Who is Senlin?

 

Senlin is Piet Bos.

How come, you might ask?

Well, in China western names don’t really work, therefore most people who arrive here adopt a Chinese name. My surname translated into English is “forest” and that becomes “森林” in Chinese.

Most westerners however cannot read Chinese characters and fortunately there is something called pinyin, a system for spelling the sounds of Chinese Mandarin.

In pinyin my name becomes “Senlin” and this is the name I adopted when I came to China in the summer of 1998 to work as a tour leader for a Dutch travel company.

I found “Senlin Online” to be a good name for my online activities.

Since the end of 1999 I have been living in Beijing and I started developing websites in October 2005.