Talk:Yunnan

Pictures

This is a great article, but could do with a picture of this spectacular region. Anyone have anything suitable? Coyote-37 11:24, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

I second the request for a picture. Also, can someone clarify the information about the languages of Yunnan a little bit? Which is the most widely spoken? Which will you hear people talking on the streets? To what degree is Mandarin understood and spoken? 多谢。 --LakeHMM 02:12, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Your question about "streets" depends on the street that you're talking about. Yunnan's ethnic distribution is extremely complex. In Kunming, however, it's probably the Kunming dialect (of Southwestern Mandarin division, of Mandarin). -- ran (talk) 13:58, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Mandarin is mainly used there although they understand cantonese and kunming Theo2k2 (talk) 06:23, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

Spelling

Maybe this is a silly question, but we are sure it's spelt with two N's in the middle? -Fsotrain09 18:23, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

I heard that some people can understand Cantonese in Yunnan Province. But the major language is Mandarin there. Sonic99 20:19, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

The Athenian speechwriter, Isocrates, who was a contemporary of Socrates, espoused that "the word 'Greek' is not so much a term of birth as it is of mentality, and is applied to a common culture rather than of common descent." Likewise, the modern Greek poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979, Odysseas Elytis, said that, "To be Greek means to feel and react in a certain way, nothing else; whether one is young or old, born here or there."

Yunanistan is the word that is used in the Islamic and Asiatic world for ¨Greece¨. It comes from the words ¨Yunan¨ for Greek and the Islamic epithem ¨-stan¨ for country, just like on anglosaxonic and germanic languages we hear the word ¨-land¨ at the end of each nation´s name.58.165.183.114 (talk) 03:51, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

In the Southwest region of China, lays today the province of ¨Yunnan¨ where german archaeological missions brought to light 12 ancient hellenic cities. The name ¨China¨ is an alternate of the french ¨Chine¨ (pronounced ¨Sine¨) from the latin ¨Sinae¨, a loan from the term ¨Sínis¨ (Σίνης), a word the Greeks gave to the Chinese when units from Alexander´s army were dismissed and settled on the Yunnan province. Sinis means ¨distractor, annihilator, thief, robber, baneful, looter¨ and comes from the historical figure of ¨Sinis the Pityokamptis¨ (Σίνης ο Πιτυοκάμπτης). ₪ 58.165.183.114 (talk) 03:58, 1 March 2015 (UTC)

History - Exploration

I've noticed that there are references to two foreign explorers at the bottom of the history section, but some of the most important ones like Joseph Rock are not present. We should add him, as well as a few others like Peter Goulart.

We should actually create a new section for this altogether. There are some other interesting things that might need their own subtopics, like info about how the camellia, azalea and rhododendron all made their way into Western gardens from Yunnan. Xiefeilaga 05:55, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

More than meets the eye

There's an Optimus Prime statue in Yunnan: 1. PAHC

Wildlife of Yunnan

Yunnan has a great biodiversity, and so contains a large number of animals. Some of them are flagship species of conservation due to their might and beauty. For ex: The 1.5 ton gaur 1 and the tiger [links removed] ---J.S (T/C/WRE) 17:02, 18 August 2007 (UTC))

Flag of Yunnan

File:Yunnan.gif Is this a real historical and/or regional flag of Yunnan? -- Himasaram 02:50, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

According to crwflags.com, this appears to be a prayer flag of the Nakhi, an ethnic group in Yunnan. -- ran (talk) 15:52, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

For issues of national unity, Chinese Provinces do not have flags. This looks vaguely Nakhi, but I've never seen it before Xiefeilaga 05:55, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

acres?

Areas this large are not normally given in acres. I've replaced that figure with square km and sq miles, from http://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/yunnan/ . Thnidu (talk) 00:12, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Buddhist?

