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Jilin

Jilin is one of the three provinces of Northeast China. Its capital and largest city is Changchun. Jilin borders North Korea (Rasŏn, North Hamgyong, Ryanggang and Chagang) and Russia (Primorsky Krai) to the east, Heilongjiang to the north, Liaoning to the south, and Inner Mongolia to the west. Along with the rest of Northeast China, Jilin underwent an early period of industrialization. However, Jilin's economy, characterized by heavy industry, has been facing economic difficulties with privatization. This prompted the central government to undertake a campaign called "Revitalize the Northeast". The region contains large deposits of oil shale.

Name
The name "Jilin" originates from girin ula, a Manchu phrase meaning "along the river", shortened to Kirin in English. This Manchu term was transcribed into jilin wula ( t 吉林烏拉, s 吉林乌拉) in Chinese characters and shortened the first two characters, which are transcribed in English as Chi-lin (Wade-Giles) and later "Jilin" (Hanyu Pinyin).

History
In ancient times, Jilin was inhabited by the Xianbei, Sushen, the Mohe, Jurchens, and the Wùjí (勿吉). The kingdoms of Buyeo and Goguryeo ruled parts of this area.

The region then fell successively under the domination of the Xiongnu, Xianbei state, Goguryeo, Balhae, Khitan Liao Dynasty, the Jurchen Jin Dynasty, and the Mongol Yuan dynasty. During the Qing Dynasty, much of the area was under the control of the General of Jilin (Girin i Jiyanggiyūn), whose area of control extended to encompass much of what is Russia's Primorsky Krai today.

After the Primorsky Krai area was ceded to Russia in 1860, the government began to open the area up to Han Chinese migrants, most of whom came from Shandong. By the beginning of the 20th century, Han Chinese had become the dominant ethnic group of the region. In 1932, the area was incorporated into Manchukuo, a puppet state set up by Japan. Changchun (then called Xinjing), capital of Jilin today, was made the capital of Manchukuo. After the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Red Army captured Jilin after Operation August Storm. The region, with the rest of northeastern China, was ceded to the Communists by the Soviet Union. Manchuria was the staging ground from which the communists eventually conquered the rest of China in the Chinese Civil War.

In 1949, Jilin province was smaller, encompassing only the environs of Changchun and Jilin City, and the capital was at Jilin City, while Changchun was a municipality independent from the province. In the 1950s, Jilin was expanded to its present borders. During the Cultural Revolution, Jilin was expanded again to include a part of Inner Mongolia, giving it a border with the independent state of Mongolia, though this was later reversed.

In recent times Jilin has, with the rest of heavy industry-based Northeast China, been facing economic difficulties with privatization. This prompted the central government to undertake a campaign called "Revitalize the Northeast".

Geography
Jilin lies in the central part of northeastern China, bordering Russia and North Korea in the east and southeast respectively. Jilin has an area of 190,000 km2 and a population of 24 million. Its capital is Changchun, which lies 113 km west of Jilin City. Jilin is rich in natural mineral deposits with 136 types of minerals, of which 70 have been extracted. Jilin has an abundance of Traditional Chinese medicine resources, with approximately 27,000 kinds of wild plants and 9,000 kinds of medicinal herbs.

The province is rich in large reserves of oil, gas, coal, iron, nickel, molybdenum, talc, graphite, gypsum, cement rock, gold and silver; its reserves of oil shale are the largest in the country.

Jilin is highest in altitude in the southeast and drops gently towards the northwest. The Changbai Mountains run through its southeastern regions and contains the highest peak of the province, Paektu Mountain at 2744 m. Other ranges include the Jilinhada Mountains, Zhang Guangcai Mountains, and Longgang Mountains.

Jilin is drained by the Yalu and Tumen rivers in the extreme southeast (which together form parts of the border between the People's Republic of China and North Korea), by tributaries of the Liao River in the southwest, and by the Songhua and Nen rivers in the north, both eventually flowing into the Amur.

Jilin has a northerly continental monsoon climate, with long, cold winters and short, warm summers. Average January temperatures range from −20 to −14 °C. Rainfall averages at 350. to 1000. mm. Major cities in this province include Changchun, Jilin City, Baishan, Baicheng, Siping, Yanji, Songyuan, Tonghua and Liaoyuan.

Administrative divisions
Jilin consists of nine prefecture-level divisions: eight prefecture-level cities (including a sub-provincial city) and one autonomous prefecture:

These nine prefecture-level divisions are in turn subdivided into 60 county-level divisions (21 districts, 20 county-level cities, 16 counties, and three autonomous counties). (See List of administrative divisions of Jilin.) These administrative divisions are explained in greater detail at Administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China. At the end of the year 2017, the total population is 27.17 million.

Politics
The politics of Jilin is structured in a dual party-government system like all other governing institutions in mainland China.

The Governor of Jilin is the highest-ranking official in the People's Government of Jilin. However, in the province's dual party-government governing system, the Governor has less power than the Jilin Chinese Communist Party Provincial Committee Secretary, colloquially termed the "Jilin CCP Party Chief".

Economy
In 2011, the nominal GDP of Jilin province totaled RMB 1053.1 billion (US$167.1 billion). Its GDP has been rising at a double-digit rate since 2003, growing 51 percent from 2003 to 2007. Per capita nominal GDP increased to RMB 26,289 (US$3,848) in 2009. Meanwhile, the incremental value and profit of large enterprises witnessed an increase of 19 percent and 30 percent respectively, compared with 2005 figures.

Jilin's agricultural production is centered upon rice, wheat, maize, and sorghum. Rice is mostly cultivated in the eastern parts, such as Yanbian Prefecture. The Changbai Mountains are an important source of lumber. Sheep herding is an important activity in the western parts, such as Baicheng.

Among its natural resources, Jilin has the largest reserves of shale oil and one of the top five largest mineral reserves in China. Compared to other provinces of China, Jilin has extensive deposits of Kieselguhr, wollastonite, floatstone, and molybdenum.

Industry in Jilin is concentrated on automobiles, train carriages, and iron alloy.

Jilin is one of the most important commodity grain bases in China. It is ranked 6th in timber production.

Traditionally, Jilin has been known as a major pharmaceutical center, with yields of ginseng and deer antlers among the largest in China, being used extensively in the field of Chinese medicine.

Jilin New and Hi-tech Industry Development Zone
The zone was founded in 1992 and is in Jilin city, covering 818 km2 of planned area with 242 km2 established. The leading industries in the zone are new materials, refined chemical products, integration of photoelectron and mechanism, electronics, medicine and bioengineering. A mere 14 km from Songhua Lake, the nearest bus and train stations are within 3 km.

The Jilin Economic and Technological Development Zone was founded in May 1998 and is in the northeast of Jilin city. The zone has a total planned area of 28 km2. It is 90 km from Changchun, 5 km from Jilin Airport, and 8 kmfrom Jilin Railway Station.

Major industries include refined chemicals, bioengineering, fine processing of chemical fiber, and farm products. It is divided into four parts: the Chemical Industrial Park, the Food Industrial Park, the Textile Industrial Park, and the Medical Industrial Park. The latter specializes in the development of traditional Chinese pharmaceuticals, mini molecule medicine, bio-pharmaceuticals and health products.

State-level ETDZs Changchun Economic and Technological Development Zone
In 1993, with the approval of the state, Changchun Economic & Technological Development Zone (CETDZ) became a state-level economic and technological development zone. The total area of CETDZ is 112.72 km2, of which 30 km2 has been set aside for development and use. By the end of 2006, the total fixed assets investment of the Changchun Economic and Technological Development Zone reached 38.4 billion yuan. There were 1656 registered enterprises in this zone including 179 foreign-funded enterprises. The regional gross product of the zone reached 101.8 billion yuan; industrial output value reached 233.0 billion Yuan; overall financial revenue reached 15.7 billion yuan.

Changchun is also the location of one of the largest factories where CRRC manufactures bullet trains. In November 2016, CRCC Changchun unveiled the first bullet train carriages in the world that would have sleeper berths, and would be capable of running in ultra low temperature environments. Nicknamed Panda, they are capable of running at 250 kmph, operate at -40 degrees Celsius, have Wi-Fi hubs and contain sleeper berths that fold into seats during the day.

Changchun High-Tech Industrial Development Area is connected by four roads and one light-rail line to the downtown area. The nearest train station, Changchun Station, is twenty minutes away by light rail. In 2002, Changchun HDA became the first area in Northeast China to qualify for the environmental certification of ISO14001. Its landscaping ratio reaches 38%.
 * State-level HIDZs Changchun High-Tech Industrial Development Area

Hunchun Border Economic Cooperation Zone was approved to be national-level border economic cooperation zone in 1992, with a planning area of 24 km2. In 2002 and 2001, the Hunchun Export Processing Zone and Hunchun Sino-Russia Trade Zone were set up in it. It has a strategic location at the junction of the borders of China, Russia and Korea. It focuses on the development of sea food processing, electronic product manufacture, bio-pharmaceuticals, textile industry and other industries.
 * Hunchun Border Economic Cooperation Zone

The Hunchun Export Processing Zone is in 5 km2 area is in the Hunchun Border Economic Cooperation Zone. Its planned area is 2.44 km2. It relies on the same infrastructure and policies as its parent zone.
 * Hunchun Export Processing Zone

Infrastructure
There are 35216 km of highways, including over 500 km of expressways.

