全国哀悼日 – China’s National Day of Mourning for Qinghai Earthquake

Image from BBC News

I got into work today and was asked by my coworker if I knew that today was 全国哀悼日 (quan2guo2ai1dao4ri4), or China’s national day of mourning for the victims of the Qinghai earthquake. At 10am +8GMT April 21st (today), cars will honk their horns for three minutes, and then all China will have three minutes of silence to mourn for those who were killed during the Qinghai earthquake in China on Wednesday morning April 14th, where the death toll is now over 2,000.

Google.hk and Baidu Participate in Mourning

My coworker also told me that the Chinese webspace will also show their respect and participate in this time of mourning and showed me several sites that had taken the color off of their main home-pages. I’ve shown Google.hk and Baidu’s homepage layout which are now just black-and-white logos.