Cathay Cafe




The Chinese Music Shop


  • Explanation of scales and tunings.
  • Examples of scales and tunings for Macintosh users.
  • Examples of scales and tunings for Windows users.


    The Guide's Shop


  • Explanation of Chinese pronunciation.
  • Chart of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions. (At present no instances involving a final -r sound have been included.)



    The Realm of Stars and Powers


  • Chinese beliefs about the planets and their powers, and how these beliefs seem to indicate cultural transmissions between China and the West at an early time. One traditional Chinese ordering of the names of the five planets that are visible to the naked eye is the inverse of the order of the planet names that are given to five of our days of the week. Both begin with the names of the planets arranged in the order of the amount of time it takes them to make one complete revolution around the sun, and then rearrange them according to a rule that probably was not independently invented twice.



    Works of Chinese Literature


    Monkey Xi You Ji, one of the four great Chinese novels, is presented here, chapter by chapter. 

    The Biography of Ying-ying The story of two young people in Tang dynasty China who were physically intimate but never became emotionally intimate. 




  • Modified:2011/02/01
  • Created: 2001/01/07