The province has a rail network, begun by the Japanese, with Changchun as its main hub. There are four major new railway projects which started construction in 2007. One of these, the Harbin–Dalian High-Speed Railway connecting Harbin with Dalian via Changchun was completed in 2012. Trains on the line can travel at up to 350 km/h. The four railway projects were estimated to cost RMB13 billion, and the province urged foreign investors to invest in them. A line from Changchun to Jilin City, expected to be completed in 2015, was expected to cut the journey times between the cities from 96 minutes to 30. The railway network in Jilin can be divided into two directions in the northwest–southeast and southwest–northeast. The main trunk line Beijing-Harbin railway runs through the north and south of Jilin. From Jilin Province, it can go directly to Harbin, Shenyang, Dalian, Beijing, Tianjin, Xi'an, Shijiazhuang, Wuhan, Jinan, and so on. By the end of 2015, the railway business mileage of Jilin province reached 4877.4 km.

The main commercial airport is Changchun Longjia International Airport; other commercial airports include Yanji Chaoyangchuan International Airport, Tonghua Sanyuanpu Airport, Baicheng Chang'an Airport, Songyuan Chaganhu Airport and Changbaishan Airport.

Jilin is landlocked. River navigation is possible from April to November. The major river ports are at Da'an, Jilin city and Fuyu. In 2007, Jilin started construction on a two-phase RMB60 million comprehensive river port; the first phase is finished. The port is on the Songhua River, has an annual throughput of two million tons, and will connect to the waterways of Northeast China. Aviation takes Changchun as the center, supplemented by Yanji and Baishan. It can go directly to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Haikou, Ningbo, Dalian, Kunming, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and so on. Changchun Longjia Airport, Yanji Airport, Tonghua Sanyuanpu Airport and Changbaishan Airport, etc.

Demographics
Jilin is inhabited by Han Chinese, Manchus, Hui, Mongols and Xibe. Most ethnic Koreans live in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. The Manchu people were once the majority in the area of Jilin, making it part of their historical region. With the adoption of Han culture and the Chinese languages by the Manchu people, the Manchu language is considered a critically endangered language. Koreans comprise about 4% of the population, owing to its proximity to the Korean Peninsula. The majority of the province speaks Mandarin.

Excludes members of the People's Liberation Army in active service.

Culture
Jilin is part of Northeast China and shares many similarities in culture to neighbouring regions, such as Errenzhuan and Yangge. Among its music, Jiju, or Jilin Opera, is a form of traditional entertainment that Jilin has innovated over its short migrant history.

The ethnic Koreans of Jilin have a distinct culture, closely tied to Korea.

Languages

The majority of the province speaks Mandarin, the official language of China. Closer to the east, many people speak Korean. Some people of Qian Gorlos autonomous county speak Mongolian.

Tourism
The Goguryeo sites and tombs found in Ji'an, Jilin, including Hwando Mountain City, Gungnae City, and the pyramidal Tomb of the General, have been listed as part of the Capital Cities and Tombs of the Ancient Koguryo Kingdom, a World Heritage Site.

Paektu Mountain, especially Heaven Lake on the border with North Korea, are popular tourist destinations due to their natural scenery.

Ancient Tombs at Longtou Mountain, including the Mausoleum of Princess Jeonghyo, are royal tombs of Balhae found in Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.

Universities and colleges

 * Jilin University (吉林大学)
 * Jilin Medical College (吉林医药学院)
 * Northeast Normal University (东北师范大学)
 * Jilin Agricultural University (吉林农业大学)
 * Jilin Normal University (吉林师范大学)
 * Changchun University of Science and Technology (长春理工大学)
 * Changchun University of Technology (长春工业大学)
 * Changchun Normal University (长春师范大学)
 * Changchun University (长春大学)
 * Changchun Taxation College (长春税务学院)
 * Yanbian University of Science and Technology (延边科技大学)
 * Yanbian University (延边大学)
 * Northeast China Institute of Electric Power Engineering (东北电力学院)
 * Jilin College of Electrification
 * Changchun Institute of Post & Telecommunications (长春邮政学院)
 * Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics
 * Beihua University
 * Jilin Agricultural Science and Technology University
 * Changchun Institute of Technology (长春工程学院)

Professional teams

 * Chinese Basketball Association
 * Jilin Northeast Tigers
 * Chinese Super League
 * Changchun Yatai
 * China League One
 * Yanbian Longding

Notable individuals

 * O Kuk-ryol, Chinese-born North Korean general and politician
 * Choe Hyon, Chinese-born North Korean general and politician
 * Ri Tu-ik, Chinese-born North Korean vice-marshal and politician
 * Li Hongbo, sculptor
 * Guo Junchen, actor
 * Wei Daxun, actor
 * Huang Renjun, main vocalist and lead dancer of K-pop boyband NCT and NCT Dream

title: Jilin


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Ferdinand von Zeppelin

Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin; 8 July 1838 – 8 March 1917) was a German general and later inventor of the Zeppelin rigid airships. His name became synonymous with airships and dominated long-distance flight until the 1930s. He founded the company Luftschiffbau Zeppelin.

Family and personal life
Ferdinand was the scion of a Zeppelin (noble family). Zepelin, the family's eponymous hometown, is a small community outside the town of Bützow in Mecklenburg. Ferdinand was the son of Württemberg Minister and Hofmarschall Friedrich Jerôme Wilhelm Karl Graf von Zeppelin (1807–1886) and his wife Amélie Françoise Pauline (born Macaire d'Hogguer) (1816–1852). Ferdinand spent his childhood with his sister and brother at their Girsberg manor near Konstanz, where he was educated by private tutors. Ferdinand married Isabella Freiin von Wolff in Berlin. She was from the house of Alt-Schwanenburg (located in the present-day town of Gulbene in Latvia, then part of Livonia). They had a daughter, Helene (Hella) von Zeppelin (1879–1967) who in 1909 married Graf Alexander von Brandenstein-Zeppelin (1881–1949).

Ferdinand had a nephew, who volunteered at the start of World War I, after he was past military age, to become general staff officer assigned to the military airship LZ 12 Sachsen.

Army career
In 1853, Count Zeppelin left to attend the polytechnic at Stuttgart, and in 1855 he became a cadet of the military school at Ludwigsburg and then started his career as an army officer in the army of Württemberg.

By 1858, Zeppelin had been promoted to lieutenant, and that year he was given leave to study science, engineering and chemistry at Tübingen. Würtemberg's mobilising for the Austro-Sardinian War interrupted this study in 1859 when he was called up to the Ingenieurkorps (Würtemberg engineering corps) at Ulm.

In 1863, Zeppelin took leave to act as an observer for the Union's Army of the Potomac in the American Civil War in Virginia. Later, he travelled to the Upper Midwest with a party that probably included two Russians. Led by Native American (probably Ojibwe) guides, they canoed and portaged from the western end of Lake Superior up the St. Louis River and across to Crow Wing, Minnesota, on the Upper Mississippi River. On reaching St. Paul (via stagecoach and hired carriage), Zeppelin encountered German-born itinerant balloonist John Steiner and made his first aerial ascent with him from a site near the International Hotel in downtown St. Paul on 19 August. Many years later he attributed the beginning of his thinking about dirigible lighter-than-air craft to this experience.

In 1865, Zeppelin was appointed adjutant of the King of Württemberg and as general staff officer participated in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. He was awarded the Ritterkreuz (Knight's Cross) of the Military Merit Order of Württemberg. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 a reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines, during which he narrowly avoided capture, made him famous among many Germans.

From 1882 until 1885, Zeppelin was commander of the 19th Uhlans in Ulm, and was then appointed to be the envoy of Württemberg in Berlin. In 1890, he gave up this post to return to army service, being given command of a Prussian cavalry brigade. His handling of this at the 1890 autumn manoeuvres was severely criticised and he was forced to retire from the Army, albeit with the rank of generalleutnant.

