Chinese tradition, ceremony,culture

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
Remembering Dr John Lim who is instrumental in saving the life wounded Chinese soldier in war resistance against Japanese. Single handedly he set up the Chinese red cross front line medical corp saving thousand of life He was born in Singapore. I didn't know about him until watching CGTN excellent documentary "Home Front" chronicling the Chinese gargantuan effort to thwart Japanese aggression and unimaginable suffering that Chinese people endure But they didn't cave in instead doggedly resist the Japanese .
Wow I didn't know he is the son of Dr Lim Boon Keng who the noted peranakan scholar, social activist and past president of Xiamen University. so he is Peranakan too
Dr. Lim was born of Chinese parentage in Singapore on October 15, 1897. His nickname was Booby. His father, Lim Boon-Keng (林文庆), was a distinguished physician graduated from the University of Edinburgh, who promoted social and educational reforms in China. His mother, Wong Tuan-Keng (黄瑞琼), the daughter of Wong Nai-siong (黄乃裳), was one of the first generation of Chinese women who received educations in the United States. His uncle, Wu Lien-Teh (伍连德), was a plague fighter and the father of Chinese public health system.

Not many people know the contribution of overseas Chinese in those time Thousand volunteer to help with war effort in Yunan driving lorry to bypass and provide relief to home front. Here is another one he can be rightly called the father of China modern medicine. At the beginning of the war the Chinese suffer horrendous death rate because of untreated wounded soldier He establish and train frontline medical relief where the medical team is at the frontline accompanying soldier and treated the soldier right at battle field therefore reducing mortality rate and improve soldier morale. He also instituted hygiene and deloussing practice among the soldier He organized the buying of quinine to treat malaria
Dr Robert Kho Seng Lim
The Father of Modern Medicine in China​
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Bobby Lim was born on October 15, 1897 in Singapore, as such he was a British subject of Chinese parentage. Lim studied in Scotland and had been one of over one hundred thousand Chinese who had departed from Ramsgate after volunteering for service supporting the British Army during the Great War. Lim served in the Indian Army Medical Service incorporated within the "Army Service Corps" on the Western Front during the great war of 1914-18. He earned his M.A. (1919), Ph.D. (1920) and D.Sc. (1924) degrees from Edinburgh University in Scotland. He began his professional career as a lecturer at Edinburgh University. He travelled to the United States of America as a Rockefeller Fellow and was associated with the University of Chicago. He became a professor of physiology at Peking Union Medical College in 1924. During World War II Lim was called on to organize the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Corps.

From his military experience in the two World Wars he became interested in pain-relieving drugs. He discovered that pain receptors are chemo-sensitive, that pain-producing agents such as bradykinin peptides are produced when tissues of the body are injured. Additionally, he discovered that aspirin and other analgesic drugs relieve pain by combining with the pain-provoking chemicals (bradykinin peptides) and altering their function.

Following World War II, Lim established numerous hospitals in China before leaving to accept a position with Miles Laboratories in the United States of American. Robert Kho Seng Lim is the father of modern medicine in China.
Here is more about him
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Robert Lim was born in British Malaya, educated in Scotland and completed his medical course in the Edinburgh University. During the last war he served for over two years in France with the Royal Army Medical corps, and then returned to Edinburgh for post-graduate work. He afterwards went out to the Peking Union Medical College where as Professor of Physiology, he built up a department famed throughout the Far East for its teaching and throughout the world for its research. His academic field was not bounded however by the four walls of his own beautiful college, for it was mainly through his hard work that a system was evolved whereby the medical education in the rapidly developing universities throughout China was standardised and standardised on a very high level. In the course of time an ever increasing number of men taking charge of these institutions were Lim’s men.

During the earlier Japanese campaign in China, Lim helped to organise the Chinese Red Cross, and there learned to accommodate his extensive experience gained in France with the unique conditions and requirements of China. It was there that he most probably formulated the plans which the so-called ‘China Incident’ has given him the opportunity to put into practice. Immediately after the outbreak of the present Sino-Japanese war, Lim slipped away from Peking and was soon established behind the Chinese lines, the peace-time scientist and teacher becoming the capable organiser and inspiring war-time leader. In order to view in its true perspective the real magnitude and importance of Lim’s achievements one must realise not only that China was dismally unprepared, both politically and militarily, to withstand the invasion which befell her, but that her civilian and army medical services were only in the embryo stage of development, and by no means fit for the terrible strain that Japan’s unprovoked assault imposed upon them. A National Health Administration had been set up by the Chinese Government before the war started, but its function was mainly to fight epidemics, to spread the elements of hygiene amongst the people and to improve standards of sanitation; the war brought the additional problem of millions of refugees and the National Relief Commission was set up to succour, feed, house and rehabilitate this immense crowd of innocent sufferers; the medical care of these millions, almost all of them suffering from malnutrition of a type unbelievable in this country of plenty and to an extent that made it impossible for them to stand the extra strain of war, the medical care of the war wounded and sick, be they regular soldiers, guerrillas or peasants, the medial care of the thousands of civilians bombed in defenceless villages and towns throughout Free China, all this tremendous work falls to the lot of the Chinese Red Cross. The whole of the field work involved in this stupendous task is done through the Medical Relief Corps of the Red Cross, and the brain, the driving force and the inspiration of this huge organisation is its Director, Dr. Robert Lim, and all he had to start with was just a mere handful of his own students and graduates, imbued with his own infectious zeal and the worthy desire to be of service to their own needy fellow-countrymen.

