Life - Chinadaily.com.cn

Life

Ninja Turtles bring box-office power

[2014-08-14 07:21]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sliced off $65 million at the weekend box office.

Goodwill hunting

[2014-08-14 07:21]

Robin Williams has inspired generations in China with his idealistic roles.

Urumqi rating raises questions on national film policy

[2014-08-14 07:21]

A cinema in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, has started to rate its films according to levels of violent and sexual content, despite no such rating system being in place on a national level.

Death on his hands

[2014-08-13 07:28]

It was a job that required facing death every day. A job that felt creepy at times. A job that paid little. But former crematory operator Li Nansheng tried to make the most of it, and he explores the meaning of death and life in his fiction My Five Years of Working in the Crematorium. Li, 36, seemed to be destined for the job. Both of his parents were specialized musicians who performed at traditional funerals; they not only sang funeral songs and incantations, but also performed religious rituals. His wife is a mortuary makeup artist. Li himself was born during a funeral session.

Octogenarian pulitzer winner still at work

[2014-08-13 07:28]

He is 86 years old, his eyesight is failing and much of his recent work reads like a man saying goodbye.

Miranda Corbie confronts her own City of Ghosts

[2014-08-13 07:28]

A love of San Francisco - its flaws, strengths and eccentricities - permeates Kelli Stanley's intriguing novels about private detective Miranda Corbie. Stanley's novels capture San Francisco - and the United States - in the years just before World War II.

By the book

[2014-08-13 07:28]

The National Library of China is the country's top restoration clinic for precious ancient texts. Nearly 20 "book doctors" work at the library, committed to making the valuable documents survive longer. "The fragility of the books leaves little room for the introduction of modern machinery. The methods we use today are almost the same as we used in the old days," says Zhu Zhenbin, 52, who has worked at the library for the past 34 years. The newly established National Museum of Classic Books is a part of the National Library of China, where about 2.6 million copies of old books are stored. "Varieties of paper and binding methods used in ancient Chinese books make the process of restoration more complicated than Western ones," he says. "It is like treating individual patients. It doesn't matter if we do the work slowly but it will be problematic if we lower our standards to accelerate our schedule," Zhu says. "What we do is to make them survive longer." Workers admit that relatively recent issues, such as air pollution, keep popping up. The restoration project also requires people with interdisciplinary knowledge, including in chemistry, the fine arts and ancient Chinese language. The museum will formally open to the public in September.