Promotions

 * 23 September 1858: Lieutenant (as of December 1871 Second-Lieutenant, as of January 1899 Leutnant)
 * 22 September 1862: Ober-Lieutenant (as of December 1871 Premier-Lieutenant, as of January 1899 Oberleutnant)
 * 31 March 1866: Rittmeister
 * 4 May 1873: Major
 * 18 September 1880: Oberstlieutenant (as of January 1899 Oberstleutnant)
 * 12 January 1884: Oberst
 * 4 August 1888: Generalmajor
 * 18 November 1890: Generallieutenant (as of January 1899 Generalleutnant)
 * 5 December 1905: Charakter als General der Kavallerie

Airships
Ferdinand von Zeppelin served as an official observer with the Union Army during the American Civil War. During the Peninsular Campaign, he visited the balloon camp of Thaddeus S. C. Lowe shortly after Lowe's services were terminated by the Army. Von Zeppelin then travelled to St. Paul, MN where the German-born former Army balloonist John Steiner offered tethered flights. His first ascent in a balloon, made at Saint Paul, Minnesota during this visit, is said to have been the inspiration of his later interest in aeronautics.

Zeppelin's ideas for large airships were first expressed in a diary entry dated 25 March 1874. Inspired by a recent lecture given by Heinrich von Stephan on the subject of "World Postal Services and Air Travel", he outlined the basic principle of his later craft: a large rigidly-framed outer envelope containing a number of separate gasbags. In 1887, the success of Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs' 1884 airship La France prompted him to send a letter to the King of Württemberg about the military necessity for dirigibles and the lack of German development in this field.

After his resignation from the army in 1891 at age 52, Zeppelin devoted his full attention to airships. He hired the engineer Theodor Gross to make tests of possible materials and to assess available engines for both fuel efficiency and power-to-weight ratio. He also had air propellers tested and strove to obtain higher purity hydrogen gas from suppliers. Zeppelin was so confident of his concept that in June 1891 he wrote to the King of Württemberg's secretary, announcing he was to start building, and shortly after requested a review from the Prussian Army's Chief of General Staff. The next day Zeppelin almost gave up as he realized he had underestimated air resistance, but resumed work on hearing that Hans Bartsch von Sigsfeld made light but powerful engines, information soon shown to be overoptimistic. Whereupon Zeppelin urged his supporter Max von Duttenhofer to press Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft for more efficient engines so as not to fall behind the French. Duttenhofer wrote to Gross threatening to withdraw support, and Zeppelin shortly afterwards sacked Gross, citing Gross's lack of support and writing that he was "an obstacle in my path".

Despite these setbacks, Zeppelin's organization had refined his idea: a rigid aluminium framework covered in a fabric envelope; separate multiple internal gas cells, each free to expand and contract thus obviating the need for ballonets; modular frame allowing addition of sections and gas cells; controls, engines and gondola rigidly attached. After publishing the idea in March 1892 he hired the engineer Theodor Kober who started work testing and further refining the design. Zeppelin submitted Kober's 1893 detailed designs to the Prussian Airship Service, whose committee reviewed it in 1894. In June 1895 this committee recommended minimum funds be granted, but withdrew this offer and rejected the design in July.

One month later, in August 1895, Zeppelin received a patent for Kober's design, described as an "airship-train" (Lenkbarer Luftfahrzug mit mehreren hintereinanderen angeordneten Tragkörpern [Steerable airship-train with several carrier structures arranged one behind another].) The patent describes an airship consisting of three rigid sections flexibly connected. The front section, intended to contain the crew and engines, was 117.35 m long with a gas capacity of 9514 cu m (336,000 cu ft): the middle section was 16 m long with an intended useful load of 599 kg and the rear section 39.93 m long with an intended load of 1996 kg

In early 1896, Zeppelin's lecture on steerable airship designs given to the Association of German Engineers (VDI) so impressed them that the VDI launched a public appeal for financial support for him. This led to a first contact with Carl Berg who supplied aluminium alloys which Zeppelin had tested, and by May 1898 they, together with Philipp Holzmann, Daimler, Max von Eyth, Carl von Linde, and Friedrich Voith, had formed the joint stock company Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt. Zeppelin invested 441,000 Marks, over half the total capital. Actual construction then started of what was to be the first successful rigid airship, the Zeppelin LZ1.

Berg's involvement with the project later led to allegations that Zeppelin had used the patent and designs of David Schwarz's airship of 1897. Berg had signed a contract with Schwartz under the terms of which he undertook not to supply aluminium to any other airship manufacturer. He later made a payment to Schwartz's widow as compensation for dissolving this arrangement. Claims that Zeppelin had been influenced by Schwartz were denied by Eckener in 1938 and also rejected by later historians. Zeppelin's design was "radically different" in both its scale and its framework from that of Schwarz.

On 2 July 1900, Zeppelin made the first flight with the LZ 1 over Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen in southern Germany. The airship rose from the ground and remained in the air for 20 minutes, but was damaged on landing. After repairs and some modifications two further flights were made by LZ 1 in October 1900, However the airship was not considered successful enough to justify investment by the government, and since the experiments had exhausted Count Zeppelin's funds, he was forced to suspend his work.

Zeppelin still enjoyed the support of the King of Württemberg, who authorised a state lottery which raised 124,000 marks. A contribution of 50,000 marks was received from Prussia, and Zeppelin raised the remainder of the necessary money by mortgaging his wife's estates. Still supported by Daimler and Carl Berg, construction of his second airship, the LZ 2, was started in April 1905. It was completed by 30 November, when it was first taken out of its hangar, but a ground-handling mishap caused the bows to be pulled into the water, damaging the forward control surfaces. Repairs were completed by 17 January 1906, when LZ 2 made its only flight. Too much ballast was jettisoned on takeoff, causing the airship to rise to an altitude of 427 m. Here a stiff breeze was encountered, and although the airship was at first able to overcome this, the failure of the forward engine due to cooling problems followed by the failure of the other due to a broken clutch-spring left the airship at the mercy of the wind. It was brought down near Kisslegg in the Allgäu mountains, with some damage caused by the stern's striking some trees during mooring, but was more severely damaged by high winds the following night, and had to be dismantled. In May 1906, work started on a third airship, LZ 3. This was the same size and configuration as LZ 2, but had a greater gas capacity. Finished by the end of the year, it made two successful flights at a speed of 30 mph, and in 1907 attained a speed of 36 mph. The success of LZ 3 produced a change in the official attitude to his work, and the Reichstag voted that he should be awarded 500,000 marks to continue his work. However the purchase by the Government of an airship was made conditional on the successful completion of a 24‑hour trial flight. Knowing that this was beyond the capabilities of LZ 3, work was started on a larger airship, the LZ 4. This first flew on 20 June 1908. The final financial breakthrough only came after the Zeppelin LZ 4 was destroyed by fire at Echterdingen after breaking free of its moorings during a storm. The airship's earlier flights had excited public interest in the development of the airships, and a subsequent collection campaign raised over 6 million German marks. The money was used to create the 'Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin GmbH' and the Zeppelin foundation (Zeppelin Stiftung).

Following the destruction of LZ 4, LZ 3, which had been damaged when the floating hangar broke free of its mooring during a storm, was repaired: at the same time it was lengthened by 8 m. It was re-inflated on 21 October 1908 and after a series of short test flights a flight lasting 5 hours 55 minutes took place on 27 October with the Kaiser's brother, Admiral Prince Heinrich, on board. On 7 November, with Crown Prince William as a passenger, it flew 80 km to Donaueschingen, where the Kaiser was then staying. In spite of poor weather conditions, the flight succeeded: two days later LZ 3 was officially accepted by the Government and on 10 November Zeppelin was rewarded with an official visit to Friedrichshafen by the Kaiser, during which a short demonstration flight over Lake Constance was made and Zeppelin awarded the Order of the Black Eagle.

Although a replacement for LZ 4, the LZ 5 was built and accepted into Army service as L II, Zeppelin's relationship with the military authorities continued to be poor, and deteriorated considerably due to his criticism of the Army following the loss of L II, which was carried away from its moorings and wrecked on 25 April 1910. However, the business director of Luftschiffbau-Zeppelin, Alfred Colsman, came up with a scheme to capitalise on the public enthusiasm for Zeppelin's airships by establishing a passenger-carrying business. Up until 1914 the German Aviation Association (Deutsche Luftschiffahrtsgesellschaft or DELAG) transported 37,250 people on over 1,600 flights without an incident. Within a few years the zeppelin revolution began creating the age of air transportation. During the First World War, Imperial Germany decided to deploy Zeppelins as long-distance bombers, launching numerous attacks upon Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom.

Other aircraft

 * 1899 unrealised plans for a paddlewheel aeroplane
 * 1912 financial support of Flugzeugbau Friedrichshafen which was to supply 850 aeroplanes 1917/1918;
 * 1914 commissions Claude Dornier to develop flying boats
 * 1914 founds Versuchsbau Gotha-Ost with Robert Bosch which built a number of Riesenflugzeug (giant aircraft) such as the Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI

Family
Count Everhard von Zeppelin, Second Lieutenant in the German Lancers, married November 1895, Mamie McGarvey, daughter of William H. McGarvey, owner of the oil wells of Galicia and his wife, Helena J. Wesolowska. A former Count von Zeppelin married a granddaughter of the 1st Earl of Ranfurly.