In countries where public health is highly organised on modern lines it is very hard to appreciate the conditions in a country where such work is just in its infancy and where the population as a whole is not yet educated up to realising the factors responsible for epidemics. Add to these primitive conditions the disorganisation caused by an influx of hundreds of thousands of starving and weakened refugees, and one can gain some small idea of the horrors that arise as a consequence of the activities in China. A D.B.S. service (Delousing-Bathing-Scabies) has been hastily but efficiently organised to combat typhus and relapsing fevers and scabies. By now more than 130 of these will have been established, and those that were operating during the first six months of 1939 did their work so well that only 37 cases were reported; considering the facilities for diagnosis and the conditions of service this is a wonderful achievement, although it is certain that the actual number of cases must have been higher due to the fact that many of the sufferers must have been too ill to negotiate the combatant and roadless zones to reach medical aid. Malaria has spread to such an alarming extent that the lack of supplies necessary for its prevention and treatment makes the control of this scourge one of the greatest problems facing China. With the advent of summer, measures against cholera loom large in the anti-epidemic programme; during the 1939 season nearly half a million individuals were inoculated by the Red Cross and over two million doses of vaccine were distributed to other organisations; the dysentery diseases form a group second in importance only to malaria, and all of them are aided and abetted by malnutrition which is almost universal amongst soldiers and peasants alike; is this any wonder when the ration of the soldier is based on an allowance of about one penny per day, and so, lest efforts in other directions should be of no avail, a Red Cross Social Diet Service had to be instituted whereby the allowance might be raised to nearly two pence!
 
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Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
(cont)

But Lim’s work did not stop here; with characteristic foresight he realised that the demands on his organisation would be ever increasing while the war lasted, and also for some time afterwards; he knew only too well that the peculiar conditions prevailing in China - the lack of transport, the almost complete absence of instruments, appliances and medicines usually found in all modern hospitals and aid stations, together with the universal prevalence of malnutrition and epidemics - made it essential that his helpers should have additional and special training to fit them for their unusual tasks; and so, at his already over-worked headquarters he founded a Training School where doctors, assistants and orderlies might be given intensive instruction under rigid war-time conditions and discipline. The objectives of the training as laid down are ‘to familiarise qualified personnel with the requirements and methods of war service, to improve the technical knowledge of those already in service, and to provide additional personnel for the Army Medical Service, Civil Health Service and Red Cross Medical Relief Corps’. Each course lasts for two months, and in its first six months, June 1938 to January 1939, this school trained 1432 Red Cross workers, of whom over 1000 were distributed to the Red Cross and the rest to the Army Medical Corps and to the Health Administration of China. And as though this were not enough to tax any ordinary person’s administrative powers, the fortunes of war made it necessary to shift this school no less than three times. But now, since March 1939, it has been established (and finally we hope) near Kweiyang in Kweichow province, and there it continues to perform its wonderful work for some of the most needy and pitiful of all humanity.

But that is not all; Lim remembered the accumulation of deformities and disabilities in Europe after the last war and the consequent problems that they presented, and he knew how much bodily damage and suffering could be prevented by early and efficient treatment, and by this means how many a severely disabled soldier may be saved from a living death and transformed into a useful citizen. He needed an Orthopaedic Hospital attached to his training school and he needed it at once , for both his patients and his trainees. For neither the civilian nor for the soldier victim of aggression in China is there any gratuity or pension, and it becomes more than ever imperative that some steps should be taken to enable the thousands of disabled and crippled to learn some trade with the limbs left to them, or to be provided with some suitable appliance whereby they may earn the small pittance necessary to keep themselves and their dependents alive. How reminiscent this if of Flynn’s far-seeing demands for Inland hospitals and flying doctors! Lim’s perseverance, like Flynn’s, was in the end rewarded, for he got his Orthopaedic Hospital. He established it with 300 beds but was only able to put 50 of these into commission. The treatment of patients in a hospital such as this is a long one, and in order that the beds in the hospital should be occupied by those who are actually undergoing active treatment, it was further decided to establish a Disabled Soldiers’ Hostel to accommodate those who were waiting for operative treatment or manipulations or who were waiting for the fitting of appliances, and thus make the hospital bed space available for the more urgent cases; this hostel accommodates a further 300 cases and thus their earlier treatment in the hospital is not vitiated by their too early removal from medical care and supervision; not only does the Hostel thus increase the efficiency and value of the Hospital by removing from the latter those who no longer need surgical care, but it also acts as a training centre, and for this purpose it is under the direction of expert members of the Chinese Industrial Co-operative, and thus, immediately the patients are medically ready for discharge, they are also fitted by their training in the Hostel to take an active and useful part in the vast co-operative scheme which is the life blood - at present - of Free China.

