ATARN Letters

Follow-up discussion on the Khotan Bow

Follow-up Discussion of the 'Khotan Bow' What would be the mechanical advantage, if any, of non-lift off siyahs? Posted by: Dale Yessak 07/18/2002, 11:01:20 As I posted in a separate questio…

A letter to you

29 November, 1998 Dear Friend, This is not exactly a regular newsletter I am getting into, but I like to keep in touch from time to time. Since the last time I wrote ( ‘A Letter from Peking’…

Year-ender

16 December, 1998 Letter from Peking (September 1998) Letter of November 1998 Dear Friend, What would amuse you at the end of the year? I can't be too seasonal because we are an multi-cultur…

Year-ender

Dear Friends, Here is an image of a faithful copy of the decoration from a Chinese archery bow by Wu of Peking (c. 1880). You can transfer this image to a light-coloured piece of thin birch …

SVG Gone Mad — A Vector-Graphics Experiment

内蒙古杂技团李师傅做弓情况

仪德刚（中国科学技术大学科学史与科技考古系，合肥 230026； 德国马普科学史研究所－中国科学院自然科学史研究所伙伴小组，北京，100010） 骑马、射箭和摔跤是中国蒙古族的传统体育活动，是草原那达幕大会上必备的比赛或表演节目。射箭运动在蒙古族由来已久，而内蒙古杂技团（以下简称杂技团）的弓箭表演亦是杂技演员们受其启发，结合高难度的杂技动作而创作出来的具有蒙古族特色的表演项目。…

ATARN Letter, January 1999

Dear Friends, A business trip to Europe has meant I couldn't get a letter out in January. I hope the two letters that went out in December made up for that. My most important news is that Dr…

ATARN Letter, February 1999

Dear All, This is the first day of the Lunar New Year of the Rabbit. So first, I wish you all a happy and propsperous New Year. I have decided to make this your letter by putting together so…

ATARN Letter, March 1999

Dear All, I had an email the other day from Bede Dwyer drawing my attention to an interesting photograph of a Chinese bowyer stringing up a traditional bow using tepliks (bow-limb forms).The…

ATARN Letter, April 1999

Dear All, Now is the time for all you good people to contribute something. I want to build up a bibliography of Asian traditional archery in the following format (the ordering is random for …

ATARN Letter, May 1999

Dear All, Thank you for the feed-back on the draft bibliography. I have now filled it out a bit and incorporated the suggestions and you can read it here . Please keep providing me with new …

ATARN Letter, June 1999

Dear All, I am tapping out this news-letter between two trips. I have just been in Peking and Kunming (provincial capital of Yunnan Province of China) for one month. Chinese bow-making In Pe…

ATARN Letter, August 1999

Dear All, Plenty of travelling this year. But this time my visit was to Pennsylvania for a pilgrimage to the Easter Traditional Archery Rendezvous at Denton Hill. Finally I had a chance to m…

ATARN Letter, October 1999

Dear All, Woops! I missed September. Excuses, excuses. Actually, I went up to Peking for a meeting and met up with Liao Wanzhen ('Arrowhead Wang'). He has written an article for ATARN on whi…

ATARN Letter, November 1999

Dear All, A Publishing Triumph for ATARN We are about to take a step which will significantly enhance ATARN's importance as a resource for the serious study of Asian traditional archery. I h…

ATARN Letter, December 1999

Dear All, ‘If you want to punch holes in a small yellow circle at a range of fifty metres, get a gun.’ That is what practitioners of Kyudo say about those to whom archery is exclusively abou…

ATARN Letter, January 2000

Dear All, As part of my re-vamp of our ATARN website, I installed some statistical software to track the use of the site starting from the first working day of the year, January 3. I�m not s…

ATARN Letter, February 2000

Dear All, Since the last letter, we have entered the year of the Dragon. A happy lunar new year to you all! Recently, I exchanged some email with Gwen Huskins, a writer of historical fiction…

ATARN Letter, March 2000

Dear All, Preliminary Announcement "The Archery Culture of China" A Two-day Symposium to be Held in Beijing China This event has been re-scheduled for 16/17 May 2001 The Asian Traditional Ar…

ATARN Letter, April 2000

Dear All, ATARN has grown nicely since we came online in September 1998. Since moving to a new server and coming online on 3 January 2000, we have served 3 668 separate host enquiries. My st…