Legacy
Count Zeppelin died early in 1917, before the end of World War I. He did not live to witness either the provisional shutdown of the Zeppelin project due to the Treaty of Versailles or the second resurgence of the Zeppelins under his successor Hugo Eckener.

The unfinished World War II German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, and two rigid airships, the world-circling LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin, and LZ 130 Graf Zeppelin II, twin to the Hindenburg, were named after him.

In 1975, Zeppelin was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame.

Cultural references
The name of the British rock group Led Zeppelin derives from his airships. His granddaughter Countess Eva von Zeppelin once threatened to sue them for illegal use of their family name while they were performing in Copenhagen.

A 1974 episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus (Series 4, Episode 1, The Golden Age Of Ballooning) features a skit in which Count Zeppelin (Graham Chapman) has taken various members of the government up in his ship for a promotional flight, only to get angry and throw each guest out of the ship's gondola (while still in the air) over the perceived insult of everyone referring to the craft as a balloon instead of his preferred airship or Zeppelin.

Honours and awards

 * Honorary citizen of the cities of Friedrichshafen (1907), Konstanz, Worms and Stuttgart (1908), Munich and Lindau (1909), Baden-Baden (1910), and Ulm (1912)
 * Honorary doctorates from the Universities of Leipzig, Tübingen (1908) and Dresden
 * Honorary member of the Natural History Society of Württemberg, 1910

Orders and decorations
• Württemberg:

• * Service Award Cross, 1st Class

• * Knight of the Military Merit Order, 18 August 1866; Commander, 1 March 1875; Grand Cross, ca. 1907

• * Knight of Honour of the Württemberg Crown, with Swords, 1870; Commander, 1889; Grand Cross, ca. 1912

• * Commander of the Friedrich Order, 2nd Class, 1883; Grand Cross, 1899

• * Grand Gold Medal for Arts and Sciences, on Band of the Württemberg Crown Order

• * Silver Karl-Olga Medal

• * Silver Jubilee Medal

•  Baden:

• * Commander of the Zähringer Lion, 2nd Class, 1876

• * Gold Medal for Arts and Sciences, on Band of the Order of Berthold the First

•  Kingdom of Bavaria:

• * Grand Cross of the Military Merit Order

• * Prince Regent Luitpold Medal, in Gold with Crown, 1911

•  Brunswick: Gold Medal of Merit for Arts and Sciences

•    Ernestine duchies: Grand Cross of the Saxe-Ernestine House Order

•  Grand Duchy of Hesse: Grand Cross of the Merit Order of Philip the Magnanimous, with Swords, 24 March 1893

•  Mecklenburg:

• * Military Merit Cross, 2nd Class (Schwerin)

• * Grand Cross of the Wendish Crown, with Crown in Gold

•  Kingdom of Prussia:

• * Knight of Honour of the Johanniter Order, 22 July 1868; Knight of Justice, 1896

• * Iron Cross (1870), 2nd Class on Black Band; with Jubilee Clip (25 years), 1895

• * War Commemorative Medal of 1870-1871, 1871

• * Knight of the Red Eagle, 3rd Class, 22 April 1883; 2nd Class; Grand Cross

• * Knight of the Royal Crown Order, 2nd Class, 23 September 1885; 1st Class

• * Knight of the Black Eagle, 10 November 1908

• * Pour le Mérite for Arts and Sciences, 22 May 1910

•  Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach: Commander of the White Falcon, 1883

•  Kingdom of Saxony:

• * Knight of the Albert Order, 1st Class with War Decoration, 1871; Grand Cross, 1889

• * Knight of the Rue Crown

•   Austria-Hungary:

• * Knight of the Iron Crown, 3rd Class, 1867

• * Decoration of Honour for Arts and Sciences, 1913

• * Officer of the Order of Franz Joseph, 1913

• 🇩🇰 Denmark: Grand Cross of the Dannebrog, 18 November 1888

•  French Empire: Knight of the Legion of Honour

•  Russian Empire:

• * Knight of St. Vladimir, 4th Class; 3rd Class

• * Knight of St. Anna, 2nd Class in Brilliants; 1st Class

• * Knight of the White Eagle

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Ferdinand von Zeppelin


text:
Talk:Baguio

"fs_dir.c"
A fascinating way to conclude the article. 66.97.20.206 (talk) 20:23, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 13 October 2020
Remove paragraph 3 in Demographics section, as it is a duplicate of paragraph 2. TKCMSC (talk) 11:55, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ Thanks for pointing this out, . JBW (talk) 12:10, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

climate
Baguio is not tropical monsoon climate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by KeYstoller (talk • contribs) 07:24, January 22, 2021 (UTC)

 * According to the most recent climate data and the Köppen climate classification criteria, Baguio is tropical monsoon because the mean temperature in the coolest month is just above 18 C. For it to be Cwb, at least one month has to have a mean temperature between -3 to 18 C (provided it meets the other criteria for a Cwb climate). Basically, a borderline Am/Cwb which is the correct way to describe the climate. It's wrong to state it is Cwb if it contradicts the data Ssbbplayer (talk) 18:47, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 19 February 2021
Change the name to "Baguió", with an accent. According to the Census of the Philippine Islands from 1903 published by the American congress just after US occupation of the country, the city's name uses an accent denoting stress on the letter 'O'.

If it can't be done, I would suggest to use the accented variant to denote the Spanish name of the city in the etymology section using the reference. 181.64.13.143 (talk) 04:00, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Move-protection-shackle.svg Not done: page move requests should be made at Requested moves. ‑‑ El Hef  ( Meep? ) 17:57, 19 February 2021 (UTC)
 * At least could you include the accented name in the etymology section for the Spanish name? --181.64.13.143 (talk) 20:21, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

That source is 118 years old, and I doubt that anyone since has used an accent mark on the "o". The city government doesn't use it (https://www.baguio.gov.ph/about-baguio-city); neither does Britannica (https://www.britannica.com/place/Baguio); neither does WorldAtlas (https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/biggest-cities-in-the-philippines.html). For that matter, neither do any of the many Filipinos I know, although of course that's not a reliable source. Dgndenver (talk) 01:58, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

"Department of public services" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Department of public services and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 February 6 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  — twotwofourtysix (My talk page and contributions) 07:47, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Baguio


text:
Talk:Persistence of Time

Untitled
OK so I'm an idiot. The Dali painting is Persistence of Memory. Chadloder

The Rolling Stone review has next to nothing to do with the album itself, all it does is talk about metal while coming close to calling it rock and going off on tangents that have absolutely nothing to do with the album itself or even the band, so I don't think it's all that decent of a review and not one that anyone actually looking for a critical, in-depth review of the album itself should be directed to. 207.5.213.97 (talk) 20:56, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

title: Talk:Persistence of Time


text:
Wolf interval

In music theory, the wolf fifth (sometimes also called Procrustean fifth, or imperfect fifth) is a particularly dissonant musical interval spanning seven semitones. Strictly, the term refers to an interval produced by a specific tuning system, widely used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the quarter-comma meantone temperament. More broadly, it is also used to refer to similar intervals (of close, but variable magnitudes) produced by other tuning systems, including Pythagorean and most meantone temperaments.

When the twelve notes within the octave of a chromatic scale are tuned using the quarter-comma meantone systems of temperament, one of the twelve intervals apparently spanning seven semitones is actually a diminished sixth, which turns out to be much wider than the in-tune genuine fifths, In mean-tone systems, this interval is usually from C♯ to A♭ or from G♯ to E♭ but can be moved in either direction to favor certain groups of keys. The eleven perfect fifths sound almost perfectly consonant. Conversely, the diminished sixth used as a substitute is severely dissonant: It sounds like the howl of a wolf, because of a phenomenon called beating. Since the diminished sixth is nominally enharmonically equivalent to a perfect fifth, but in meantone temperament, enharmonic notes are only nearby (within about $1⁄4$ sharp or $1⁄4$ flat); the discordance of substituted interval is called the "wolf fifth".

Besides the above-mentioned quarter comma meantone, other tuning systems may produce severely dissonant diminished sixths. Conversely, in 12 tone equal temperament (12-TET), which is currently the most commonly used tuning system, the diminished sixth is not a wolf fifth, as it has exactly the same size as a perfect fifth.

By extension, any interval which is perceived as severely dissonant and regarded as "howling like a wolf" is called a wolf interval. For instance, in quarter comma meantone, the augmented second, augmented third, augmented fifth, diminished fourth, and diminished seventh may be called wolf intervals, as their frequency ratio significantly deviates from the ratio of the corresponding justly tuned interval (see Size of quarter-comma meantone intervals).

