A pilot area for the internationalization of education on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was officially launched on Sunday in Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province.

With the aim of training TCM talent and better promoting TCM globally, the pilot area was jointly planned by the Ministry of Education, Jiangxi University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and pharmaceutical firm Jiangzhong Group.

A set of programs will be carried out, including the training of internationally oriented TCM professionals, as well as programs on international communication and cooperation in TCM education.

Under the programs, more foreign students and doctors will have a chance to receive TCM training in China, and TCM documents will be translated into more foreign languages. More Chinese talent with a command of TCM knowledge and foreign languages will be cultivated.

Wang Guoqiang, deputy head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission and head of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said the training of talent is a priority in promoting TCM abroad, which is an integral part of people-to-people exchanges under the Belt and Road Initiative.

A new H7N9 virus infection was confirmed in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, local authorities said on Sunday.

The 44-year-old patient, surnamed Wang, is a seller of live poultry in a market in the city of Zigong, according to the government of the Ziliujing District of the city on Saturday.

The patient is being treated in a local hospital and is in stable condition.

All the live poultry markets in the city will be suspended for one month from May 22.

H7N9 is a bird flu strain first reported to have infected humans in China in March 2013. Infections are most likely to occur in winter and spring.

Disease control and prevention experts have said that the H7N9 virus is not transmitted from person to person.

Experts recommend avoiding contact with birds, and only buying certified poultry.

Experts in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region have developed a Mongolian language database containing over 19 million words and phrases in an effort to protect ethnic culture and language.

The program, based on cloud computing technology, was initiated in 2012 by Mengdong cloud computing center of Chifeng City and Inner Mongolia University.

Yan Xiaofeng, an engineer with the program, said the university started to collect Mongolian language documents in the 1980s, which has helped contribute to the database. The database covers a wide range of content including lexicons, grammar and literature.

Nashunuzhitu, a professor at the university, said the database’s Mongolian-Mandarin electronic dictionary is open to the public. The database also includes a dictionary for scientific terminology featuring Mandarin, Mongolian, English and Japanese.

In 2016, the region designated the big data and cloud computing industries as new engines for local development, vowing that the regional big data industry’s output value will exceed 100 billion yuan (14.5 billion U. S. dollars) in 2020.

Two men who allegedly hunted a wild rhesus monkey have been detained, police in north China’s Shanxi Province said Sunday.

Police with the public security bureau of Yuncheng City were informed earlier this month that a car carrying a caged monkey was seized on an expressway in Yuanqu County.

Investigation showed that the two suspects, from Henan Province, drove to Shanxi Lishan national nature reserve. They hit a rhesus monkey with a tranquilizer dart and locked it in an iron cage.

They were intercepted by highway security staff on their way back to Henan.

Rhesus monkeys are a second-class nationally protected animal. The Lishan reserve has hundreds of rhesus monkeys living there.

The two men were detained for illegal hunting and transporting a precious and endangered wild animal.

A set of clear and well-preserved footprints suspected to have been left by a wild Siberian tiger were discovered in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, local forestry authorities said Sunday.

The footprints were found by workers on a tree farm in Raohe County on Friday. Experts said such clear and complete footprints were rare, and they likely belong to a young male tiger.

Zhang Minghai of the Northeast Forestry University said the tiger was probably walking toward the Wusuli River on the China-Russia border.

Siberian tigers are one of the world’s most endangered species. They predominantly live in northeast China and eastern Russia.

Heilongjiang has reported frequent activity by wild Siberian tigers in recent years. Footprints of another tiger were found in March in Raohe County.

Local authorities said the province has witnessed a rise both in the population of wild tigers and their prey.