On Wikipedia we only find the term Scholar-official. But the idea of the ancient Chinese scholar is a bit wider as a concept, and even people who were not trying to be officials could thrive to follow certain aspects of the scholar way of life.
Particular attributes the ideal Chinese scholar would have include:It is in a sense sad (or awesome) that the computer has essentially replaced, or one may argue, enhanced beyong recognition, all of the traditional four arts, to the point that Ciro can't touch anything that is not a computer. Sometimes the old arts live on particularly closely though, e.g. in computer music, computer graphics and computer Go.
- mastery of the Four arts, which also implies the Four Treasures of the Study for caligraphy and painting
- live in a place that includes
This classification is too restrictive, and too South-centered. But if is worth knowing.
Good website, with poems in Chinese, pinyin and commented translation. Well done!
100 poems website 100tangpoems.wordpress.com/2023/02/27/pure-and-fair/
100 poems website 100tangpoems.wordpress.com/2023/02/27/pure-and-fair/
In Chinese lit. just "Four Great Masterpieces".
This is just the most charming of the Four Great Classic Novels.
The definitive television series adaptation is obviously Journey to the West. It just manages to capture all the charms of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie.
Old illustration of Zhu Bajie
. Source. Needs better identification: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Zhu_Bajie#Illustration_date_wrong:_15h_century? What poor countries have to do to get richer Allow your citizens to have double citizenship by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16In 2020 Brazil for example, you are not allowed in theory to obtain a double nationality which you were not allowed to have as a birth right.
This means that Brazilian students e.g. in France, many of whom could easily obtain the French citizenship had to either chose between:Can you guess which option Brazilian students would usually pick?
- giving up their Brazilian citizenship. Who the fuck would do that? Brazilians love their country despite all!
- not getting French citizenship. This meant in France having to come 6 AM once a year to some police station on some suburbia to stamp a piece of paper, plus having your VISA completely dependant on your employer for several years until you could obtain a permanent VISA, making it very hard to change jobs, and putting you in a constantly precarious position
- keeping both citizenships, ignoring Brazilian law, which is extremely unlikely to sue you anyways for this bullshit law, and just hope for the best
As a poor country, you have to allow people to obtain multiple citizenship. Students are not going to go back because they don't have the foreign citizenship. They are just going to have to ensure shittier jobs for a few years, thus diminishing the chances that they will actually lean anything useful to bring back to your country later on.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact