Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

Children, history, and the household instructions of Mr. Yan: Jeremiah at the Granite Studio looks at child raising practices in Chinese history:

Yan Zhitui (531-591) was born into a family of scholar-officials at a time when being a scholar-official wasn’t necessarily the easiest gig in the world, the tail end of the "Age of Division"....An era of family values, it was not.

But Mr. Yan found the time to write a set of "household instructions," his addition to a genre of writing quite common throughout the imperial period down to the last century. The fact that heads of households had to keep writing out the rules for living under their roof suggests that family life in old China was a bit more chaotic and disordered than contemporary stereotypes would have us believe. It’s an axiom in history that lists of rules don’t always tell us much about what people were doing, but they can tell us quite a bit about what people SHOULD HAVE been doing but were not.

See also: Sam Crane responds with his thoughts on Mencian child rearing.

A brief introduction to the history of Chinese bottled water: At Fine Waters, Howard Zhang presents the major milestones in China's bottled water industry ahead of the China Bottled Water Exhibition in March:

In 1905, a German businessman was hunting in Laoshan Mountains in China’s Shandong province. Among some old trees, he found a spring with several hedgehogs drinking the water. He tasted the water as well and felt that it was of very good quality. He brought some water samples back to Germany for testing and the analysis proved the quality of the water.

1930, another German businessman called Ludwig started to dig a well near the original spring and very good quality water, which became known as Laoshan Mineral Water emerged from the well not far from where his countrymen saw the Hedgehogs. Ludwig then invest and established a bottled water plant near the well to produce China’s first bottled mineral water named ALAC Water, only 37 years behind the worlds first bottled water.

Don't go home for the holidays, gov't advises: CNN reports on the continuing winter weather situation:

China has taken the step of asking millions of migrant workers to forgo their annual Lunar New Year trip home, saying the worst winter weather in 50 years is expected to pummel the country for at least another three days.

"For the sake of their safety, and relieving the stress on transport, I advise migrant workers to stay in the cities where they work," Zheng Guogang, chief of the China Meteorological Administration, told the state newspaper, China Daily.