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Located in the Tarim Basin in southern Xinjiang, the Miran site is well known for its so-called “winged angel” frescos and diverse cultural artifacts dating from the Han Dynasty through Tubo Kingdom (~200 BC–900 AD) periods. This essay presents the first integrated archeobotanical and isotopic investigation on the archeobotanical remains at Miran. Our findings suggest that, despite implementing mixed-crop cultivation, Tibetans at Miran became increasingly invested in drought-resistant millet-based agriculture. New seed δ13C data recovered from naked barley and wheat at Miran provide additional suggestions that medieval Tubo people likely employed improved irrigation techniques at this Silk Road settlement.

Excavations at Tiaotou reveal evidence for cultural continuity through the late third to the mid first millennia BC. This research explores shifts in subsistence, production and ritual at Tiaotou, and the emergence of the Pishan-Tiaotou Culture (1200–1000 BC). Tiaotou/Pishan-Tiaotou represents a missing link among Taihu Lake archaeological cultures and contributes to our knowledge of complex political formations and cultural change in Bronze Age southern China.

Reconstructing the history of elite communication in ancient China benefits from additional archaeological evidence. We combine textual analysis with new human stable carbon and nitrogen isotope data from two Chu burials in the Jingzhou area to reveal significant dietary differences among Chu nobles of the middle Warring States period (c. 350 BC). This research provides important new information on the close interaction between the aristocratic families of the Qin and Chu.

Without rapid international action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, climate scientists have predicted catastrophic sea-level rise by 2100. Globally, archaeologists are documenting the effects of sea-level rise on coastal cultural heritage. Here, the authors model the impact of 1m, 2m and 5m sea-level rise on China's coastal archaeological sites using data from the Atlas of Chinese Cultural Relics and Shanghai City's Third National Survey of Cultural Relics. Although the resulting number of endangered sites is large, the authors argue that these represent only a fraction of those actually at risk, and they issue a call to mitigate the direct and indirect effects of rising sea levels.

The size of global and China’s economy expanded rapidly in recent years, and working on emission of carbon dioxide increased due to environmental change. The relationship between decoupling, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions has been examined extensively, but economic growth efficiency can decouple from carbon reduction efficiency is less explore area specially in country like China. Our work extracted respective productive for economic growth and reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and further evaluated the decoupling relationship at the efficiency level for China’s provinces during 2005–2017. Economic growth efficiency showed a downward trend, whereas the efficiency in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions showed a slight improvement in the whole of China, which was consistent with China’s strong negative decoupling. All three geographic regions in China had an enormous division between efficiency and its decoupling status. In particular, the eastern provinces had the highest efficiency, but the central region exhibited the highest decoupling. Furthermore, the overall performance of the two efficiency indices declined gradually from the eastern provinces to the western provinces and, over time, more provinces improved their decoupling relationship. Above results also helpful to policy implications, which were conductive to balance economy and environment.

Few studies addressed the relationship between the energy efficiency cycle and the export-oriented economic growth style, and our work aimed to contribute this research in the literature using China's dataset during 1985–2018. Results of the autoregressive-distributed-lag model there were two cycles in China's energy efficiency, and the first ranged from 1989 to 2002 while the second was over the period 2003–2012. Meanwhile, the estimations suggested that a 1% export increase was linked to a 0.107% increase in energy efficiency in the long run. However, the export was significantly and negatively associated with the short-run fluctuation of energy efficiency. As a result, the statistical simulation confirmed that export would raise the fluctuation range of energy efficiency.

Although archaeobotanical data of sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) recovered from the sites in China had increased in recent years, the early history of human usage ways of this plant has received less attention. In this study, we collated and reevaluated all published macro-botanical data of lotus from China during 9000 − 1100 BP. The present findings suggest that Neolithic rice growers living in the middle and lower Yangtze and Yellow River basins had made extensive use of lotus roots and seeds as a supplementary starch-based food for subsistence. Furthermore, the medicinal and cultural use of the sacred lotus appears to have developed with the rise of China’s urban aristocracy from the mid-Warring States to the Late Tang Dynasty period. Our study provides the basis for further telling the story of the Chinese people’s long-term interaction with the plants of sacred lotus.