Temperament and the wolf
The reason for "wolf" tones in meantone tunings is the bad practice of performers pressing the key for an enharmonic note as a substitute for a note that has not been tuned on the keyboard; e.g. pressing the black key tuned to G♯ when the music calls for A♭. In all meantone tuning systems, sharps and flats are not equivalent; a relic of which, that persists in modern musical practice, is to fastidiously distinguish the musical notation for two notes which are the same pitch in equal temperament ("enharmonic") and played with the same key on an equal tempered keyboard (such as C♯ and D♭, or  E♯ and F♮), despite the fact that they are the same in all but theory.

In order to close the circle of fifths in 12 note scales, twelve fifths must average out to $700$ cents Each of the first eleven fifths (starting with the fifth below the tonic, the subdominant: F in the key of C, when each black key is tuned to a meantone sharp / no flats) has a value of $700$ cents, where $ε$ is some small number of cents that all fifths are detuned by. In meantone temperament tuning systems, the twelfth and last fifth does not exist in the 12 note octave on the keyboard. The actual note available is really a diminished sixth: The interval is $700 − ε$ cents, and is not a correct meantone fifth, which would be $700 + 11 ε$ cents. The difference of $700 − ε$ cents between the available pitch and the intended pitch is the source of the "wolf". The "wolf" effect is particularly grating for values of $12 ε$ cents that approach $12 ε$ cents A simplistic reaction to the problem is: "Of course it sounds awful: You're playing the wrong note!"

With only 12 notes available in a conventional keyboard's octave, in meantone tunings there must always be omitted notes. For example, one choice for tuning an instrument in meantone, to play music in the key of C♮, would be
 * {| style="text-align:center;"

with this set of chosen notes in bold face, and some of the omitted notes shown in grey.
 * A  ||  || B♭  || B  ||   || C  || C♯  ||   ||    ||
 * D  ||  || E♭  || E  ||   || F  || F♯  ||   || G  || G♯
 * }
 * D  ||  || E♭  || E  ||   || F  || F♯  ||   || G  || G♯
 * }

This limitation on the set meantone notes and their sharps and flats that can be tuned on a keyboard at any one time, was the main reason that Baroque period keyboard and orchestral harp performers were obliged to retune their instruments in mid-performance breaks, in order to make available all the accidentals called for by the next piece of music. Some music that modulates too far between keys cannot be played on a single keyboard or single harp, no matter how it is tuned: In the example tuning above, music that modulates from C major into both A major (which needs G♯ for the seventh note) and C minor (which needs A♭ for its sixth note) is not possible, since each of the two meantone notes, G♯ and A♭, both require the same string in each octave on the instrument to be tuned to their different pitches.

For expediency, keyboard players substitute the wrong diminished sixth interval for a genuine meantone fifth (or neglect retuning their instrument). Though not available, a genuine meantone fifth would be consonant, but in meantone tuning systems (where $ε$ isn't zero) the sharp of any note is always different from the flat of the note above it. A meantone keyboard that allowed unlimited modulation theoretically would require an infinite number of separate sharp and flat keys, and then double sharps and double flats, and so on: There must inevitably be missing pitches on a standard keyboard with only 12 notes in an octave. The value of $ε$ changes depending on the tuning system. In other tuning systems (such as Pythagorean tuning and twelfth-comma meantone), each of the eleven fifths may have a size of $20~25$ cents, thus the diminished sixth is $20~25$ cents. If their difference $700 + ε$, is very large, as in the quarter-comma meantone tuning system, the diminished sixth is used as a substitute for a fifth, it is called a "wolf fifth".

In terms of frequency ratios, in order to close the circle of fifths, the product of the fifths' ratios must be $700 − 11 ε$ (since the twelve fifths, if closed in a circle, span seven octaves exactly; an octave is $12 ε$, and $128$), and if $ε$ is the size of a fifth, $2:1$, or $27 = 128$, will be the size of the wolf.

We likewise find varied tunings for the thirds: Major thirds must average $128 : f11$ cents, and to each pair of thirds of size $f11 : 128$ cents we have a third (or diminished fourth) of $400$ cents, leading to eight thirds $400 ∓ 4 ε$ cents narrower or wider, and four diminished fourths $400 ± 8 ε$ cents wider or narrower than average. Three of these diminished fourths form major triads with perfect fifths, but one of them forms a major triad substituting the diminished sixth for a real fifth. If the diminished sixth is a wolf interval, this triad is called the wolf major triad.

Similarly, we obtain nine minor thirds of $4 ε$ cents and three minor thirds (or augmented seconds) of $8 ε$ cents.

Quarter comma meantone
In quarter-comma meantone, the frequency ratio for the fifth is $300 ± 3 ε$, which is about $300 ∓ 9 ε$ cents flatter than an equal tempered $\sqrt{ 5$ cents, (or exactly one twelfth of a diesis) and so the wolf is about $3.42157$ cents, or $700$ cents sharper than a perfect fifth of ratio exactly $737.637$, and this is the original "howling" wolf fifth.

The flat minor thirds are only about $35.682$ cents sharper than a subminor third of ratio $3:2$, and the sharp major thirds, of ratio exactly $2.335$, are about $7:6$ cents flatter than the supermajor third of $32:25$. Meantone tunings with slightly flatter fifths produce even closer approximations to the subminor and supermajor thirds and corresponding triads. These thirds therefore hardly deserve the appellation of wolf, and in fact historically have not been given that name.

The wolf fifth of quarter-comma meantone can be approximated by the 7-limit just interval $7.712$, which has a size of $9:7$ cents.

Pythagorean tuning
In Pythagorean tuning, there are eleven justly tuned fifths sharper than $49:32$ cents by about $737.652$ cents (or exactly one twelfth of a Pythagorean comma), and hence one fifth will be flatter by twelve times that, which is $700$ cents (one Pythagorean comma) flatter than a just fifth. A fifth this flat can also be regarded as "howling like a wolf." There are also now eight sharp and four flat major thirds.

Five-limit tuning
Five-limit tuning was designed to maximize the number of pure intervals, but even in this system several intervals are markedly impure. 5-limit tuning yields a much larger number of wolf intervals with respect to Pythagorean tuning, which can be considered a 3-limit just intonation tuning. Namely, while Pythagorean tuning determines only 2 wolf intervals (a fifth and a fourth), the 5-limit symmetric scales produce 12 of them, and the asymmetric scale 14. It is also important to note that the two fifths, three minor thirds, and three major sixths marked in orange in the tables (ratio $1.955$, $23.460$, and $40:27$; or G↓, E♭↓, and A↑), even though they do not completely meet the conditions to be wolf intervals, deviate from the corresponding pure ratio by an amount (1 syntonic comma, i.e., $32:27$, or about $27:16$ cents) large enough to be clearly perceived as dissonant.

Five-limit tuning determines one diminished sixth of size $81:80$ (about $21.5$ cents, i.e. $1024:675$ cents sharper than the $722$ Pythagorean perfect fifth). Whether this interval should be considered dissonant enough to be called a wolf fifth is a controversial matter.

Five-limit tuning also creates two impure perfect fifths of size $20$. Five-limit fifths are about $3:2$ cents; less pure than the $40:27$ Pythagorean and/or just $680$ perfect fifth. They are not diminished sixths, but relative to the Pythagorean perfect fifth they are less consonant (about $3:2$ cents flatter) and hence, they might be considered to be wolf fifths. The corresponding inversion is an impure perfect fourth of size $701.95500 cent$ (about $20$ cents). For instance, in the C major diatonic scale, an impure perfect fifth arises between D and A, and its inversion arises between A and D.

Since in this context the term perfect is interpreted to mean 'perfectly consonant', the impure perfect fourth and perfect fifth are sometimes simply called the imperfect fourth and fifth. However, the widely adopted standard naming convention for musical intervals classifies them as perfect intervals, together with the octave and unison. This is also true for any perfect fourth or perfect fifth which slightly deviates from the perfectly consonant $27:20$ or $520$ ratios (for instance, those tuned using 12 tone equal or quarter-comma meantone temperament). Conversely, the expressions imperfect fourth and imperfect fifth do not conflict with the standard naming convention when they refer to a dissonant augmented third or diminished sixth (e.g. the wolf fourth and fifth in Pythagorean tuning).

"Taming the wolf"
Wolf intervals are a consequence of mapping a two-dimensional temperament to a one-dimensional keyboard. The only solution is to make the number of dimensions match. That is, either:

 * Keep the (one-dimensional) piano keyboard, and shift to a one-dimensional temperament (e.g., equal temperament), or

 * Keep the two-dimensional temperament, and shift to a two-dimensional keyboard.

Keep the piano keyboard
When the perfect fifth is tempered to be exactly $4:3$ cents wide (that is, tempered by almost exactly $ε$ of a syntonic comma, or precisely $f$ of a Pythagorean comma) then the tuning is identical to the now-standard 12 tone equal temperament.