To conceive of this plan with all its intricate detail, was the work of a genius; to put it into successful operation against all the adverse currents in a primitive China at war, was the achievement of an indefatigable and practical worker, and now as a memorial to both, this orthopaedic centre stands, the only hospital of its type in the whole of Free China, serving a population of over 400 millions. In relation to this huge number, 300 beds - and of these only 50 as yet in commission - sounds infinitesimal, yet it has already begun to attract the world-wide attention it deserves, the begging attention from the pitiful sufferers of China and the charitable attention of beneficent helpers in other countries as well as Lim’s own. Regarding the former, the names of nearly 30,000 disabled solders alone were already on the waiting list some months ago, and that does not take into account any civilian air-raid casualties, thousands upon thousands of whom have just been left to die or to become hopelessly crippled beggars, lying in villages or along roadsides with empty rice bowls and idle chop-sticks. Concerning charitable helpers, the story is a more enheartening one; the British Orthopaedic Society donated equipment to the value of £2,000 Hong Kong dollars (nearly £1,400 sterling) towards the maintenance of the hospital during the first six months of its existence; and so impressed have foreigners in China been with the value of this work that they have relieved Lim of the burden of financial worry in order that the full force of his energies may be directed towards the professional and administrative aspects of this work; the Foreign Auxiliary to the National Red Cross of China has accepted the full financial responsibility for this Orthopaedic centre.
 

Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
I am really marvel at the righteousness of the old peranakan family I mean these people are so westernized and wealthy and generations removed from China But when they hear the cry for help they don't hesitate to leave their creature comfort and jump right in into misery and deprivation to help.
His dream was to established Xiamen university medical school founded by his father but the war prevent that
At the end of the war he was offered ministry of health by KMT but he decline preferring to return to academia.
They don't ask for reward or fame when the war end they just fade away!
They really are the true follower of Confucius! But unfortunately many of the old peranakan family left Singapore
It is good China remember his contribution
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At the onset of war against japan China is completely unprepared the no health care to speak of Only rudimentary plague prevention. Due to neglect the KMT does not do anything Soldier life is dime a dozen they have nobody to count on Dr Lim change all that with his experience in WWI he establish China first frontline medical relief At first only with his student but lack of medical doctor hamper his effort. There are many doctor but they all live under Japanese occupied territory. He personally wrote letter to them encouraging them to help . Not only people but they short of money as well He personally contact his overseas family, friend and clan association asking them for money.

He then train hundred if not thousand of medical personnel and establish hospital all over Chinese held territory of Guizhou,Yunnan, Sichuan. practically establishing modern medical service in the interior of China. Helping not only soldier but refugee and civilian. He literally save thousands of life
At the end of the war he built hundred of hospital across china

Here is more about his life

In the 30's, Lim turned toward serving his country on a larger scale. He became President of the Chinese Medical Association and Chairman of the North China Council for Rural Reconstruction. Lim organized a training corps for reserve medical officers. As the Japanese attacks began,

Lim founded the Chinese Red Cross Medical Relief Commission, and its field units first saw service when the Japanese moved against Shanghai. When fighting spread along the Great Wall, Lim had twelve medical units which treated over 20,000 casualties. He knew that China would require a vast number of persons at all levels of training, and he pressed upon P.U.M.C. the need for mass education of technicians and sanitarians. P.U.M.C, which conceived its mission to be the teaching of teachers, refused to change its standards, and Lim left it for good in 1938.

By 1940, the Chinese Red Cross, under Lim's direction, operated convoys, depots, and medical units. The units, now forty-nine in number, provided treatment and nursing services for the wounded; ambulance units, each with 120 stretcher bearers, brought the wounded, who otherwise would have been left on the field to die, into makeshift hospitals. Lim had by then inaugurated a school designed to train 200 men a month as hospital attendants and stretcher bearers. This and the similar schools he built in the next few years were intended to be the nuclei of future medical schools. Lim built at Kweiyang the largest medical center in wartime China, and he was appointed Inspector General of the Medical Services in 1941.

