Eva Chin writes for RECATOOLS on business and commerce in Southeast Asia: the commercial decisions small businesses actually face, and the markets and regulation around them. She also covers Chinese naming and cultural practice, education and qualifications across the region, and the arithmetic of a tropical home. Coverage of cultural practice is educational — it explains what a tradition holds and where it came from, and does not make predictive claims.

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Articles · Home & Living Showing 11–20 of 23

Hands taking a paper rubbing of Chinese characters carved into a stone tablet
Home & Living

The 3,500 commonest Chinese characters mostly have an exact Mandarin homophone

By Unicode's Unihan 17.0 readings, 89% of the 3,500 first-level characters on mainland China's 2013 standard list share their exact Mandarin sound, tone included, with another character on that level. Cantonese spreads the same characters over more syllables and groups them differently.

8 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Several generations of one family standing together outdoors around a baby
Home & Living

Taiwan's marriage law extends to second cousins, and other ways cousins are counted

A cousin's degree and removal come from counting the generations from each person up to the ancestor they share. Counted that way, Taiwan's Civil Code reaches second cousins, while Singapore's and Malaysia's civil marriage statutes for non-Muslims name no cousin.

7 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A small stack of books with Chinese titles on their spines
Home & Living

A Simplified-first pinyin library trips over Taiwan's Zhuyin readings

Run the text of Taiwan's primary-school dictionary through pinyin-pro, a widely used pinyin library, and it disagrees with the ministry's Zhuyin on 1 character in 19. How much its Traditional option and a Simplified-first lookup help, which readings Taiwan teaches differently, and what Unicode's Bopomofo blocks hold.

3 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A pair of bookmarks printed with lines of Chinese verse in calligraphy
Home & Living

Mandarin rhymes share a Pingshui rhyme group about half the time

Two level-tone characters that rhyme exactly in Putonghua share a 平水韵 group only about half the time, by our count of 942 common characters. Where the old groups split, how 中华新韵 and 中华通韵 differ, and what Cantonese and Taiwan readings change.

3 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Red lanterns strung above a pedestrian street lined with Chinese shopfronts
Home & Living

Xiehouyu are mostly metaphors, and many Mandarin puns miss in Cantonese

外甥打燈籠──照舅 is a pun in Mandarin and not in Cantonese. Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary lists 305 xiehouyu and only about one in nine explains a pun; we checked 256 Putonghua pun pairs against CUHK's Cantonese database and about four in ten miss.

3 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A page of a printed Chinese book set in vertical columns of characters
Home & Living

Classical Chinese particles, counted in the Analects and Mencius

About a quarter of the Analects and Mencius is 23 small grammatical words. How often 之, 也, 矣, 焉 and 乎 appear, which ones end a sentence, 乎 as a preposition, the gaokao's 18-word list against the counts, and what Hong Kong and Taiwan set.

3 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
A hand moving a piece on a wooden Chinese chess board
Home & Living

Writing a xiangqi move in Chinese, WXF and ICCS notation

How Chinese chess (象棋) moves such as 炮二平五 are written, why Red and Black number the files differently, when 前 and 后 replace the file, where the conventions for pawns disagree, and the same moves in ICCS and WXF letters.

1 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Three generations of a family seated along one side of a long dining table
Home & Living

What to call your relatives in Chinese, and why one in five has more than one answer

Of 1,195,740 family relationships up to six steps, about 53% have one standard Chinese term, 20% could be several people with different terms, and 26% have no single word. The terms, the in-law words you will meet, and where Taiwan's dictionaries disagree with each other.

30 Sep 2026 · 4 min read
A calligraphy brush resting on an inkstone over a practice sheet of Tang verse characters
Home & Living

How many poems are in 300 Tang Poems, and how many Tang poems survive

The Three Hundred Tang Poems holds 320 poems in the editions we counted, and its preface only ever promised "three hundred and some". The imperial collection of 1707 counted more than 48,900, and the best current estimate of surviving Tang poems is about 53,000.

29 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Bamboo steamer baskets filled with assorted dim sum
Home & Living

What dim sum names mean, and why menus translate them so many ways

Har gow is a shrimp dumpling, cheung fun a rice-noodle roll, and Singapore's carrot cake is really white radish. We copied the English names of 12 classic dishes from 11 restaurant menus: 97 of 102 labels were different, and only har gow and siu mai usually keep their Cantonese names.

23 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
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