Because of the compromises (and wolf intervals) forced on meantone tunings by the one-dimensional piano-style keyboard, well temperaments and eventually 12-tone equal temperament became more popular.

A fifth of the size Mozart favored, at or near the 55 equal temperament fifth of 698.182 cents, will have a wolf of $3:2$ cents: $700$ cents sharper than a justly tuned fifth. This howls far less acutely, but is still noticeable.

The wolf can be "tamed" by adopting equal temperament or a well temperament. The very intrepid may simply want to treat it as a xenharmonic music interval; depending on the size of the meantone fifth, the wolf fifth can be tuned to more complex just ratios 20:13, 26:17, 17:11, 32:21, or 49:32.

With a more extreme meantone temperament, like 19 equal temperament, the wolf is large enough that it is closer in size to a sixth than a fifth, and sounds like a different interval altogether rather than a mistuned fifth.

Keep the two-dimensional tuning system
A lesser-known alternative method that allows the use of multi-dimensional temperaments without wolf intervals is to use a two-dimensional keyboard that is "isomorphic" with that temperament. A keyboard and temperament are isomorphic if they are generated by the same intervals. For example, the Wicki keyboard shown in Figure 1 is generated by the same musical intervals as the syntonic temperament—that is, by the octave and tempered perfect fifth—so they are isomorphic.

On an isomorphic keyboard, any given musical interval has the same shape wherever it appears—in any octave, key, and tuning—except at the edges. For example, on Wicki's keyboard, from any given note, the note that is a tempered perfect fifth higher is always up-and-rightwardly adjacent to the given note. There are no wolf intervals within the note-span of this keyboard. The only problem is at the edge, on the note E♯. The note that is a tempered perfect fifth higher than E♯ is B♯, which is not included on the keyboard shown (although it could be included in a larger keyboard, placed just to the right of A♯, hence maintaining the keyboard's consistent note-pattern). Because there is no B♯ button, when playing an E♯ power chord, one must choose some other note that is close in pitch to B♯, such as C, to play instead of the missing B♯. That is, the interval from E♯ to C would be a "wolf interval" on this keyboard. In 19-TET, the interval from E♯ to C♭ would be (enharmonic to) a perfect fifth.

However, such edge conditions produce wolf intervals only if the isomorphic keyboard has fewer buttons per octave than the tuning has enharmonically distinct notes. For example, the isomorphic keyboard in Figure 2 has 19 buttons per octave, so the above-cited edge condition, from E♯ to C, is not a wolf interval in 12-TET, 17-TET, or 19-TET; however, it is a wolf interval in 26-TET, 31-TET, and 53-TET. In these latter tunings, using electronic transposition could keep the current key's notes centered on the isomorphic keyboard, in which case these wolf intervals would very rarely be encountered in tonal music, despite modulation to exotic keys.

A keyboard that is isomorphic with the syntonic temperament, such as Wicki's keyboard above, retains its isomorphism in any tuning within the tuning continuum of the syntonic temperament, even when changing tuning dynamically among such tunings. Plamondon, Milne & Sethares (2009), Figure 2, shows the valid tuning range of the syntonic temperament.

title: Wolf interval


text:
Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq (born Michel Thomas, 26 February 1956) is a French author of novels, poems and essays, as well as an occasional actor, filmmaker and singer. His first book was a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Houellebecq published his first novel, Whatever, in 1994. His next novel, Atomised, published in 1998, brought him international fame as well as controversy. Platform followed in 2001. He has published several books of poetry, including The Art of Struggle in 1996.

An offhand remark about Islam during a publicity tour for his 2001 novel Platform led to Houellebecq being taken to court for inciting racial hatred (he was eventually cleared of all charges). He subsequently moved to Ireland for several years, before moving back to France, where he currently resides. He was described in 2015 as "France’s biggest literary export and, some say, greatest living writer." In a 2017 DW article, he is dubbed the "undisputed star, and enfant terrible, of modern French literature".

In 2010, he published The Map and the Territory, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. In 2015, his next novel, Submission, sparked another controversy for its depiction of Islam. He was also recently accused of plagiarism concerning Submission. Annihilation was published in 2022.

Personal life
Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas on the French island of Réunion, the son of Lucie Ceccaldi, a French physician born in Algeria of Corsican descent, and René Thomas, a ski instructor and mountain guide. Houellebecq's official date of birth is 26 February 1956, although he has sometimes stated that he was born in 1958.

He lived in Algeria from the age of five months until 1961, with his maternal grandmother. In a lengthy autobiographical article published on his website (now defunct), he states that his parents "lost interest in [his] existence pretty quickly", and at the age of six, he was sent to France to live with his paternal grandmother, a communist, while his mother left to live a hippie lifestyle in Brazil with her recent boyfriend. His grandmother's maiden name was Houellebecq, which he took as his pen name. Later, he went to Lycée Henri Moissan, a high school at Meaux north-east of Paris, as a boarder. He then went to Lycée Chaptal in Paris to follow preparation courses in order to qualify for grandes écoles (elite schools). He began attending the Institut National Agronomique Paris-Grignon in 1975. He started a literary review called Karamazov (named after Fyodor Dostoevsky's last novel) and wrote poetry. He graduated in 1980, married and had a son; then he divorced, and became depressed.

He married his second wife, Marie-Pierre Gauthier, in 1998. They divorced in 2010.

His third marriage was in September 2018 to Qianyun Lysis Li, a Chinese woman 34 years his junior, and a student of his works.

Works and rise to fame
Houellebecq's first poems appeared in 1985 in the magazine La Nouvelle Revue. Six years later, in 1991, he published a biographical essay on the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, a teenage passion, with the programmatic subtitle Against the World, Against Life. A short poetical essay named Rester vivant : méthode (To Stay Alive) appeared the same year, dealing with the art of writing as a way of life – or rather, a way of not-dying and being able to write in spite of apathy and disgust for life (a film adaptation was made in 2016). It was followed by his first collection of poetry, La poursuite du bonheur (The pursuit of happiness). Meanwhile, he worked as a computer administrator in Paris, including at the French National Assembly, before he became the so-called "pop star of the single generation", starting to gain fame in 1994 with his debut novel Extension du domaine de la lutte, published by Maurice Nadeau (translated in English by Paul Hammond and published as Whatever). It reads as a first-person narrative, alternating between realistic accounts of the (unnamed) protagonist's bleak and solitary life as a computer programmer, and his idiosyncratic musings about society, some of which are presented in the form of "animal fictions"; he teams up with an even more desperate colleague (he is a virgin at the age of 28) who later gets killed in a car accident, which triggers the narrator's mental breakdown and eventual admission in a psychiatric hospital; even there, he theorizes about his condition being the direct result of the contemporary social configuration, rather than a personal failure or mental illness.

Throughout the 1990s, Houellebecq published several books of poetry, including Le sens du combat in 1996 (translated as The Art of Struggle, which, in a 2005 video interview for the magazine Les Inrockuptibles, he cited as his most accomplished book to date, the one he would usually choose if compelled to read whatever he wanted among his published works), and articles in magazines (such as Les Inrockuptibles) or more confidential literary publications (such as L'Infini edited by Philippe Sollers). Most of those texts were later collected in Interventions (1998, expanded in 2009 and 2020). At that time, he lived at the same address as fellow writer Marc-Édouard Nabe, at 103, rue de la Convention in Paris. Nabe wrote about this proximity in Le Vingt-Septième Livre (2006), comparing both neighbours' careers and the way their writings were met by critics and audiences.

His second novel, Les Particules Élémentaires (translated by Frank Wynne and published in the English-speaking world as Atomised in the UK, or The Elementary Particles in the US) was a breakthrough, bringing him national and soon international fame and controversy for its intricate mix of brutally honest social commentary and pornographic depictions (two years earlier, in 1996, while working on that novel, being interviewed by Andrew Hussey, he had presciently said : "It will either destroy me or make me famous." ) It narrates the fate of two half brothers who grew up in the troubled 1960s: Michel Djerzinski, who became a prominent biologist, highly successful as a scientist but utterly withdrawn and depressed, and Bruno Clément, a French teacher, deeply disturbed and obsessed by sex; Djerzinski eventually triggers what is labelled as the "third metaphysical mutation" by retro-engineering the human species into immortal neo-humans. The book won the 1998 Prix Novembre (which was renamed Prix Décembre, following the resignation of its founder who disapproved of the prize being given to Houellebecq), missing the more prestigious Prix Goncourt for which it was the favourite. The novel became an instant "nihilistic classic" and was mostly praised for the boldness of its ideas and thought-provoking qualities, although it was also heavily criticized for its relentless bleakness and vivid depictions of racism, paedophilia, torture, as well as for being an apology for eugenics (Michiko Kakutani described it in The New York Times as "a deeply repugnant read" ). The novel won Houellebecq (along with his translator, Frank Wynne) the International Dublin Literary Award in 2002.

