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THE LEAD DISPATCH

Culture

Cui Jian and the Rise of Chinese Rock Music

In May 1986 a concert was held at the Workers’ Gymnasium in Beijing to mark the International Year of Peace declared by the United Nations. The venue, the Beijing Workers’ Gymnasium, is an indoor arena in…

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Cui Jian and the Rise of Chinese Rock Music

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People

Yang Liwei and the Shenzhou 5 Flight of 2003

At nine o’clock in the morning, Beijing time, on 15 October 2003, a Long March 2F rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the desert of western Inner Mongolia, carrying a spacecraft named Shenzhou 5 and a single passenger, an air force pilot of thirty-eight named Yang Liwei.

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Science & Tech

The South–North Water Transfer Project

On 12 December 2014 the gates of a canal head at Taocha, on the shore of the Danjiangkou reservoir in the south-west of Henan province, were opened, and water from the Han River, a tributary of the Yangtze, began to flow northward along a channel more than 1,200 kilometres long towards Beijing.

25 min read

Places

The Qinghai–Tibet Railway, 2006

On 1 July 2006 the first scheduled passenger trains left Golmud in Qinghai and Lhasa in Tibet, travelling in opposite directions across the highest plateau on earth.

25 min read

Economy

The Xiaogang Village Contract and the Household Responsibility System, 1978

On a winter night in late November 1978, in a small village in the hills of Fengyang County in the province of Anhui, the heads of eighteen households gathered in a mud-walled house and put their names and red thumbprints to a short handwritten document.

26 min read

High-key editorial illustration of a Chinese writer in an indigo jacket seated at a low wooden table beneath a mulberry tree in a rural Shandong courtyard, writing in an open notebook with a brush pen, a clay ink pot and plain teacup beside him and a small plain cinnabar red square on the table, behind a grey-capped earthen wall and a flat field of standing sorghum under pale gold morning light.

People

Mo Yan and the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature

On 11 October 2012 Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, opened the doors of the Academy's hall in the Old Town of Stockholm and announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for that year had been awarded to the Chinese writer Mo Yan, "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

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High-key editorial illustration of a Chinese engineer in a grey-blue work jacket at a plain grey control panel in a 1980s Shanxi coal power station, one hand on a round dial and a notebook in the other, looking toward a wide window with a concrete cooling tower, pylons and pale gold sky beyond, and a single small cinnabar red lamp on the desk.

Culture

Liu Cixin and the Rise of Chinese Science Fiction

On 22 August 2015, at the World Science Fiction Convention held in Spokane, Washington, the Hugo Award for Best Novel was given to The Three-Body Problem, a book by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin, translated into English by Ken Liu.

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High-key editorial illustration of a vast covered wholesale market hall in Yiwu, steel roof trusses and pale gold daylight, long rows of stalls piled with small goods, boxes of buttons and zips, stacked basins and paper decorations, merchants at their stalls and buyers with sack carts in the wide central aisle, one bundle of cinnabar red ribbon the single accent.

Places

Yiwu and the World’s Largest Small-Commodities Market

In the centre of Zhejiang province, about three hundred kilometres south-west of Shanghai, a county-level city of some two million people has become the largest wholesale market for small commodities in the world.

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High-key editorial illustration of a formal ministerial conference hall in the Gulf in 2001, long white-clothed tables with delegates in dark suits seated in two ranks, one rising to speak, tall shuttered windows casting pale gold light, a row of muted indigo, grey and cream flags along the far wall with one cinnabar red flag among them.

Economy

China’s Accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001

On 10 November 2001, at a ministerial conference held in Doha, the capital of Qatar, the members of the World Trade Organization approved by consensus the terms on which the People’s Republic of China would join them.

25 min read

High-key editorial illustration of a county-town street in north China in the early 1980s, grey brick and earth walls with tiled roofs and a bare poplar, a flat cinnabar red and cream notice panel painted on one wall with no writing, a woman in a blue jacket holding a small child's hand, an old man with a bicycle leaning against the wall.

History

The One-Child Policy, 1980 to 2015

On 25 September 1980 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party published an open letter addressed to all its members and to the members of the Communist Youth League.

26 min read

Hand-painted watercolour illustration of a European Jesuit in a black cassock and a Chinese scholar in a blue-grey robe examining a bronze armillary sphere on a wooden table in a walled Chinese courtyard, with a red veranda pillar, a grey-tiled wall and a misty blue hill beyond.

