Author: Zhang Linchu Source: "Diplomats Say Things"
About the Author
Zhang Linchu served as Secretary of the Military Attaché Office of the Chinese Embassy in France and Algeria, Army Attache of the Chinese Embassy in France, Military Attache of the Army, Navy and Air Force of the Chinese Embassy in Italy, and Senior Researcher of the China Institute for International Strategic Studies. He is currently a researcher of the China Foundation for International Studies, a member of the 9th Council of the Chinese Society of Civil Diplomacy, a senior advisor to the France Studies Society of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a director of the Beijing Society for Foreign Studies and the deputy director of the Center for European Studies.
He has published hundreds of current affairs papers and literary works in newspapers and periodicals such as Jiefangjun Daily, Global Times, International Strategic Studies, Foreign Issues Studies, Global Finance and Economics, Peace and Development, Geography and Energy, World Knowledge Expo, World Culture, Friends of Military Retirement, Chinese Geographical Names, World Literature, and other newspapers and periodicals, as well as International Network, China Social Science Network, Jiangshan Literature Network, and Galaxy Yue Reading Chinese Network.
Main works: "Remembering My Father and Mother", "Eternal Memory", "Traces of Time", "Mulberry Pick-up", "Looking Back", "Towards Europe in 2000" (co-author), "Chronicles of Nations - Côte d'Ivoire", "World Knowledge Series" of 18 countries including Belgium, Algeria and South Africa, "World Expo" of 4 countries including Portugal, Belgium and Monaco.
Main translations: "Biography of Algeria President Juari · Boumedin" (co-translation), "History of the Development of France's Nuclear Forces", "War in the 21st Century", etc.
He has won many awards in essay contests held by "Jiangshan Literature Network" and "Galaxy Yue Reading Chinese Network", and has been named "Gold Medal Author" for four consecutive years, and has won the titles of May Day Model Worker, Excellent Party Member, Outstanding Galaxy Man and "Model Comrade-in-Arms".
The autumn twilight has fallen, and the sky is sprinkled with silver stars. The sea is particularly tranquil and pure, and the waves that hit the shore are like a white stream, faintly delineating the coastline. This is the night view of mid-autumn on the France Eastern Mediterranean coast.
We drove away from the famous tourist city of Nice in France Eastern Mediterranean and headed east along a brightly lit road. Sometimes the road floats like a white ribbon from the mountains to the shore, sometimes leaving the shore and disappearing into the dark shadows of the Alps. Lights flickered everywhere on the hillside.
About 20 kilometers of driving, a white line appears on the road, the coat of arms of the Principality of Principality of Monaco is erected on the side of the road, and a red and white Monaco flag flutters on the flagpole. Before we knew it, we had crossed the border and entered Monaco without any formalities.
Bordering France on three sides and bordering the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to the south, Monaco covers an area of about 2.08 square kilometers, slightly larger than the Vatican, and is one of the smallest countries in Europe. The Principality of Principality of Monaco may be small, but its maritime museum is world-renowned.
The Oceanographic Museum stands on a cliff near the sea, facing the city and facing the sea with its back to the sea, with a height of 87 meters and three floors including a basement. Located next to the Prince's Palace, it is Monaco's second largest tourist attraction after the Casino de Monte-Carlo, receiving more than 1 million visitors from all over the world every year.
The museum building is so cleverly and harmoniously embedded between the large rocks that it seems to have grown out of an abrupt rock. Facing this masterpiece of the famous France architect Dressorti, we stood for a long time and were amazed. After 11 years of construction, the Maritime Museum was officially opened to the public on March 29, 1910.
At the entrance to the museum, there is a statue of Prince Albert I of Monaco, the founder of the Oceanographic Museum, standing on the bridge of the oceanographic research ship, to forever commemorate this master who made a great contribution to marine science.
Albert I was born in Paris in 1848 and joined the France Navy in 1870. He developed a keen interest in oceanography from a young age, and spent a large amount of money from the charter of casinos for marine scientific research.
In 1873, he bought the research ship "Swallow" and carried out a multi-year scientific expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean. From 1885 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he made 28 expeditions with many scientists from around the world, collecting numerous specimens of marine animals and plants. Albert I dedicated his life to the study of the oceans and is credited with being the founder of marine science.