ATARN Letter, May 2000

Dear All, Well, I got back safely from my adventures in Chengdu and Peking. I succeeded in all my (quite modest) targets. I managed to get round the most important historical monuments and m…

ATARN Letter, June 2000

Dear All, This letter is a mixture of good and bad news. The bad news is that I have a whole lot more work to do (not connected with Asian archery – in which case it would have been good new…

ATARN Letter, July 2000

Dear All, Sorry! Late with my homework again. I've been on the move again, and I'm holding down two jobs here, so time is hard to find. Anyway, my schoolteachers never accepted such lame exc…

ATARN Letter, August 2000

Dear All, I�m going to write about money, so please keep you finger off the ‘delete’ icon (for a few more paragraphs at least!) First though, apologies for ATARN having been down for a few d…

ATARN Letter, September 2000

Dear All, Letter from Fort Dodge Photographs and text © Stephen Selby, 2000. All rights reserved I've just got back from the International Horse Archery Festival and I know many of you will …

ATARN Letter, October 2000

Dear All, With a sinking feeling, I faced writing the newsletter once again with nothing to offer other than something about Chinese bows or archery. That's a problem I face each month, me b…

ATARN Letter, November 2000

Dear All, Last week I was in in Peking to negotiate the arrangements for the symposium "The Archery Culture of China" that ATARN will co-organize on 16-17 May 2001. I shall be putting up mor…

ATARN Letter, December 2000

Dear All, As usual, I am at a loss for anything to write about anything other than Chinese material. But at least I'm not at a loss for Chinese material to write about. This week, I have had…

ATARN Letter, January 2001

Dear All, In China, it is the custom to celebrate the lunar new year (Wednesday 24 January is the first day of the Year of the Snake) by cleaning and decorating the house and putting up ausp…

ATARN Letter, February 2001

Dear All, First, my apologies yet again for the breakdown of the Discussion Forum. This application seems to get tired after it has accepted about 60 messages and just refuses to work. So I …

ATARN Letter, March 2001

Dear All, This month I am trying out the dangerous exercise of trying to shoot two birds with one pellet. The first 'bird' is to pass on some of my experiences of 'tradition' as it affects A…

ATARN Letter, April 2001

Dear All, A Letter from Kyongju Members and guests of the Hu Rim Jung Archery Club My Easter holiday this year with my wife and children took my to Kyongju, South Korea, where we visited Tom…

ATARN Letter, May 2001

Dear All, The World Wide Web Consortium, the body which sets the policies and norms for the Web, held its tenth annual meeting, WWW10 , in Hong Kong from 1 - 5 May. I took part as one of the…

ATARN Letter, June 2001

Dear All, If you have visited the ATARN website during the last month, you will see that I have tried to implement some technical up-grades. Occasionally they work. Following the suggestions…

ATARN Letter, July 2001

Dear All, Summer is upon us here in Hong Kong and I'm about to go off on holiday. (Holiday! Again?? This guy's always gallivanting off somewhere. How does he ever get any work done?) Yes, Ho…

ATARN Letter, September 2001

Dear All, You get your September letter a little early, because I'm off to Fort Dodge for the 2001 International Horse Archery Festival . Check out their web page by clicking on the link. Co…

ATARN Letter, October 2001

Dear All, I was at 40,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean on 11 September when four hijacked jetliners were used to attack the United States with such terrible effect. Our hearts go out to the b…

ATARN Letter, November 2001

Dear All, This month's main news is the birth of ATARNet . ATARNet is the name of our new discussion forum. The previous one was based on an in-built function of the Microsoft FrontPage soft…

ATARN Letter, December 2001

Dear All, 모든 분들께, ATARNet has been up and running for a month. It's certainly easier on the eyes that the previous Discussion Forum. I am still ironing out some bugs, but I think most Member…

ATARN Letter, December 2001

Dear All, ATARNet has been up and running for a month. It's certainly easier on the eyes that the previous Discussion Forum. I am still ironing out some bugs, but I think most Members have b…

ATARN Letter, January 2002

Dear All, It's rare for me to get side-tracked from ATARN by my real work (the stuff people pay me for); but in January I have been, so I owe you an apology (a) for failing to wish you a ver…

ATARN Letter, March 2002

Dear All, Hong Kong is a sub-tropical place, so my ten-year-old daughter has never seen snow. To cure that (with a vengeance), I took my whole family to the Arctic Circle in Tr‘ms’, Norway f…

