Word: hunan
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Spring in Hunan is about as fair a sight as any landscape painter could want. Rain-washed red hillsides are green again. Young willow leaves festoon the roads winding through the rice paddies. But the springtime beauty of this central Chinese province, one of the nation's "rice bowls," ends with the landscape. A portrait painter in Hunan would find an ugly subject-the bitter, bony face of famine...
...Chai Tzi, Sweet Chrysanthemum. But the exhibits of grass and herbs, no trophy of a schoolgirl's outing in the country, were part of an official report from the China office of UNRRA. The pretty names stood for wild leaves and stems and roots that the peasants of Hunan province (where 5,000,000 face death) have lived on for 40 days...
...Anything can happen if only peace exists - it will be possible to ride a railway train from Canton to the Amur River under a single flag ; possible to irrigate the fields of Hunan with the waters of Szechwan; possible to warm the homes of Shanghai with the coal of Shansi, possible to fuel the trucks of Yünnan with the oil of Sinkiang. The vision is too great, the hope too high for any group or any individual to dare to flout it with impunity...
...Shantung man. Stocky, muscular and tanned, like most Shantung peasants, he has a ferocious temper, a vivid and profane vocabulary. He is of the very core of the old Chinese Army, a Whampoa Academy cadet who fought his way up from platoon to army group commander. But in Hunan he used methods long neglected in China...
...Happen? In 1865 a Lon don Athenaeum critic was vexed by a new book called Alice in Wonderland - "a stiff, overwrought story," he complained, which would make "any real child more puzzled than enchanted." In 1932, when Alice invaded the Chinese province of Hunan, the sensitive provincial war lord was even more shocked. "Bears, lions, and other beasts cannot use a human language," he barked, and banned Alice as "an insult to the human race." In 1936, an eminent Austrian psychiatrist recoiled, shuddering, before Alice's "oral sadistic traits of cannibalism" and "continuous threat to the integrity...