Analysis of plant remains of 73 taxa obtained from the graveyard of the Haihun Marquis (circa 59 bc) at Nanchang, China, is presented. Chronology was confirmed by direct AMS radiocarbon dating of both a seed and wood, while plant seeds were collected by wet sieving. Detailed composition of the samples suggests that the fundamental landscape of the graveyard was composed of Platycladus orientalis, a symbol of solemnity and compatible with the high status of the tomb owner Liu He. Furthermore, seeds of Sapium sebiferum, Castanopsis sclerophylla and Lauraceae, among other high-status plants were also discovered and thus could be included in the landscaping of the graveyard of the Haihun Marquis. In addition, plants like Poaceae, Santalaceae, Cyperaceae and Broussonetia sp., among others, represented a considerable share of the graveyard growth. Fruit stones of Amygdalus persica, Armeniaca mume and Cerasus pseudocerasus discovered in the well may have been included as fruit trees, but grew outside the graveyard. In the main tomb (M1), remains of five plant were discovered, i.e. Oryza sativa (rice), Cannabis sativa (hemp), Setaria italica (foxtail millet) and Cucumis melo (sweet melon), as well as Armeniaca mume (Japanese apricot) and had been placed in the tomb for further use as cereals and fruit by the deceased in the world beyond, thus also demonstrating diversified plant use in the Western Han Dynasty.

Human influence on ecological niches can drive rapid changes in the diet, behaviour and evolutionary trajectories of small mammals. Archaeological evidence from the Late Neolithic Loess Plateau of northern China suggests that the expansion of millet cultivation created new selective pressures, attracting small mammals to fields and settlements. Here, the authors present direct evidence for commensal behaviour in desert hares (Lepus capensis), dating toc. 4900 years ago. Stable isotope ratio analysis of hare bones from the Neolithic site at Yangjiesha shows a diachronic increase in a C4(millet-based) diet, revealing, for the first time, the expansion of ancient human-hare interactions beyond the predator-prey relationship.

Recent archeobotanical work has shed light on prehistoric food globalization across the Eurasian landmass; however, much less research has focused on the foodways of the historical cities and settlements found throughout Central Asia on various portions of the ‘Silk Road’. Here, we present archeobotanical and isotopic results from recent excavations at Shichengzi, a Han dynasty (202 BC–AD 220) military garrison. Our archeobotanical results recovered from 11 samples reveal that four types of cereals, naked barley, wheat, common millet, and foxtail millet, were the most common crops at the site. Naked barley, a drought and cold resistant crop, comprised 79% of the crop assemblage recovered from Shichengzi, and the rest of the assemblage is composed of wheat and millet. The reliance on drought resistant crops indicates that people at Shichengzi oriented their agricultural strategy toward mitigating environmental risks. In addition, our isotopic analyses (δ13C and δ15N) of charred cereal grains ( n = 22), animal and human remains ( n = 12) recovered from excavations at Shichengzi suggests that the δ15N values of cereals were enriched by human or livestock dung. Moreover, the calculated Δ13C values from Shichengzi suggest that farmers preferentially planted their crops in wide areas that would have received a large amount of water available on the northern piedmont of the Tianshan mountains. Our research contributes to the growing understanding of the diversity of agricultural strategies used along the Silk Road.

Migrants enter the labour market as self-employed with employees (as employers), self-employment without employees (as own-account workers), and paid-employment (as salaried employees). This study ...

Our work aimed to build a reasonable proxy for unmet medical demands of China’s urban residents. We combined health demand modeling and stochastic frontier analysis to produce a frontier medical demand function, which allowed us to disentangle unmet medical demands from the unobservable effects. We estimated unmet medical demands by using China’s provincial dataset that covered 2005–2018. Our estimates showed that unmet medical demand at the national level was 12.6% in 2018, and regions with high medical prices confronted more unmet medical demands than regions with moderate or low medical prices during 2005–2018. Furthermore, medical prices and education were the main factors that affected unmet medical demand, therefore, policy making should pay more attention to reducing medical costs and promoting health education.

Aiming at the problem that methods based on background templates in existing substation scenes cannot completely detect salient targets with similar characteristics in some areas and the background, a salient target integrity detection method based on contour detection is proposed. First, extract the initial contours of the input image, use the proposed virtual connection-based contour processing scheme to merge adjacent contours and remove isolated contours, and use the designed shortest path-based closed-loop search scheme to merge the contours with longer distances to obtain Saliency map for contour detection. Then, an adaptive threshold segmentation algorithm is used to process the saliency map based on background template suppression to obtain the binarized saliency map and the salient pixels. By removing the complete area of the contour with the proportion of salient pixels smaller than the specified threshold, an optimized saliency map based on contour detection is obtained. Finally, merge it with the binarized saliency map to obtain a complete saliency map. The results prove that the method in this paper can obtain a better saliency map for images where the saliency target is located at any position.

This study is designed to investigate the impact of pollution on the inequality in health care expenditure. We use the method of stochastic frontier function to model residents’ demand of health ca...

The scale of urbanization in China has more than doubled in the last two decades, with important consequence of transforming the landscape of energy. While the relationship between urbanization and energy use has been examined extensively, the question of whether urbanization affects energy efficiency receives less attention. In this study, we seek to provide new empirical evidence on the effect of urbanization on energy use and efficiency in China. We extend the stochastic frontier approach to model the demand for energy while measuring energy efficiency by distinguishing between efficient- and inefficient-use. Using data from a variety of sources during 2005–2015 to generate an eleven-year province-level panel, we estimate a simultaneous-equation model through a random effects panel data specification. We find that urbanization in China during our sample period is associated with a significant increase in energy consumption, but there is little evidence of improvement in energy efficiency. In particular, our results from our preferred specification suggest that the inefficient-use accounts for approximately 23% of the total energy consumption.