ATARN Letter, April 2002

Dear All, At heart, I know that ATARN Members love cables, camwheels, sights, shock-dampers and counter-balances. You just don't like having them on your bows - you want them on your compute…

ATARN Letter, May 2002

Dear All, ATARN is gearing up our out-reach in China. From 12 - 15 April, I went with a television crew to continue working on a documentary about Ju Yuan Hao. This was a follow-up to a visi…

ATARN Letter, June 2002

Dear All, ATARN has just completed a mission to Qinghai and Xinjiang in the People's Republic of China. Led by the Vice-President of the Chinese Archery Association, Mr. Xu Kaicai, the missi…

ATARN Letter, July 2002

Dear All, Surrounded by other competitors and on-lookers, Alice is under as much pressure as she has ever been as a sportswoman at a golfing event. She has to get her shot out to over 220 ya…

ATARN Letter, October 2002

Dear All, Noted with appreciation the occasional withdrawal symptoms expressed by Members who couldn't find the August and September newsletters. I never wrote them. I have been away on trav…

ATARN Letter, November 2002

Dear All, My apologies that the monthly newsletter seems to slip later and later each month. But it is worth waiting for! This month, we have an excellent article by Bede Dwyer on Scythian-s…

ATARN Letter, December 2002

Dear All, The end of the year is rushing upon me. It’s time to write another newsletter! First, please accept my greetings for the season and the coming new year! Asia is waking more and mor…

ATARN Letter, January 2003

Dear All, If you had dreams that I would make a new year's resolution to get ATARN newsletters out on time, well... dream on! Actually, I did resolve to make better excuses for getting them …

ATARN Letter, April 2003

Dear All, Since the first time I raised the possibility of a seminar on Asian archery, the event seems to have been jinxed. The event I had so confidently announced for 15-17 May 2003 must n…

ATARN Letter, May 2003

Dear All, The Asian Archery Festival originally scheduled for May 2003 has been postponed to October 25 - 27 to allow the region to get clear of the Sars outbreak. Please check out the curre…

ATARN Letter, June 2003

Dear All, Horseback Archery at the Leeds Royal Armouries, UK 8th, 9th, 10th August 2003 Hilary Greenland, Secretary of the SPTA (The Society for the Promotion of Traditional Archery) writes:…

ATARN Letter, August 2003

Dear All, Here I am back in harness after spending a month in England. Apart from riding and doing some archery, I had the chance to visit the Simon Archery Collection in Manchester and the …

ATARN Letter, October 2003

Dear All, ATARN's first international 'event' came to a successful end on Sunday, 26 October. That we could carry this off is due to the fantastic support and organization skills of the Leis…

ATARN Letter, November 2003

Dear All, This is one of those newsletters that is a particular pleasure to prepare, because most of the input comes from ATARN members and not from me. Born in 1955 in Milan, Italy, Fulvio …

ATARN Letter, January 2004

Dear All, First, best wishes for the new year of 2004. Soon it will be the lunar new year of the Monkey, so have a happy one of those, too. In December I had the pleasure of making my first …

ATARN Letter, March 2004

Dear All, Chapchal in Yili, Xinjiang, is home to several thousand of the Xibe nationality. The Xibe were a branch of the Manchus, and the present inhabitants of Chapchal are descended from a…

ATARN Letter, April 2004

Dear All, Bear with me for this month, because I haven't got a whole load of pretty pictures of hardware to show you this time around, and I do know how much you like them. As you know, ATAR…

ATARN Letter, June 2004

Dear All, I hope that you enjoy this newsletter. It's particularly enjoyable for me because I have received contributions from a few ATARN friends around the World, which will make the lette…

ATARN Letter, July 2004

Dear All, It's blowing a typhoon outside. So my office is closed. So I have come home. So I can write a letter. It's an ill wind which blows no-one any good. A couple of months back, some Me…

ATARN Letter, October 2004

Dear All, It is total disgrace that there hasn't been a newsletter since July. I don't know who's running this joint, but he or she should be fired immediately, told to clear his desk by noo…

ATARN Letter, December 2004

Dear All, Wishing you all a happy and prosperous year 2005! In 2005, we plan to hold the second Asian Traditional Archery Festival, following the success of the one held in Hong Kong in 2003…