Give | by {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ginnerobot/3118868877/}ginnerobot{/link}

Thanks Giving is here and the upcoming Christmas is also around corner. HO-HO-HO

Have you already planned out your gift list for this holiday season? Is your family planning for a trip to China next year and you want to know more about traveling in China? Do you have a junior one who is curious about the “Middle Kingdom”? Or you want to enrich yourself with some music cd / food cookbook of eastern style? Maybe you can try to give some “China” gifts this holiday season. Well, I mean, gifts which are about China, not just “Made in China” 🙂

Amazon.com, the online retailer giant, has really a wide range collection of good product. Obviously, there are lots of wonderful products about China. Here, ChinaBlog.cc has selected some of the best “China” collections on Amazon.com. They focus on different aspects (General, Travel guides, Nature, Music, Food, Art) and all have great customer reviews.

Do you have any good “China” stuff to recommend? Why not share with us!

BTW: Amazon has “Free 1 month membership to Amazon Prime” promotion going on right now. Get free two-day shipping with no minimum. Works even if you tried before.

General (Culture, History) | Travel Guides | Nature & Wildlife | Chinese Music | Cookbook | Art

General ( Culture, History) :

As the world’s oldest continuous civilization and most populous country, with the fastest-growing economy, China is experiencing profound social, economic, and political change. A detailed exploration of the country’s long, rich history paired with its complex present makes China a one-of-a-kind reference that offers an eye-opening, thought-provoking and authoritative visual guide to one of the world’s great nations. AUTHOR BIO: Written by an international team of China specialists.

To compress 8,000 years of a civilization’s life into a single volume is a daunting task, but University of Illinois historian Patricia Ebrey does the job with authority and considerable flair. Writing with an eye to explaining recurring themes in Chinese history, she discusses ideas of order and statecraft, resource allocation and use, imperialism and population growth. Along the way she makes interesting asides, noting, among other things, that the Mongol conquerors of China monopolized the bamboo trade because they did not want the ethnic Chinese to make weapons, and she gives stimulating overviews of such matters as the manufacture of silk, hardwood furniture, and ceramics.

Travel Guides:

	Traveler Justine Shapiro explores the traditional Southwest of China, the autonomous region of Guangxi, and the provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan, while Megan McCormick journeys though Central China, from Shanghai to the Yellow Mountains, and from the Yangzi River to Xian, the ancient capital of China. Zay Harding completes the tour traveling through the four provinces of Southeast China from Guanzhou to Nanchang. Along the way ¨ Attend a traditional Long Horn Mio ceremony and listen to their amazing singing ¨ Visit the Huangguoshu Waterfalls, the largest in Asia ¨ See the endangered Giant Panda ¨ Visit a silk factory in Suzhou, the silk capital of China, and attend the temple fair celebrating the end of the silk harvest ¨ Walk among the 8,000 terracotta warriors built to guard to tomb of China’s first emperor, Emperor China.
	This first-ever humorous travel guide on China both dishes the dirt on the myriad travel mishaps that may befall any unsuspecting tourist and explains how to avoid them! Possible danger zones debunked include airports, hotels, hospitals, taxis, and bathrooms. Readers will learn essential skills like how to haggle, exchange currencies, cross the street, decipher menus, say useful phrases in Chinese, and more. The guide comes complete with survival tips on etiquette, a map, and resource lists. Don’t leave home for China without it!Veteran travelers Qin and Larry Herzberg are Chinese language and culture professors at Calvin College in Michigan.
	The DK travel guide helps you to get the most out of your trip to China, providing expert recommendations as well as detailed practical information. The opening chapter Introducing China maps the country and sets it in its historical and cultural context. Each of the seven regional sections is divided into area chapters that cover from one to three provinces each. Here you will find descriptions of the most important sights with maps, pictures and illustrations. Hotel and restaurant recommendations can be found in Travelers Needs . The Survival Guide contains practical information on everything from transport personal safety.

Nature & Wildlife:

An exotic fusion of natural history and Oriental adventure, “Wild China” is a series of journeys through four startlingly different landscapes, each based around the travels of a real historical character. With splendour, scale and romance, Wild China lifts the veil on the world’s most enigmatic and magnificent country, delving into its vibrant habitats to reveal a land of unbelievable natural complexity. Journey across China from the glittering peaks of the Himalayas to the barren steppe, the sub-Arctic to the tropical islands, through deserts both searingly hot and mind-numbingly cold and see, in pioneering images, a dazzling array of mysterious, beautiful, wild and rare creatures.

Chinese Music:

	This 2CD set contains a very good selection of Chinese folk music. Various instruments, various ethnicity, various emotions, ancient and contemporary.
	Chinese Lullabies was a finalist for the 1996 NAIRD award for the Best Children’s Music, and is a stunningly lovely CD! The Beijing Angelic Choir, composed of the best voices from several local choirs in Beijing, is distinguished by their sweet, superbly trained voices and musical training. The songs are lightly accompanied, with emphasis, of course, on the singing of the children. The sound is dreamlike, sweet and soaring, almost other-worldly.
	The Hugo Masters: An Anthology of Chinese Classical Music contain extensive documentation of the various instruments used in Chinese solo and orchestral music, with descriptions of their history and modifications, as well as an essay to help Western listeners understand the background of Chinese classical music. The instruments fall into four categories, each constituting a separate compact disk as a collector’s series in a beautifully designed silk boxed set. : Volume I: Bowed Strings II: Plucked Strings III: Woodwinds IV: Percussion

Chinese Food / Cookbook:

San Francisco native and recipe developer Young (The Best of China; The Best of Thailand) recalls the classic Cantonese meals of her youth, sharing family anecdotes and the basic tenets of Chinese cooking.

Chinese Art:

“A completely fresh account of Chinese art … lively and highly accessible.”–Professor Dame Jessica Rawson, Merton College, Oxford “Always lucid and sometime provocative … incorporates not only the most recent archaeological discoveries, but also the insights of a prodigious amount of recent scholarship … invalualbe.”–Professor Julia K. Murray, University of Wisconsin

Wish everyone a happy holiday season. Wish you will enjoy the wonderful China, just like Marco Polo did!