Pollen, as an important index of the paleoenvironment and ancient human agricultural activities, is also one of the significant indicators for research on buckwheat agriculture. In order to test buckwheat pollen dispersal during each crop processing stage, we applied traditional processing simulation experiments of buckwheat crops in a modern village, to collect aerial pollen and perform statistical analysis. The result has shown that the distribution of buckwheat pollen in residential areas is closely related to human processing behaviour. Among all the processing procedures, pollen release rate is highest in the threshing and the sieving stages. The redistribution and burial of pollen during crop processing is an important reason for the prominent increase of crop pollen concentration in the cultural layer. Not only can it indicate the cultivation and processing behaviour of humans but also provide a basis for identifying the crop processing remains in archaeological sites and assessing the intensity of agricultural activities.

With respects to the low level of the healthcare expenditure, China has been experiencing a rapid growth of the education. This article is designed to test the education quantity and the education ...

In this study, the chemical precipitation coating (CP) process was creatively integrated with DLP-stereolithography based 3D printing for refining and homogenizing the microstructure of 3D printed Al2O3 ceramic. Based on this novel approach, Al2O3 powder was coated with a homogeneous layer of amorphous Y2O3; with the coated Al2O3 powder found to make the microstructure of 3D printed Al2O3 ceramic more uniform and refined, as compared with the conventional mechanical mixing (MM) of Al2O3 and Y2O3 powders. The grain size of Al2O3 in Sample CP is 64.44% and 51.43% lower than those in the monolithic Al2O3 ceramic (AL) and Sample MM, respectively. Sample CP has the highest flexural strength of 455.37±32.17 MPa, which is 14.85% and 25.45% higher than those of Samples MM and AL, respectively; also Sample CP has the highest Weibull modulus of 16.88 among the three kinds of samples. Moreover, the fine grained Sample CP has a close thermal conductivity to the coarse grained Sample MM because of the changes in morphology of Y3Al5O12 phase from semi-connected (Sample MM) to isolated (Sample CP). Finally, specially designed fin-type Al2O3 ceramic heat sinks were successfully fabricated via the novel integrated process, which has been proven to be an effective method for fabricating complex-shaped Al2O3 ceramic components with enhanced flexural strength and reliability.

Located in the Jianghan plain in Hubei Province, China, the Wangshanqiao Tomb No. 1 is a large-sized burial belonging to a high-status male from the Chu State during Warring States period (475–221 bc). Here, archaeobotanical studies were applied to the waterlogged plant remains discovered from that tomb dated to around 300 bc. The recovery of a considerable number of well-preserved plant macrofossils suggests that the Chu kingdom noble classes used many plant species including spices such as Sichuan pepper (Zanthoxylum bungeanum), ginger (Zingiber officinale), and Chinese Angelica (Angelica sinensis), as well as fruits and nuts. We discuss the differences in spice usage between noble classes and genders in this southern central part of China from late Bronze to early Iron Ages by examining these data along with other extant archaeobotanical evidence recovered from 33 tombs during around 1100 bc to ad 30. It indicates that the seeds of Sichuan pepper were more widely used in the noble burials of male and female from upper to lower classes than other spices in the southern central part of China from Warring States period (475–221 bc) to Western Han dynasty (202 bc–ad 8).

To reduce industrial wastewater emissions, likely scenarios involve saving water in the production process or treating the emissions that are discharged. In this regard, our paper aims to evaluate the costs of these two paths and then analyze whether the industrial sector has made a good trade-off. In particular, we measured costs of the two paths by shadow prices of water use and wastewater emissions, and then we built a non-parametric input&ndash, output model to produce the estimates. For 2015, the shadow price of water use was 37.85 RMB/ton at the national level, which indicated the marginal cost of saving each ton of water was 37.864 RMB and that of wastewater emissions was 141.759 RMB/ton, which meant that the marginal cost of abating each ton of wastewater emissions was 141.759 RMB. Over the period 2004&ndash, 2015, both shadow prices exhibited an upward trend at the national and regional levels, which suggested there was an increased cost to reduce emissions. However, the two shadow prices did not follow a common trend, but deviated from each other in most of China&rsquo, s provinces, which resulted in a bad trade-off between the two scenarios. As a result, the bad trade-off not only lowered the efficiency to reduce emissions, but it was also linked to a high cost.

