splash our grandparents and parents to show our respect," says Mie Duc Hong, a 40-year-old Dai woman who lives in the Yunnanese village of Manchunman. "Then we could go splash our friends. It was a lot of fun. But it wasn't like it is now where people get so wet. We just sprinkled them with drops of water, not whole...
...Minority Park, an "ethnic theme park" that actually encompasses five Dai villages (Mie Duc Hong's community is one of them), the annual tradition has strayed furthest from its tranquil origins. There, the water-splashing portion of the festival is organized in a shallow pool every day at 3:30 p.m. Cable describes the spectacle as a "large-scale wet-T-shirt contest." For $5, tourists can rent plastic basins for splashing each other and scantily-clad Dai women. "Authenticity is much less important than entertainment in China," says Cable. "Tourists don't come to see authentic rituals. They come...
...teach users how to circumvent Web restrictions, or else his website would be shut down by authorities. This has left him with little choice, he says, but to switch to an overseas server. In late March, when Google began redirecting Chinese search traffic to an uncensored site based in Hong Kong, authorities blocked Ng's site. His daily traffic dropped from more than 20,000 hits to 6,000 overnight, but many mainland users still climb the Great Firewall to view his site...
...close coverage from state-run press. "This kind of heroic rescue operation always gets a lot of coverage in the official Chinese media, but if it's not a success, then the story quickly disappears from the media," says Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based workers' rights NGO. "In this case they did manage to rescue over 100 miners. It's portrayed as a miracle." (See the top 10 miraculous rescues...
...measure. "If you live alone, it's inevitable that you may die alone," says Yoko Yokota, assistant supervisor of the ward's division for senior-citizen services. "What Shinjuku ward wants to do is increase the chance that people will notice." (Watch a video about the cemetery business in Hong Kong...