History

The Jesuits at the Chinese Court

In the spring of 1601 a mechanical clock was carried into the Forbidden City at Beijing, and for the first time in the history of the Ming court the hours were announced by something other than a watchman striking a bronze bell.

39 min read

Hand-painted watercolour illustration of an early Chinese bronze foundry, with foundry workers in grey and indigo robes pressing clay mould sections beside a finished green-patinated ritual tripod bearing a raised animal-mask pattern, a rust-red robed worker holding a tray of glowing molten bronze, and misty blue-green mountains beyond the open doorway.

History

The Chinese Bronze Age

No culture has left behind a stranger set of objects than the bronze ritual vessels of early China.

28 min read

Watercolour and ink illustration in cream rice paper with pale gold morning light and a single cinnabar accent, showing the triple-tiered circular roof of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests rising above its stone terrace and cypress trees, with a clear sky above the blue glazed tiles.

History

The Temple of Heaven

South of the Forbidden City, behind a wall that is square at one end and round at the other, there is a place where the emperor of China went to stand in the open sky and pray for rain.

25 min read

History

The Siku Quanshu

In the 1770s the Qianlong emperor set out to do something no Qing ruler had attempted: to take possession of the written record of his own empire, down to the last commentary on the last classic, and to keep it inside the palace walls.

28 min read

Dispatch

Five Thousand Years of Trouble

Every tradition needs a founding moment, and Chinese martial arts is no exception.

52 min read

Dispatch

The Chinese Imperial Post Office

A clerk at a counter in Shanghai, in the winter of 1897, takes your letter, weighs it against a printed table, and hands back a small square of paper printed in red and black.

29 min read

Dispatch

Li Bing and the River That Would Not Flood

The Min comes out of its gorge in the wrong mood.

26 min read

A painted Chinese landscape in cream, gold and indigo: a river winds between terraced fields and distant blue mountains, a pine tree spreads above a family gathered around a low table with a teapot, a farmer works the soil, and a figure sits in meditation on a river rock.

History

Harmony Is Not Agreement

On a cold morning in the ninth century BC, a duke of Qi came back from hunting and found his minister Liangqiu Ju waiting for him at the tower. The duke was delighted.

31 min read

Culture

Xuanzang’s Pilgrimage to India and the Translation Bureau of Tang Chang’an, 629-645

In the autumn of the year 629, more precisely in the ninth month of the Zhenguan reign, a 27-year-old Tang monk climbed alone through one of the lesser-known passes in the Liulian Mountains and slipped across the western frontier of the empire.

30 min read

Dispatch

Li Shizhen and the Materia Medica

Somewhere in the middle of the sixteenth century, in a house in the hills of what is now Hubei province, a physician began writing a book he would not finish for twenty-seven years.

26 min read

Dispatch

The Battle of Lake Poyang

The Collapse of the Yuan and the Contenders of the Yangtze In the late summer of 1363, upon the shallow, wind-whipped expanse of Lake Poyang in modern Jiangxi province, two rival Chinese warlords engaged in what remains one of the largest naval engagements in world history.

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Dispatch

Empress Wu Zetian and the Zhou Dynasty Interregnum

The only woman in Chinese dynastic history who took the throne as emperor in her own right, and held it for fifteen years, was born into a family of timber merchants and entered the imperial palace of Tang as a minor concubine of the second rank in the household of the future Emperor Taizong.

26 min read

Dispatch

The Battle of Talas River and the East-West Turn of 751

In the summer of 751, somewhere in a river valley north of the Syr Darya, an army of the Tang dynasty of China and an army of the newly proclaimed Abbasid Caliphate fought a battle that, by most accounts, lasted a single day.

28 min read

Dispatch

The Salt Iron Debate

In 81 BCE, in a palace at Chang’an, scholars summoned from the provinces by the regent Huo Guang argued with the senior officials of Emperor Wu’s dead government about who should make money from salt and iron.

27 min read

Watercolour of the stone gateway and steps of the Purple Mountain Observatory above Nanjing, with a bronze armillary sphere and white telescope domes in morning haze

Science & Tech

The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Its Place in World Science

The Chinese Academy of Sciences is at once a national research organisation, an honorific learned society and a university system, and on most quantitative measures it is the largest scientific institution in the world.

36 min read