On the first floor of the museum is a row of 8-meter-high white stone columns carved from a single stone. Carved between the pillars are the names of 12 research vessels that have contributed to marine science, including the "Swallow" and "Alyssa I", which were used by Albert I in his oceanographic expeditions.
Stepping into the spacious and bright main hall, I saw a huge glass inlaid on the facing wall, through which you can see the vast Eastern Mediterranean, blue sky and clear water, sparkling, and a few seagulls flying nearby; In the distance, where the water and the sky are connected, there are several sea boats that flicker and flicker, making people feel like they are in the sea.
Along the route, we enter the main hall on the left side of the hall, where the marine animal exhibition room is filled with skeletal specimens of sea animals and marine fish. In the middle of the hall are more than a dozen species of cetacean mammal skeletons, including a sperm whale with a skeleton of about 10 meters and another fish whale with a skeleton of 20 meters long.
On the shelves on both sides of the hall are many glass jars, which contain specimens of various marine animals, including fish, shrimp, crabs, starfish, sea cucumbers, oysters, anemones, etc., many of which are caught in the deep sea at a depth of 3,000 meters. A fish called the "sea rooster" is particularly interesting, not only because of its mottled body, but also because it can make sounds that sound like a rooster's crowing from a distance. This fish lives in the Eastern Mediterranean and is rare in the world.
On the wall on one side of the hall hangs an ovoid monster named "Moonfish", with two high fins growing on either side of its oval body. It mainly lives in tropical oceans.
Next, we visit the Natural Marine Geography and Appliances Showroom, located on the right side of the main hall. The first thing that catches your eye when you enter the exhibition room is the large and small nets of various shapes hanging from the ceiling and the edges of the walls: huge trawls and tiny nets for catching zooplankton. The small nets are woven with thin threads that are difficult to see, and the whole net is crystal clear and made of glass. Until we see these unique displays, it's hard to imagine that there are such ingenious fishing utensils in the world.
Most of the exhibits in the exhibition room are instruments and equipment used by marine scientists to investigate the oceans: automatic water level recorders, automatic flow fluctuation recorders, bathymetric hammers, automatic flip thermometers at predetermined depths, samplers, etc. Among the many instruments and equipment, two very ordinary sealed champagne bottles stand out. The two bottles are tied to the ends of a one-and-a-half-metre-long rope, one of which is filled with some sand for a measuring hammer, while the other floats on the water. According to reports, when Albert I took the research ship "Swallow" in 1885-1888 to investigate the warm current in the Gulf of Mexico, he used this extremely simple instrument to measure.
The main hall on the second floor displays a variety of models of sea ships from ancient times to the present day, bringing people into the world of ships.
The West Hall is the Marine Physics and Marine Chemistry Showroom. It not only visually shows the characteristics of water at different depths, including water temperature, water pressure and gas state, but also uses dioramas to show the Atlantic, Pacific, India and Arctic Oceans, placing us in the marine world.
The east hall on the second floor is the Practical Oceanography Showroom. More than 100,000 specimens of marine animals are on display, most of which were captured by Albert I during his 28 expeditions between 1885 and 1914.
Among these numerous specimens, the most striking is the specimen of a polar bear living in Upenavik, Greenland; Steller's specimen of sea lions, which are twice as large as females; There is also a 13-meter-long spear squid caught on Novaya Zemlya in 1877.
According to museum administrators, the showroom also contains some very valuable specimens, which are not normally on public display. For example, the Sturre of Steller's Manatee presented by the St. Petersburg Museum in Russia to Albert I. The massive manatee that lives in the Bering Strait was discovered in the 18th century and became extinct 17 years later. Currently, there are only a handful of museums in the world that have taxidermy collections of this manatee.
In the glass display cases around the Practical Oceanography Gallery, there are also many economically valuable fish, sea beasts and seabirds caught from the oceans; cod oil and whale oil; shrimp crabs, molluscs and algae; industrial fats, skins and various chemical agents; Fish fertilizer and feed fishmeal for agricultural use, etc.