Was the region buddhist before the cultural revolution? I could not find anything in the article about the religeous traditions in the region?Billlion (talk)

Mix. The catchall is Chinese folk religion but there's proper Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan, too. Lots of Islam, too. — LlywelynII 22:34, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Consistency on number of plants

I think in separate parts of the article the total number of discrete plant species is variously given as 17,000, 18,000, and 15,000. Obviously they are not grossly disparate but it would be better if one of the figures was identified as the currently most authoritative. Historian932 (talk) 04:45, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Zhao Pian

Shouldn't we space those images out a bit better? There are a series that are all bunched up. I hope no one minds if I move them around and space 'em out. Please note. The Sound and the Fury (talk) 04:22, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Sources for article expansion

Yuan and ming dynasty rule

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https://web.archive.org/web/20090108011623/http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~asiamajor/pdf/2006ab/14%20AM%20vol19%20Brose.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120513182154/http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~asiamajor/pdf/2006ab/14%20AM%20vol19%20Brose.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20130922004334/http://www.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/~asiamajor/pdf/2006ab/14%20AM%20vol19%20Brose.pdf

• 5
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Yunnan under Qing

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Malaria in Qing Yunnan

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Biodiversity

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• Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt
• Kunming Institute of Biology
• "Description of a new species of the genus Yunnanilus"

Language

• "The Use of Perception Tests in Studying the Tonal System of Prinmi Dialects: A Speaker-centered Approach to Descriptive Linguistics"

Tai people

• "Intra-dynastic and Inter-Tai Conflicts in the Old Kingdom of Moeng Lü in Southern Yunnan"

Geology

• "Landform System Structures and Characteristics of the Diancang Mountain Areas in West Yunnan Province"

Chinese

• 中越边境大扫雷 : 云南段实录

Rajmaan (talk) 16:15, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Eh, thanks for clearing out your browsing history for us, I guess.

All the same, next time include titles or glosses, format the links properly, and try not to give the same (unnamed) one three times. — LlywelynII 22:34, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Coordinate error

{{geodata-check}} The following coordinate fixes are needed for —183.171.174.244 (talk) 03:52, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

I just checked and the coordinates are pretty much in the middle of the province. They're only approximate, to the nearest degree, but any more precision would be misleading.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 04:12, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

 Not done. I agree that the coordinates are sufficiently precise and sufficiently centered in the province, so I'm closing this request. (I've also asked for someone more adept with templates than I to alter the infobox used in the article so that it applies the correct type—"adm1st" rather than "city"—to the coordinates.) Deor (talk) 17:30, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

Early census

Where can I get ethnic composition for early census?--Kaiyr (talk) 19:01, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

A, I don't know if they took that information.

B, You know that Chinese censuses up until the last few haven't exactly been accurate, right? — LlywelynII 22:34, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

MOS-ZH

Per WP:MOS-ZH, the policy is to remove the foreign translations from the lead sentence when the Chinese text and pinyin appear in an infobox. Kindly don't restore it pending a new consensus there.

For what it's worth, I completely agree: here, we have the same Chinese characters written at least three times. There is absolutely nothing gained (except lack of clarity) by including the 汉字 a fourth time in the first sentence. — LlywelynII 22:34, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Governors of province

were there any Governors and Secretaries of the CPC from national minority in this province?--Kaiyr (talk) 19:34, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

External links modified

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I have just modified 8 external links on Yunnan. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20130727021210/http://www.stats.gov.cn:80/english/newsandcomingevents/t20110429_402722516.htm to http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/newsandcomingevents/t20110429_402722516.htm
• Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20090805174810/http://www.stats.gov.cn:80/TJGB/RKPCGB/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16767.htm to http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16767.htm
• Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20120914173158/http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16768.htm to http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16768.htm
• Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20120510075429/http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16769.htm to http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16769.htm
• Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20120619002216/http://www.stats.gov.cn:80/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16772.htm to http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020404_16772.htm
• Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20120829052024/http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020331_15435.htm to http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjgb/rkpcgb/qgrkpcgb/t20020331_15435.htm
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/20130727021210/http://www.stats.gov.cn:80/english/newsandcomingevents/t20110429_402722516.htm to http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/newsandcomingevents/t20110429_402722516.htm
• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150925123928/https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/baylor-ir/bitstream/handle/2104/9326/WANG-THESIS-2015.pdf?sequence=1 to https://baylor-ir.tdl.org/baylor-ir/bitstream/handle/2104/9326/WANG-THESIS-2015.pdf?sequence=1

