Official Historical Tour of Harvard

    Student-Led Public Walking Tour

    Please note: Due to ongoing construction, our tour schedule will be limited. Please check our updated tour times on the calendar. In the event of bad weather, please check the calendar or call regarding a scheduled tour time.

    The tour is student-led and includes an outdoor walk(please dress appropriately)through Harvard Yard, providing a history of the university, general information, and a unique view on the students' individual experience. The tour is around one hour long, and completely free of charge. There is no pre—registration for general visitors, and we begin registration for each tour one hour before departure time. Currently we are only able to accommodate groups of up-to 14 people on our free, public tour. If you have a group of 15 or more, reservations are required (please see below).

    Group Tours and Reservations

    Reservations are required for tours of 15 or more people, with an absolute maximum of 125 people. We request 2 weeks' notice to schedule a tour. Please note that we cannot accommodate groups that arrive without a reservation.

    A Self-Guided Walking Tour of Harvard Yard

    If you are interested in touring the campus on your own,you may want a self-guided walking tour. These tour pamphlets(册),offered in nine different languages, can be purchased from our office for a minimal charge.

    You may also download audio files of historical information on each of the buildings in Harvard Yard. These files, together including an Audio Tour, can also be obtained here with a simple click.

    Did you know that the position(位置) you choose to sleep in says something about what kind of person you are?

    A study of 1,000 British people has been done by Chris Idzikowski, a British professor and director of the Sleep Assessment and Advisory Service in the UK. It looked at the six most common sleeping positions and which personalities tend to match them. Have a look:

    ⒈Fetus (胎儿) position – This is the most common sleeping position. About 41 percent of the participants said they sleep in this position. These sleepers may appear to be strong but they are usually sensitive (敏感的) and shy. The more they curl (蜷缩) up, the more worried they are.

    ⒉Log position (树干睡姿) – This is the second most common position. People who sleep like a log are usually stubborn.

    ⒊Yearner position (向往型睡姿) – This position says that you are open-minded and eager (急切的) to face challenges.

    ⒋Soldier position – These sleepers lie on their backs with their arms down and close to the body. They are usually reserved and quiet.

    ⒌Freefall position – People who sleep in this position are outgoing (外向的) but feel a lack of control in their lives. This is the least comfortable position.

    ⒍Starfish position – People who sleep like this are good listeners, helpful, and uncomfortable being the center of attention.

    When her five daughters were young, Helene An always told them that there was strength in unity (团结). To show this, she held up one chopstick, representing one person. Then she easily broke it into two pieces. Next, she tied several chopsticks together, representing a family. She showed the girls it was hard to break the tied chopsticks. This lesson about family unity stayed with the daughters as they grew up.

    Helene An and her family own a large restaurant business in California. However, when Helene and her husband Danny left their home in Vietnam in 1975, they didn't have much money. They moved their family to San Francisco. There they joined Danny's mother, Diana, who owned a small Italian sandwich shop. Soon afterwards, Helene and Diana changed the sandwich shop into a small Vietnamese restaurant. The five daughters helped in the restaurant when they were young. However, Helene did not want her daughters to always work in the family business because she thought it was too hard.

    Eventually the girls all graduated from college and went away to work for themselves, but one by one, the daughters returned to work in the family business. They opened new restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Even though family members sometimes disagreed with each other, they worked together to make the business successful. Daughter Elisabeth explains, "Our mother taught us that to succeed we must have unity, and to have unity we must have peace. Without the strength of the family, there is no business."

    Their expanding business became a large corporation in 1996, with three generations of Ans working together. Now the Ans' corporation makes more than $20 million each year. Although they began with a small restaurant, they had big dreams, and they worked together. Now they are a big success.

    Some parts of the garden are for the rest of the world to admire. Others are for you to disappear to when you don't want to be found. Of course, that's easy enough to arrange when you have lots of land with space for the kids to run round and cosy "garden rooms" for the adults to enjoy. But when your garden is on the small side, you might think it's a tall order. Well, you're wrong.

    To create a secret garden, people tend to take the routine: surrounding a small garden with high fences and then placing a lawn(草坪) in the middle and borders round the edge. Far from making the most of the area, that just makes it look a lot smaller and more boring. Dividing it up makes much more use of your space and means you can have your practical family area plus a secret garden.

    When you're searching for the perfect secret site within your existing set-up, consider your present favourite spot. A secret garden needs to be special—a complete contrast to the more practical family parts of the garden. Perhaps you take a folding chair down to a quiet corner that gets evening sun; maybe you sit and watch the pond or simply slip out to the patio(露台)with a glass of wine.

    It's quite easy to change an existing favourite feature into a secret place. You could top the patio with a pergola(棚架) pole and plant a grapevine for shade, or position a bench overlooking the pond and plant bamboos to screen it from the rest of the garden.

    The areas you create needn't all to be the same size—or even the same style—but if you're planning a major redesign, take your time and work it out on paper before committing time and money. Then when it's done, you'll really be able to relax and enjoy it.

    Not many years ago, a wealthy and rather strange old man named Johnson lived alone in a village in the south of England. He had made a lot of money in trading with foreign countries. When he was seventy – five, he gave $ 60,000 to the village school to buy land and equipment for a children's ground.

    As a result of his kindness, he became famous. Many people came to visit him. Among them was a newspaperman. During their talk, Johnson remarked that he was seventy-five and expected to live to be hundred. The newspaperman asked him how he managed to be healthy at seventy-five. Johnson had a sense of humor. He liked whisky and drank some each day. "I have an injection (注射) in my neck each evening," he told the newspaperman, thinking of his evening glass of whisky.

    The newspaperman did not understand what Johnson meant. In his newspaper he reported that Johnson was seventy-five and had daily injection in his neck. Within a week Johnson received thousands of letters from all over Britain, asking him for the secret of his daily injection.

After a long and hard journey that made international headlines, China's famous herd of wandering elephants appears to finally be heading home.

In August, the 14 Asian elephants of various sizes and ages were guided across the Yuanjiang river in Yunnan and a path was being made for them to return to the nature reserve in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture.

The elephants' return completes a more than 500km odyssey that caught the attention of the country. The highlights of their trip included the birth of a calf in Pu'er in last November; and going viral for taking a nap. If they were just taking a walk in the forest, it wasn't a big deal. But the fact is, they left whatever they stepped on in ruins, causing great damage to local residents.

Local wildlife experts have been unable to pinpoint the reason the herd decided to move. One reason is given that the population of elephants in the nature reserve in the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture is so large, which has increased from 190 to over 300 since 40 years ago, that there is not enough food for them. Some say that their move is due to the influence of the magnetic field of the earth and there is another story saying maybe that lead elephant lost its way, thus leading the herd out of the way. But Zhang Li, a professor on conservation biology at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times in June that large-scale human engineering developments have sped up the ‘islanding'of elephant habitats.

This meant "the traditional safe zones between humans and elephants are gradually disappearing, and the chances of elephants encountering humans naturally increase greatly".