In 2000, Houellebecq published the short fiction Lanzarote (published in France with a volume of his photographs), in which he explores a number of the themes he would develop in later novels, including sex tourism and fringe religions. His subsequent novel, Plateforme (Platform, 2001), was another critical and commercial success. A first-person romance narrated by a 40-year-old male arts administrator named Michel, who shares many real-life characteristics with the author, including his apathy and low self-esteem, it includes a depiction of life as hopeless, as well as numerous sex scenes, some of which display an approving attitude towards prostitution and sex tourism.

The novel's explicit criticism of Islam—the story ends with the depiction of a terrorist attack on a sex tourism venue, later compared to the Bali bombings which happened the following year —together with an interview its author gave to the magazine Lire in which he described Islam as "the dumbest religion," which remark led to accusations of incitement to ethnic or racial hatred against Houellebecq by several organisations, including France's Human Rights League, the Mecca-based World Islamic League as well as the mosques of Paris and Lyon. Charges were brought to trial, but a panel of three judges, delivering their verdict to a packed Paris courtroom, acquitted the author of having provoked 'racial' hatred, ascribing Houellebecq's opinions to the legitimate right of criticizing religions. The huge controversy in the media subsided following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

His next novel, La Possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island, 2005), cycles between three characters' narratives: Daniel 1, a contemporary stand-up comedian and movie maker renowned for his extreme causticity, alternating with Daniel 24 and then Daniel 25, neo-human clones of Daniel 1 in a far future; Daniel 1 witnesses dramatic events by which a sect named the Elohimites (based on Raëlism) changes the course of history, and his autobiography constitutes a canonical account that his clones are compelled to study, both in order to acquaint themselves with their model / ancestor's troubled character (since the Elohimites' chief scientist's purported project of mind uploading turned out to be a failure) and to distance themselves from the flaws of humans. Houellebecq later adapted and directed a movie based on this novel, which was a critical and commercial failure.

In 2008, Flammarion published Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World (Ennemis publics), a conversation via e-mail between Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy, in which both reflected on their controversial reception by the mainstream media, and elaborated on their tastes and influences in literature, among other topics.

Houellebecq has also released three music albums on which he recites or sings selected excerpts from his poetry. Two of them were recorded with composer Jean-Jacques Birgé: Le sens du combat (1996, Radio France) and Établissement d'un ciel d'alternance (2007, Grrr Records, which Houellebecq considers the best of his recording endeavours, as handwritten in the libretto). Présence humaine (released in 2000 on Bertrand Burgalat's Tricatel label, and featuring musical arrangements by Burgalat himself), has a rock band backing him, and has been compared to the works of Serge Gainsbourg in the 1970s; it was re-released in 2016 with two additional tracks arranged by Jean-Claude Vannier (who famously worked on Histoire de Melody Nelson) and a booklet featuring notes by Mishka Assayas and texts by Fernando Arrabal.

A recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality. The original French title of Whatever, Extension du domaine de la lutte (literally "broadening of the field of struggle"), alludes to economic competition extending into the search for relationships. As the book says, a free market has absolute winners and absolute losers, and the same applies to relationships in a society that does not value monogamy but rather exhorts people to seek the happiness that always eludes them through the path of sexual consumerism, in pursuit of narcissistic satisfaction. Similarly, Platform carries to its logical conclusion the touristic phenomenon, where Westerners of both sexes go on organized trips to developing countries in search of exotic locations and climates. In the novel, a similar popular demand arises for sex tourism, organized and sold in a corporate and professional fashion. Sex tourists are willing to sacrifice financially to experience the instinctual expression of sexuality, which has been better preserved in poor countries whose people are focused on the struggle for survival.

Although Houellebecq's work is often credited with building on conservative, if not reactionary, ideas, his critical depiction of the hippie movement, New Age ideology and the May 1968 generation, especially in Atomised, echoes the thesis of Marxist sociologist Michel Clouscard.

His novel La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory) was released in September 2010 by Flammarion and finally won its author the prestigious Prix Goncourt. This is the tale of an accidental art star and is full of insights into the contemporary art scene. Slate magazine accused him of plagiarising some passages of this book from French Wikipedia. Houellebecq denied the accusation of plagiarism, stating that "taking passages word for word was not stealing so long as the motives were to recycle them for artistic purposes," evoking the influence of Georges Perec, Lautreamont or Jorge Luis Borges, and advocated the use of all sorts of raw materials in literature, including advertising, recipes or mathematics problems.

On 7 January 2015, the date of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the novel Submission was published. The book describes a future situation in France, set in 2022, when a Muslim party, following a victory against the National Front, is ruling the country according to Islamic law, which again generated heated controversy and accusations of Islamophobia. On the same date, a cartoon of Houellebecq appeared on the cover page of Charlie Hebdo with the caption "The Predictions of Wizard Houellebecq," eerily ironic in retrospect. For the second time, his fictional work appeared to echo real events involving Islamic terrorism, although Submission does not feature acts of terrorism and eventually presents conversion to Islam as an attractive choice for the protagonist, a typically "houellebecquian" middle-aged man with a fixation for young women. A friend of his, Bernard Maris, was killed in that shooting. In an interview with Antoine de Caunes after the shooting, Houellebecq stated he was unwell and had cancelled the promotional tour for Submission.

In January 2019, Houellebecq was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. His novel Sérotonine was published (translated as Serotonin) in the same month. This time, one of the novel's main themes, a violent revolt from desperate farmers, appeared to echo the Yellow Vests movement.

Adaptations
Extension du domaine de la lutte has been adapted into a film with the same title by Philippe Harel, and later adapted as a play in Danish by Jens Albinus for the Royal Danish Theatre.

The English translation of his novel Platform was adapted as a play by the theatre company Carnal Acts for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in December 2004. A Spanish adaptation of the novel by Calixto Bieito, performed by Companyia Teatre Romea, premiered at the 2006 Edinburgh International Festival. Houellebecq and Bieito appeared together that same year in a TV program named Au cœur de la nuit / Durch die Nacht (Through the night) for the French-German channel Arte.

Along with Loo Hui Phang, Houellebecq wrote the screenplay for the film Monde extérieur (2002) by David Rault and David Warren.

Atomised has been made into a German film, Elementarteilchen, directed by Oskar Roehler, starring Moritz Bleibtreu and Franka Potente. The film premiered in 2006 at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival. It was poorly received and generally considered a watered-down take on the novel's bleakness and thought-provoking ideas.

The film La Possibilité d'une île, directed by Houellebecq himself and based on his novel, premiered in France on 10 September 2008. It was a critical and commercial failure, sometimes even considered one of the worst films ever made in France, alongside Bernard Henri Levy's Le Jour et la Nuit, although some authors found him intriguing and recognized redeeming qualities.

American rock singer and "godfather of punk" Iggy Pop released in 2009 the unusually quiet album Préliminaires, which he described as influenced by his reading of Michel Houellebecq's novel The Possibility of an Island (one track 'A Machine for Loving' even consists in the singer merely reading a passage from the book over a musical accompaniment.). The author considered it a great honour, as he was himself deeply affected as a teenager by Iggy Pop's music with The Stooges, even going so far as to say that he was, for once, "completely happy".

In 2016 he participated, together with Iggy Pop and several others, in Erik Lieshout's documentary To Stay Alive: A Method, based on his 1991 essay.

Views on politics and religion
In 2014, Houellebecq drew up a "project for a new constitution" based on direct democracy which would render the president of the republic elected for life, but instantly revocable by a simple popular referendum, and would permit the people to elect judges. During his 21 June 2016 appearance on Le Petit Journal, Houellebecq said that he voted for the Socialist Party ticket headed by Anne Hidalgo and Jérôme Coumet in the 2014 Paris municipal election. In 2017, Houellebecq explained that he "doesn't believe in an ideological vote, but a vote based on class" and that "there is a class which votes for Le Pen, a class which votes for Mélenchon, a class which votes for Macron, and a class which votes for Fillon. I am part of the France which votes for Macron, because I am too rich to vote for Le Pen or Mélenchon."

In 2002, during an interview about his book Platform published in the literary magazine Lire, Houellebecq remarked:

"Islam is a dangerous religion, and has been from the moment it appeared. Fortunately, it is doomed. On one hand, because God of Islam does not exist, and even if someone is an idiot, he will eventually realize that. In the long run, the truth will triumph. On the other hand, Islam is undermined from the inside by capitalism. We can only hope that it will triumph rapidly. Materialism is a lesser evil. Its values are contemptible, but nevertheless less destructive, less cruel than those of Islam."

