Welcome to the official website for Understanding Chinese – A guide to the languages, people & markets of China & the Chinese diaspora, which is a semi-crowdsourced book written by Alex Trup (that’s me), commented on by visitors to this site and then edited and re-edited by myself again.

Who… is this Alex Trup fella and what does he know about Chinese things?

I am Alex Trup (Chinese name 杜安勇), a Londoner living and working in Taipei. When I was at Durham University in the UK, I studied a mixture of Chinese language, culture and business. I’ve previously lived and worked in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. I like to count Chinese people of all shapes and sizes as some of my closest friends and at times even feel more Chinese than I do western.

What… are you trying to achieve and what does “semi-crowdsourced” mean?

This website is essentially a book that’s a work in progress. It contains partially written chapters as and when I get the chance to write them. For many years now, I’ve had a strong passion for and interest in the Chinese language, culture and people and would love to share everything I have learnt, particularly in a practical way that makes it easier for business people coming to the region to make sense of everything going on. I don’t pretend to know absolutely everything about Chinese related topics, nor do I think everything I write here will be as accurate as it can be when I first set pen to paper (or rather hands to keys). With that limitation in mind, I open up virtually all the pages on this site to comments from you and anyone else that wants to contribute their experience, expertise, or resources (such as photos) to this work in progress. In that way I am sourcing from the crowd, but only “semilly” because each page starts as a collection of my own thoughts and research.

Why… would people want to contribute to this project?

All the pages I write for this website are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence. This means that you can take big chunks of text and discuss them on your blog or mash them up in video projects or sing them or a whole host of things that I’m sure I haven’t even thought about. The main caveat is that whatever you do with the text from this site, it shouldn’t be for a commercial project (i.e. one which you make money from) and if it is commercial please let me know and I’m sure we can work out something mutually beneficial

When… did this experiment start and when’s it going to end?

Well, I first authored this page on 3rd November 2009, but I did start laying out chapters on my iPod Touch 2 days prior to that, so lets say 1st November 2009 is the official birthday (I know it’s technically conception, but I’m never going to remember the 3rd). As for when this project will end, well, I hope I can write enough within a year to publish the first edition of this site in book form, but the site itself will hopefully continue to grow indefinitely.