Excavations at Shichengzi, the probable location of ancient Shule, have revealed diverse burial practices suggesting a population with varied cultural backgrounds. Together with archaeobotanical evidence, this indicates a community of agro-pastoralists and Han Dynasty migrants using diverse cropping patterns to attain self-sufficiency. The project raises interesting questions about the impact of migrations on the identities of inhabitants.

Supplemental material, Supplementary_Table_2 for Foodways on the Han dynasty’s western frontier: Archeobotanical and isotopic investigations at Shichengzi, Xinjiang, China by Pengfei Sheng, Michael Storozum, Xiaohong Tian and Yong Wu in The Holocene

Water availability and climatic conditions profoundly control agricultural systems in different spatial-temporal conditions. Using new results of archaeobotanical research on the north Loess Plateau and extant macro-botanical data recovered from the eastern part of the north-south Loess Plateau, we investigated the ancient cropping patterns of different agrarian communities living in the marginal area of the East Asian monsoonal climatic zone. It indicated that the common millet ( Panicum miliaceum)–based cropping pattern was dominant in the north Loess Plateau during around 3000–1800 cal. BC. However, there is a preference for foxtail millet ( Setaria italica)–based farming combined with a certain amount of rice ( Oryza sativa) cultivation by the archaeological humans on the south of the Loess Plateau during the same periods. We infer the diverse ways of crop management selected by late Neolithic human beings adapting to various water stress that probably underpinned different developmental trajectories of ancient civilizations on the Loess Plateau during mid-late Holocene.

Recently, the burs of Xanthium strumarium L. were discovered at the Yuergou site (400–200 cal BC) in the Turpan Basin of northwestern China. These burs were hard and medicated with tan or gray color. Compared with previous findings of cockleburs remains in China, the present discoveries of X. strumarium are much larger in terms of the number recovered (138 burs). These represent the most abundant finds of cockleburs (X. strumarium) from archaeological contexts in China directly dating to around 250 cal BC. Moreover, it is interesting that most of these cockleburs were broken with their seeds missing as modern experimental results performed here indicate that they were likely opened by humans with a knife. The cockleburs were likely used as a common medicinal resource and provide us with a glimpse of the wild plant use and daily practices of the ancient inhabitants of the Turpan Basin.

The highly efficient BiOIO3/g-C3N4 with unique nanoflake heterostructures were synthesized through hydrothermal method by simply depositing BiOIO3 flake on the surface of g-C3N4. Photocatalytic ability of nanoflakes was tested by oxidation of gaseous Hg0 under 18 W and 24 W LED light irradiation. The g-C3N4/BiOIO3 composite with the molar ratio of 10:1 exhibited that the Hg0 removal efficiency reached up to 93.7%. The remarkable photocatalytic performance of the as-prepared catalysts can be attributed to the interfacial contact heterostructure formed between BiOIO3 and g-C3N4, which constructs an intimate interfacial interaction between the two components. Moreover, well-matched band structure can efficiently lead to the separation of photogenerated charges.

According to the dynastic chronicles of the Han dynasty, City of Shule (疏勒城) was a large fortress located at in the farthest northwest of the Han Empire. The Shichengzi site was a settlement occupied by Han armies, which was considered as matching the location of City of Shule on the ancient Silk Road in Xinjiang, directly dating to about the first century AD. In the present study, we provide a preliminary investigation on palaeobotanical and palynological evidence recovered from a depositing soil profile at Shichengzi site in northern Tianshan Mountains. Although it shows that natural vegetations around Shichengzi was dominated by desert steppe during the late Holocene period, it can be seen that there was a relatively warm and humid environment when Han armies firstly relocated in the region. This suggests that such an improved climate conditions might have played an important role in supporting the development of Han culture in eastern Central Asia at approximately 2000 BP.

Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is regarded as the best known semiconductor photocatalysts, but its large band gap and low rate of photogenerated charge separation impede the application to solve the environmental contaminations and energy crisis. Reducing band gap and improving electron-hole separation and migration have remained a longstanding challenge. While creating the junctions between different crystal phases and substance is an effective method. In this work, we prepared the V2O5/rutile-anatase photocatalyst system with homo-hetero junctions via a facile incipient wet impregnation method. In this system, the synergetic effects of homo- and hetero-junctions are beneficial to separate the generated electron-hole pairs, facilitate interfacial charge-transfer rate, and reduce band gap, which greatly promote photocatalytic activities. Furthermore, it exhibits an enhanced activity on photocatalytic oxidation of elemental mercury (Hg0), which shows the highest Hg0 oxidation efficiency of 93.58% under visible light. The result suggests that combination of both homo- and hetero- junctions in one photocatalyst is a promising method to improve the photocatalytic activities for solving the environmental contaminations and energy crisis. We believe that the preparation of this new photocatalyst system may be a great assist in the design and preparation of efficient photocatalyst. Meanwhile, this method is sought-after for large-scale industrial applications of photocatalysis.