The Capital Museum was exhibiting more than 400 precious cultural relics in Beijing on July 29, and nearly 70 percent of those relics were being shown in public for the first time.

The focus of the exhibition is two red characters written by a Chinese brush pen on a fragment of a flat flask. According to Gao Wei, a researcher from the Institute of Archaeology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

  World Expo Parade, one of the key events during Expo’s 184 days in the site, yesterday started its first official tour.
 With more than 920 performances, this largest and longest parade activity in World Expo history is expected to attract nearly 30 million visitors. Three teams will  parade along two routes, one in Pudong area and the other in Puxi area, for a total of five times every day.
The parades depict a scene of cultural prosperity, harmony and joy in the ideal future cities.

  No one can under- stand the culture of a country without first experiencing its food and drink. Chinese culinary traditions have adapted freely and changed fluidly with time. Over the course of 5000 years, these culinary traditions have been devised and perfected and have withstood the test of time. For example, steaming, the basic kitchen technique, was used extensively long before the foundation of the first dynasty.

  There were a total of 34,505,000 overseas Chinese scattered around the world as of the end of 1999, an increase of 2.3 percent over the previous year, according to statistics released by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission.