Sycee by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
TODO freely licensed image of sycees presented on a plate. This is how gifts/prizes would be formally handed in ancient China, possibly wrapped in silk to make it more discrete.
Cuju by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Lit. "to kick (leather) ball".
Figures notbaly in Water Margin, where it is played by Gao Qiu. The novel also suggests that it was considered a lesser art, e.g. as opposed to the scholarly four arts and the "proper" martial arts.
Video 1.
Ancient Chinese Football Freestylers by Tifo Football (2021)
Source. Mentions that it was popular in the Ming dynasty, but then, if you will, the ball fell off a bit.
Video 2.
Bernardo cuju challenge by Manchester City (2019)
Source.
Chinese garden by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
The Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou
. Source.
Figure 2.
Round door at the Lingering Garden in Suzhou
. Source.
Stone garden by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The literal Chinese name says it all: "Fake Mountain". The stones evoke the feeling of the beautiful rock mountains of China.
The term "奇石假山" (qi2 shi2 jia3 shan1, lit. "weird shaped stone fake mountain") is also used, almost as a synonym by many people, since the stones are often chose in interesting shapes. Choosing the right stone is basically an art form in itself.
The stones used are generally limestone, which as a sedimentary rock is weaker, and more likely to be eroded into interesting shapes.
The actually had decimal time systems... why that didn't win!
Tael by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Notably used for measuring gold and silver as a form of Chinese currency.
Shandong by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Literally: East of the Mountain.
Kaifeng by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Capital of the Northern Song dynasty. Features in Water Margin.

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!
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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/derivative
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    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.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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