Afterwards, we visited the museum's library. The library of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco is the largest, oldest and most well-stocked marine library in Europe, with a collection of some 25,000 volumes, 3,500 periodicals from more than 80 countries, and numerous reports on oceanographic expeditions. In addition to this, there are a large number of photos and negatives of marine animals such as marine fish, shrimp and crabs, shells, cephalopods, etc. Each photo is a photographer's masterpiece and is something you can't put down.
Of greatest interest to the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco is the Aquarium in the basement, which is open to the public with 90 fish tanks on display of 1,000 square meters and 100 tanks for scientific research, storage of newly caught fish and storage of seawater. It currently has more than 450 species, more than 4,500 marine fish, more than 100 invertebrates and more than 70 corals, making it one of the largest aquariums in the world.
We first went to the 25,000-litre pond to watch several tropical marine sharks of different sizes chasing and playing in the water. Sharks are very vicious and are natural predators of humans at sea, but the sharks in the Aquarium are much more docile. Many children stop despite their parents' urgings.
A large glass tank overgrown with coral houses a terrifying octopus. Octopuses are cephalopod mollusks, with 8 long tentacles covered with suckers; The huge body is like a pocket; A pair of eyes are as bright as human eyes; The beak resembles a parrot's beak.
The second glass jar houses a large hawksbill turtle, which was brought from the Azores more than 70 years ago. Along with the large tortoiseshell turtles, there are many smaller tortoiseshell turtles that swim around in the water very pleasantly.
Another glass tank decorated with a model of a shipwreck and a hill under the sea houses moray eels belonging to the family of eels, baring their teeth and revealing their sharp fangs. These moray eels are found in tropical seas but are often caught in the Eastern Mediterranean. Legend has it that in ancient Roman times, the moray eel was considered one of the most dangerous and ferocious fish, and other fish would be torn to pieces like a slave in crime.
Thousands of tropical aquarium fish are housed in a row of glass tanks filled with coral and seaweed. The colorful and flower-like fish, sometimes in groups and sometimes in pairs, chasing and playing in the water, are very interesting and make us linger.
Sea anemones and sea lilies in glass jars resemble bizarre furry bouquets from fairy tales. In other glass jars, one can see starfish, shrimp, crabs, seahorses, sea cucumbers, etc. The sea urchin, which is half a meter long and has a thin needle-like spin on its body, slowly wriggles, is particularly eye-catching.
After visiting the Aquarium, the hospitable curator, Nadiki · Unais, invited us guests from afar to her office. After brewing coffee for us, the curator warmly said, please come to the office to sit, first, let you rest and reminisce about what you have seen and heard in the Aquarium; Second, I would like to briefly introduce to you how we use modern science and technology to serve these "distinguished guests" in the water. She said quickly:
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As far as tropical marine ecosystems are concerned, we have made encouraging progress in the cultivation of corals and the establishment of coral ecosystems. We followed underwater photographs taken in the natural environment to create an exact same environment in the fish tank, i.e. the same density of light, the same density of fish, the same corals and marine plants, and many other details.
In addition, in order to make the aquarium viable, it is also necessary to pay attention to the biological cycle. Freshly caught fish should be placed in a reserve tank for quarantine to avoid contamination of the tank open to the public; It will take half a year before it can be moved into the fish tank on display, and it will take a year to reach the ecological balance.
When it comes to technology, we at the Aquarium have a lot of experience. The central information system continuously monitors the technical equipment of the Aquarium and the physical and chemical parameters such as water temperature, salt content, hydrogen ion concentration, oxygen concentration and other physical and chemical parameters of the main fish tank. The 30 important fish tanks are monitored 24 hours a day and night by means of 60 bathymetric instruments and 130 sensors. Through these technical means, the safety of our "VIPs" in the water is ensured.
It is not easy to run an aquarium well, and the most important thing is to create a real ecological environment; The Aquarium should not be seen as a simple fish tank, but as a living system. In recent years, we have applied modern science and technology to innovate the Aquarium. At present, we have two ecological environments, namely the tropical marine ecological environment and the Eastern Mediterranean ecological environment.
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From the light green Aquarium to the sun-drenched street, we once again look in awe at the statue of Albert I, the founder of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, at the entrance of the museum, for building this temple for spreading marine science to future generations.
[Transferred from: Galaxy Joy Reading.]
Editor: "The Diplomat Says Things" Jia Jia]