Following the defeat of the Chinese armies in 1942, Lim accompanied General Joseph Stilwell in the retreat through Burma. He earned the friendship and admiration of Stilwell. When President Roosevelt ordered Stilwell to confer the Order of Merit upon Chiang Kai-shek, Stilwell said: "It will make me want to throw up." * Stilwell was allowed, as an anti-emetic, to pin the same decoration on Lim. In the many memoirs of the period, General Bobby Lim occasionally appears, distinguished amidst the surrounding chaos by his honesty, industry and accomplishments.


When the Nationalist Government was on the point of collapse on the Mainland, Lim was offered the Ministry of Health. After a debate with his staff, all men and women of great integrity and dedication, Lim refused the job. Seeing that Mainland China was untenable, Lim proposed that the medical units be moved to Taiwan and that the government follow. He was able to save equipment and supplies, and he diverted from Shanghai to Taiwan a ship sailing to China with supplies he had ordered.

On Taiwan, Lim built the National Defense Medical College and ten hospitals throughout the island. Lim regretted that he had lost touch with teaching and research, and after twelve years of fighting under desperate circumstances, he wanted to return to the academic life. He resigned as Surgeon General and Lieutenant General and came to the United States. He remained persona grata with the government on Taiwan,f and on cordial terms with General and Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

He revisited the island several times to do research and to arrange for postgraduate training of Chinese physicians in this country. The year before his death, he spent six months on Taiwan, setting up a neurophysiological laboratory. After working briefly in Chicago and Omaha, Lim was invited by Miles Laboratories of Elkhart, Indiana to join its research team. Miles had a proprietary interest in preparations of acetylsalicylic acid, and Lim worked on analgesia. Eventually he was made Senior Research Fellow, and then he did the work on the neurophysiology of pain for which he will probably be best remembered.

HONORS AND DISTINCTIONS M.B., Ch.B., 1919, Edinburgh University Ph.D.,
1920, Edinburgh University D.Sc.,
1924, Edinburgh University D.Sc. (Hon. Causa),
1961, Hong Kong PROFESSIONAL RECORD
1919—1923 Lecturer in Physiology, Edinburgh University
1920 Goodsir Fellow, Edinburgh University
1923-1924 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, University of Chicago
1924-1938 Professor and Head, Department of Physiology, Peking Union Medical College
1939--1941 Director, Emergency Medical Service Training School
1944—1947 Special Lecturer in Physiology, Columbia University
1945 Organizing Director, Institute of Medicine, Academia Sinica
1946-1949 Director, National Defense Medical Center, Republic of China
1949-1950 Visiting Research Professor of Clinical Science, University of Illinois, Chicago
1950-1951 Professor and Head, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Creighton University
1952-1967 Miles Laboratories, Inc., Elkhart, Indiana, Director, Medical Sciences Research, Senior Research Fellow 1968-1969 Visiting Professor of Physiology, University of California, Los Angeles, and Senior Medical Investigator, Veterans Administration Center, Los Angeles
 
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Hendrik_2000

Lieutenant General
This is the society where Dr Robert Lim come from very traditional,elegant, and refine


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Bride head dress from Ming dynasty time very rare I don't think there exist a copy even in China
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Tam

Brigadier
Registered Member
Soundtrack for Genshin Impact being done by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra with traditional folk musicians. The blending of Chinese traditional musical instruments with a Western style symphony orchestra.

 

taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
感动中国 2020

It is a tradition to me to watch this program every year after the Chinese new year celebration. Unfortunately not this year because of the COVID-19. Finally it comes.

It is about the change of a small Tajik (not the same Tajik in Tajikstan but related) village in the Pamir mountains. Similar (only worse) to the cliff village that was featured two years ago, this village was locked by deep valleys most of the year. Children can only go to boarding school in the county city once a year. Many children mostly girls did not go to school because of the difficulty. Finally road and bridge were built. I am specially touched when hearing boys and girls saying what they want to be when growing up.

A small note, their standard mandarin (with a bit Shaanxi Gansu accent) is as good as mine (after removing my Beijing accent).
 
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taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
In this village there is only one person who works as a doctor in the county who is also the only doctor in the village. He is under-educated for a doctor. For this reason, I still believe that "exemptions", "adding scores in Gaokao" or any preferable measure should be maintained for people from such harsh region before their living standard can reach a self-sustainable level close to the rest of China. After all, one can not solely rely on rotating personnel from outside.

Somewhere in the middle of the video, children visited the National Flag guard platoon at Tiananmen. That explains why a girl and a boy wanted to be soldiers.
 
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