8/24/2009

Panda on Bing Home Page for Taiwan

Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, is out. I am certain Bing is going to bug people, especially here in Taiwan: http://www.bing.com/ Why? There's a panda (Bing, the Panda, I guess) photo pasted to the home page.

Last year, China lent two pandas to Taiwan to keep in the Mucha Zoo. The pandas were called Tuan Tuan (團團) and Yuan Yuan (圓圓). When we put the words together, we were surprised to get 團圓 or unification in English. For many here in Taiwan, the idea of unification with China is off-putting or absurd. After all, Taiwan was abandoned to the Japanese in 1895 by China. 1895 wasn't the first time China tried to dump Taiwan either. The great Emperor Kangshi, after trying to resell Taiwan to the Dutch in 1683, claimed
Taiwan was nothing more than a blob of mud floating in the sea, a blob that would never be worthy of inclusion within the Center Kingdom. There wasn't anything in his talk about unification.

I could keep going, adding new points, but I'd rather eat my lunch. I say take the panda down.

5 comments:

dennis said...

fuck the pandas i say, i'd feed those two filthy animals to stray dogs if i had a choice. then again, that might be a bit cruel to the dogs hmm...

Patrick Cowsill said...

The panda is gone now. They've got a volcano instead. I like the non-clutter of google: I don't know if I can get used to this.

Anonymous said...

there are nine definitions of BING in the wikipedia. among them the most interesting one is CHINESE FLATBREAD, it must be 餅
BING has nothing to do with the pandas nor Valcony
the time magazine reported that Microsoft spent half a billion for Bing in order to fight google, wonder if it can beat that or not.
Cho-San

Patrick Cowsill said...

Bing is the name of a panda too. Bling is shiny jewelry.

BTW, I watched the shipping on the Danshui documentary you sent. It was excellent. I see what you mean about the narrator. He's not a native speaker of Chinese.

He sure knows his stuff. Thanks once again.

Just George said...

Have a look at this site. It is a archive of all the Bing home pages since release.
http://www.binghomepages.com

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