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"southwest China" vs. "Southwest China"

The following is a discussion between myself and another editor. It took place on his/her talk page, but I really think it ended up being more appropriate to this page, as this is where changes to the article should be discussed. Despite the serious tone in the opening of the comments, I harbor no ill will and hope that is true of the other editor as well. The important thing is that all parties want the article to be accurate. Unschool 06:58, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

False accusations of vandalism

You left the following message on my talk page:

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize pages by deliberately introducing incorrect information, as you did at Yunnan, you may be blocked from editing. CaradhrasAiguo (leave language) 23:53, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

I have been a Wikipedia editor for over thirteen years, and have never been accused of deliberately introducing "incorrect information". While you may disagree with my edit (sources differ on whether Yunnan is more correctly described as "southwest" or "south central" China, and this disagreement is a sincere one), your disagreement does not make my edit vandalism. Indeed, from a purely geographical standpoint, it is clear that "south central" is more accurate than "southwest", but I recognize that there are historical reasons for the widespread use of "southwest" to describe its location. So to be clear, you have erred in falsely accusing me of vandalism. If you cannot tell the difference between vandalism and a reasonable edit with a clearly explained edit summary, then perhaps we need to take this difference of views to a third party for some intervention. As to the matter of the edit in question, had the edit merely been reverted, I would have been unaffected. I do not have strong feelings about this matter, and in fact, have learned that many see the matter differently than I do. I may, when I have more time, investigate the matter further, but I just cannot do that right now. My solitary objection at this time is to your slanderous accusations of vandalism, and it is on that matter alone that I am considering further action. The tone of your response will be the primary factor determining my next steps. Unschool 03:57, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Did you click on southwest China, which has sourced, official definitions of the regional delineation, before making your edit on 26 Jan? The government's definition, based on the historical definition, is the final say; any such descriptions of the province as south central is pure WP:OR and confusing to the reader, given the existence of the south central region. The same goes with describing Beijing or even Shandong as being the "northeast".

And apologies, I do not have control of the fully protected message templates, which for level 3, defaults to linking to WP:V. CaradhrasAiguo (leave language) 04:07, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Did I click on southwest China? I honestly don't remember. But I don't need to read an article to know that this sentence (as it appeared before my edit) is factually wrong:

Yunnan is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the far southwest of the country.

That sentence, which I changed, is simply wrong. Note that it says, "the far southwest". That is not a reference to a region, but a compass direction. The "far southwest" using a compass would be Tibet. If you drew a north-south line down the middle of China, Yunnan would probably fall on that line. That makes it south-central. Regardless of your fealty to the opinions of the Chinese government, they do not have the final say on compass directions.

Additionally, I did look at South China, and you see right on that map there that Yunnan is listed as part of "South China" in two of the three connotations of the term (one of which does admittedly antedate the Communist regime). So my position is not entirely without merit.

The problem with your argument, as I see it, is that you fail to recognize the difference in the official name of the region and the geographic characteristics of that region. I see that the article currently reads with the word "far" removed, like this:

Yunnan is a province of the People's Republic of China, located in the southwest of the country.

This is an improvement, but it remains problematic, as anyone with an eight-year old's intelligence and understanding of geography is going to question the accuracy of that statement. It's not unlike the problem that I found with elementary school social studies textbooks in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, in assigning what region each state belonged to. Most were obvious; three or four were not. For example, Oklahoma in some books was listed the Great Plains states, in others as a Southern state, and in one encyclopedia as a Southwestern state. These designations were of course matters of opinion, and one's opinion was influenced by whether you were more concerned with culture or compass directions. I personally regarded the listing of Oklahoma as "southwestern" as absurd, but it also didn't really fit in with the others. But the point is, no one was being a jerk for suggesting one classification or another, they were simply looking for the best solution they could find to the problem.

Of course, this problem is unnecessary with China. Unlike the United States, there are official regions established by Beijing which can be used. I cannot understand why this is not what you (or whoever edited the current version) have done. Sure, there's a wikilink to Southwest China, but why on earth would you pipe it? Unless someone does click on the link, they're going to assume that person who wrote the sentence is geographically ignorant. If the sentence had originally been written this way, I would have never changed it, because it would have been factually correct. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. Hopefully you will understand why saying "southwest China" is not the same thing as saying "Southwest China". Then I am going to copy this discussion over to Talk:Yunnan, for future reference, with the hope of preventing future misunderstandings. Unschool 06:58, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Unschool: it completely makes sense why someone unfamiliar with Chinese geography would be confused by the term "Southwest China" because if you just look at a map of the People's Republic of China, Yunnan is definitely not in the southwest portion. But to understand the term "Southwest China", consider the context where the entirety of Chinese history for millennia occurred in the eastern half of what is now the PRC (for reference, see this map that displays Ming-era China and is fairly representative of what was considered China through most dynasties in history). It is only in the last 150 years that the sparsely populated "western" portions of China were incorporated, but in Chinese nomenclature the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guizhou, and sometimes Guangxi are still referred to as "Southwest China". The terminology caries over into English as well, for example see the Lonely Planet guidebook "China's Southwest" that covers these four provinces but does not include Tibet. (As another example, I just searched for Yunnan on BBC and the most recent result refers to "southwest China's Yunnan province")

For an analogous example in the USA, consider how someone unfamiliar with American geography/terminology may be confused when they the visit the WP page for Ohio and see it referred to as Midwestern state when it it is clearly in the central eastern portion of the country. You wouldn't describe Ohio as "Officially part of the Midwestern Region" and the current wording for the Yunnan article is equally as clunky. I agree that the lowercase "southwest China" may have been misleading, but I am going edit the page to remove "officially" and I'll capitalize the region's name so it is more obvious as named region. Hopefully this makes sense and explains why Southwest China is the correct terminology for this region. -NoGhost (talk) 04:21, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the kind and patient explanation, NoGhost. As it happens, while I was unaware of all the details you provided, I knew enough to realize that prior to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, Yunnan would have come closer to meeting the compass-driven expectations of "southwest China". It was for this reason that, in my first post above, I wrote: I recognize that there are historical reasons for the widespread use of "southwest" to describe its location. I didn't want to get into those details here, but you have done so, and I thank you.

Of course, the irony is that, by calling Yunnan a part of their "southwest", the Chinese government undercuts their own argument that Tibet has been a part of China proper for over 500 years.

By the way, I completely get your analogy. I grew up in Illinois, and the first social studies textbook I had said that Illinois was one of the "North Central States", which made perfect sense to me. Then I moved to another town (also within Illinois) and our books said that Illinois was in the "Midwestern States". This struck me as nonsensical, and I challenged my teacher on this (this is at the age of nine or ten). She could not explain it to me either.

So, as far as the "clunky" wording of the article is concerned, I disagree with you slightly (though possibly out of ignorance). Why? Because there is no place officially designated by the US government as the "Midwestern Region", but there is a "Southwest China" region officially recognized by China. Something to mull over, I guess. Cheers. Unschool 06:11, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Biology

Hydrophyte 102.90.48.45 (talk) 13:37, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Yunnan Province Product Exports (2020).svg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:29, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

Ethnic makeup

The total of all the percentages in the ethnic composition chart in the demographics section is less than 100%. GermanSourCream (talk) 15:07, 21 March 2024 (UTC)