He faced trial on charges of racial hatred after calling Islam "the dumbest religion" ("la religion la plus con") in the same interview. He told a court in Paris that his words had been twisted, saying: "I have never displayed the least contempt for Muslims [but] I have as much contempt as ever for Islam." The court acquitted him. He was sued by a civil-rights group for hate speech and won on the grounds of freedom of expression. Houellebecq extended his critique to monotheistic religions in general: "The fundamental monotheistic texts preach neither peace nor love nor tolerance. From the start, they were texts of hatred." In what he has said will be his last novel, Aneantir, Houellebecq has seemingly softened his view on Christianity, though by no means seems to be a convert.

He has been critical of attempts to legalise euthanasia in France and Europe, writing in April 2021 in Le Figaro:

"[W]hen a country — a society, a civilisation — gets to the point of legalising euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else — another country, another society, another civilisation — might have a chance to arise."

In an interview with Front Populaire magazine on November 2022, he stated: "The 'Great Replacement' is not a theory, it is a fact. There is no conspiracy orchestrated by the elite but there is a 'transfer' of people from poor countries, where the birth rate is high ... What we can already see is that people are arming themselves. There will be acts of resistance, reverse Bataclans, attacks aimed at mosques as well as cafés popular with Muslims ... The objective of the local French population is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop robbing and attacking them or another possibility, that they go away." He also blamed the US for importing "woke" culture into France. He went on to add: "Our only chance of survival would be for white supremacy to become trendy in the United States."

Reception
Literary critics have labelled Houellebecq's novels "vulgar", "pamphlet literature" and "pornography"; he has been accused of obscenity, racism, misogyny and Islamophobia. His works, particularly Atomised, have received high praise from the French literary intelligentsia, with generally positive international critical response, though there have been poor reviews in The New York Times by Michiko Kakutani and Anthony Quinn, in the London Review of Books by Perry Anderson, as well as mixed reviews from The Wall Street Journal. However, without ignoring the book's grotesqueries, Lorin Stein from Salon, later editor of The Paris Review, made a spirited defense:

"Houellebecq may despair of love in a free market, but he takes love more seriously, as an artistic problem and a fact about the world, than most polite novelists would dare to do; when he brings his sweeping indignation to bear on one memory, one moment when things seemed about to turn out all right for his characters, and didn't, his compassion can blow you away."

Ten years later, Houllebecq responded to critical reviews:

"First of all, they hate me more than I hate them. What I do reproach them for isn't bad reviews. It is that they talk about things having nothing to do with my books—my mother or my tax exile—and that they caricature me so that I've become a symbol of so many unpleasant things—cynicism, nihilism, misogyny. People have stopped reading my books because they've already got their idea about me. To some degree of course, that's true for everyone. After two or three novels, a writer can't expect to be read. The critics have made up their minds."

According to the Austrian feature-writer Anne-Catherine Simon, Houellebecq's oeuvre shows "great continuity: as a long story of western decadence".

In an interview with Agathe Novak-Lechevalier Houellebecq characterised himself as "the author of a nihilistic era and the suffering that goes along with nihilism".

Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi has criticised Houellebecq's stance on Lovecraft. An essay by Todd Spaulding makes the case for why Houellebecq portrayed Lovecraft as an "obsolete reactionary" whose work was based largely on "racial hatred."

However, Christopher Caldwell defends Houellebecq for his overall depictions of technological loneliness and cultural alienation:

"Certain basic things that important novelists do, Houellebecq does not. Great novels usually concern the relationships, institutions, and ideals out of which the "bourgeois" social order is knit together—marriages, schools, jobs, piety, patriotism. But in our time, relationships fail to take root. Institutions fall apart. The visible social order seems not to be the real one. Many novelists limit their vision to those narrow precincts where the world still makes sense (or can be made to make sense) in the way it did to Balzac or Flaubert ... Houellebecq is up to something different. He places his characters in front of specific, vivid, contemporary challenges, often humiliating and often mediated by technology: Internet pornography, genetic research, terrorism, prescription drug addiction. This technological mediation can make his characters seem isolated, and yet it is an isolation with which any contemporary can at least empathize. The Outsider is Everyman. Houellebecq's reputation as a visionary rests on his depiction of what we have instead of the old bourgeois social order."

Selected publications

 * H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (1991, monograph, H. P. Lovecraft : Contre le monde, contre la vie)
 * Whatever (1994, novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte)
 * The Art of Struggle (1996, poems, Le Sens du combat)
 * Atomised (1998, novel, Les Particules élémentaires)
 * Interventions (1998, collection of various texts, expanded in 2009 and 2020)
 * Lanzarote (2000, novella)
 * Platform (2001, novel, Plateforme)
 * The Possibility of an Island (2005, novel, La Possibilité d'une île)
 * The Map and the Territory (2010, novel, La Carte et le Territoire)
 * Submission (2015, novel, Soumission)
 * In the Presence of Schopenhauer (2017, monograph, En présence de Schopenhauer)
 * Serotonin (2019, novel, Sérotonine)
 * Annihilation (2022, novel, Anéantir)

Filmography

 * Cristal de souffrance (1978), short film (author)
 * Déséquilibre (1982), short film (author)
 * La Rivière (2001), short film for Canal + (author)
 * La Possibilité d'une île (2008) (author/director)
 * The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (2014) (actor)
 * Near Death Experience (2014) (actor)
 * Saint-Amour (2016) (actor)
 * To Stay Alive: A Method (2016) (actor)
 * Thalasso (2019) (actor)
 * Rumba la vie (2022) (actor)
 * Dans la peau de Blanche Houellebecq (2024) (actor)

Audio albums

 * Le Sens du combat (1996) Paris: Les Poétiques de France Culture.
 * Présence humaine (2000) Paris: Tricatel.
 * Établissement d'un ciel d'alternance (2007) Paris: Grrr.

title: Michel Houellebecq


text:
Pears' Cyclopaedia

Pears' Cyclopaedia was a one-volume encyclopaedia published in the United Kingdom. Pears' Soap launched the original Pears' Shilling Cyclopaedia in December 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.

The first edition contained an English dictionary, a medical dictionary, a gazetteer and atlas, desk information and a compendium of general knowledge entitled "A Mass of Curious and Useful Information and Things that everyone ought to know in Commerce, History, Science, Religion, Literature and the other Topics of Ordinary Conversation".

Background
Each edition traditionally featured an atlas, a gazetteer, a chronological list of events, a list of prominent people (past and present), a miniature encyclopaedia of general information and around a dozen or more other sections on various subjects such as cinema, classical mythology, current events, wine, astronomy, ideas and beliefs, gardening, medicine, etc. The selection of subjects varied slightly over the years, and in later years the world atlas section was dropped, leaving a world and European map inside the front and rear covers and with the Gazetteer limited to the British Isles.

From 1953, it was published annually. It was published by Pelham Books from 1959 to 1988, and from then until the final, 2017 edition by Penguin Books. Dr. Chris Cook was the editor from 1977 until the final edition.

During the 1950s, Pears' awarded the Silver Pears' Trophy annually to a prominent person for "outstanding British achievement in any field." The 2017–2018 edition, released on 31 August 2017, was subtitled "The Final Edition". The publisher confirmed it is the last: "In the age of the internet, Pears' has continued to be a uniquely British almanac, reaching readers across generations. It is with great sadness that we stop publishing it as Dr. Cook retires but we celebrate his dedication and generosity over the past four decades."

According to The Bookseller, "Statistics from Nielsen BookScan have also revealed volume sales of the work have sharply declined in recent years: the 2001/02 edition sold 24,229 copies whereas the 2016/17 edition sold only 2,854." Over its history, Pears' had "produced sales over 3 million copies by the 1930s and at least as many since". The Guardian's article on the final edition cites total sales over the last decade (2007–2017) of "more than 120,000", adding that, "according to Penguin, it did particularly well in election years".

Sam Leith wrote in The Times Literary Supplement: "Now, rendered quite redundant in that respect by Wikipedia (among many, many other things), Pears' is more a curiosity than a serious reference resource." But he continues: "You’re more likely, as I did, to open this Cyclopaedia to see whether something’s in it than in the hopes of finding out about that something. Which said, on that level it is full of interest. To the very great credit of Dr. Chris Cook, who has been annually (and manually) updating the Cyclopaedia since 1977, it has done a semi-successful job of its madly quixotic project of keeping up with the times."

The final page of the final edition summarizes "The Story of Pears, 1897–2017" and concludes: "The single most important factor in the Pears success story, and the key to its truly unique publishing phenomenon, is that it is the only book of its kind to be fully revised and updated by a team of experts every year.

Schools and colleges, offices and libraries, students and researchers, newspapers, radio and TV stations – for all these and many more, for whom readily accessible, reliable facts at their fingertips are needed, Pears' Cyclopaedia remained an invaluable companion. Now, the ready availability of electronic information has made the printed reference work no longer commercially competitive. That is progress. But many will regret the passing of a famous book that, in its heyday, had become not only a national institution but also the reliable pathway for successive generations of working-class families to a better education."

title: Pears' Cyclopaedia