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.

194
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~1230 min
Total reading
All 194 Business 125 Chinese Culture 46 Home & Living 23

Articles Showing 61–70 of 194

An open antique book beside a metal armillary sphere in low light
Chinese Culture

A Ziwei chart is four numbers and some arithmetic

The static chart is a function of the year stem, the lunar month, the lunar day and the birth hour. Locating the Life Palace, deriving the bureau and placing the emperor star are all arithmetic, and the leap month is where implementations genuinely disagree.

21 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
An old book of Chinese text lying open under a spotlight
Chinese Culture

Most of a Chinese almanac entry is arithmetic, and the rest disagrees

The day's stem and branch, officer, mansion and clash all follow from the date by formula. The suitable and avoid lists come from a table instead, and for 21 September 2026 one almanac lists opening a business as suitable while another lists it as something to avoid.

21 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
Red wooden prayer plaques marked with the character 福 hanging at a temple
Chinese Culture

Two temples print the same Guanyin oracle and not one of its hundred poems matches

The Guanyin oracle is a set of a hundred numbered poems, drawn by lot in temples across Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Comparing two complete editions character by character, not one of the hundred is identical and sixty-nine differ by nine characters or more — though the story attached to each number still matches on ninety-five.

21 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
A calligraphy brush beside Chinese characters written in black ink
Chinese Culture

Four governments publish stroke order and only one publishes the rules

Taiwan publishes seventeen numbered principles. The mainland publishes 8,105 per-character orders and no principles at all. Hong Kong publishes animations it tells you not to rely on, and Japan's general-use kanji list mentions stroke order zero times.

21 Sep 2026 · 10 min read
An open book printed in columns of Chinese characters
Chinese Culture

How Cangjie turns a Chinese character into five keystrokes

The 24 Cangjie keys are abstract shapes rather than the characters printed on them, and the five-code limit is derived from a count of 594 heads and 9,897 bodies. Working real characters through the rules shows what gets dropped, and which five per cent are handled by closed lists instead.

21 Sep 2026 · 9 min read
Six glass milk bottles standing on a brick windowsill in monochrome
Business

Ultrajaya Buys Frisian Flag and Loses Control of Itself

A Rp14.57 trillion share issue hands FrieslandCampina the largest single holding in the company buying its Indonesian dairy business.

21 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
Condensation running down the inside of a window pane with blurred green foliage behind it
Home & Living

Singapore's humidity swings thirty points a day without the water changing

Relative humidity is a ratio whose denominator moves with temperature, so 70% at 31°C holds two and a half times the water of 70% at 15°C. Computed from the met service's own normals, Singapore's humidity falls thirty points between dawn and afternoon while the actual water content changes by under five per cent.

20 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
Machinery on a factory floor with daylight falling through high windows
Business

A Korean Chipmaker Lost $9.3m in Vietnam. That Was the Small Problem.

The subsidiary reported a net loss of KRW85.7 billion on KRW174 billion of revenue, and the parent injected capital two months later.

20 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
Traffic on a multi-lane Singapore expressway at dusk, with a landscaped central divider
Business

Singapore Welcomed Waymo and Capped How Fast It Can Deploy

The transport minister counted the jobs it would create. His own road authority said driverless cars will not arrive faster than displaced drivers can be retrained.

19 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
A rider in a yellow jacket on an electric scooter waits in a busy street as pedestrians pass behind
Business

Grab Paid $1.49bn for a Lending Business It Chose Not to Build

The cash is only half the arrangement. What the remaining 40 per cent will cost has already been fixed by a formula, floor and cap included, years before anyone pays it.

19 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
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