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322 dispatches found

September 2026

Painted illustration of the giant tan granite boulders on the golden beach at Tianya Haijiao near Sanya, Hainan, with small figures and a leaning palm

Places

The Island at the End of the Sky

On the southern shore of Hainan Island, where the beach ends in a scatter of enormous granite boulders under the palms, two of the rocks carry inscriptions that together form the most romantic address in China: tianya haijiao, the edge of the sky and the rim of the sea.

Painted illustration of the Bund in Shanghai in the 1930s seen from the Huangpu, with the domed bank, the Custom House clock tower and the green-roofed Sassoon House

People

The Soong Sisters

There is a saying about them that every Chinese schoolchild used to know: of the three Soong sisters, one loved money, one loved power, and one loved China.

Painted illustration of the Tiananmen gate tower seen from the north on an autumn morning in 1949, with its red wall, arched gateways and yellow double-eaved roof

History

The Road to Tiananmen

At three in the afternoon on 1 October 1949, on the rostrum of the Tiananmen gate tower in Beijing, above the walls where emperors had proclaimed their edicts for five hundred years, a tall Hunanese in a plain grey tunic leaned to the microphone and announced that the Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China was hereby established.

Painted illustration of the eleven-arched Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing at dawn in July 1937, with the walls of Wanping beyond

History

The War That Remade China

On the night of 7 July 1937, Japanese troops conducting exercises near an ancient stone bridge southwest of Beijing reported one of their soldiers missing, and demanded entry to the nearby walled town of Wanping to search for him.

Painted illustration of Beijing's Zhengyangmen gate tower in winter 1916, with mule carts and rickshaws on the road below

History

The Broken Republic

On the first day of January 1916, in the same Forbidden City from which his dynasty had abdicated four years earlier, Yuan Shikai ascended a throne of his own.

Painted illustration of Peking's grey Tartar Wall above the Legation Quarter during the siege of 1900, with sandbag barricades and the Qianmen gate tower beyond

History

The Last Years of the Dragon

For fifty-five days in the summer of 1900, the diplomatic quarter of Beijing was a fortress under siege.

Painted illustration of the white Marble Boat with its two-storey pavilion at the Summer Palace in Beijing, reflected in Kunming Lake

History

The First Answer to the Gunboats

On 18 October 1860, British soldiers set fire to the Yuanmingyuan, the vast complex of palaces and gardens northwest of Beijing where, forty-four years earlier, Lord Amherst had been turned away at dawn from a closed gate.

Painted illustration of the British ship of the line HMS Cornwallis at anchor on the Yangzi off Nanjing in 1842, with junks and the city wall along the shore

History

The War Nobody Would Name

On 29 August 1842, in the great cabin of the 74-gun ship of the line HMS Cornwallis, anchored in the Yangzi River off Nanjing, three Qing commissioners sat down with Sir Henry Pottinger and signed away the settlement of a war.

Painted illustration of labourers destroying opium in long brine-filled trenches beside the Pearl River at Humen in 1839

History

The Poison That Opened China

For twenty-three days in June 1839, on a muddy flat by the mouth of the Pearl River, five hundred labourers destroyed the most valuable cargo in the history of the China trade.

Painted illustration of weary European travellers climbing down from Chinese mule carts before the gate of the Yuanmingyuan at dawn in 1816, watched by Qing officials

History

The Envoys Who Would Not Kneel

At about five o’clock in the morning of 29 August 1816, a procession of exhausted Englishmen arrived at the gates of the Yuanmingyuan, the imperial summer palace northwest of Beijing.

Painted illustration of Longwood House on Saint Helena, a low cream house with a green trellised porch on a windswept plateau

History

Napoleon Predicted China’s Rise From His Prison Island

On 27 June 1817, the East Indiaman Caesar dropped anchor off St Helena, a volcanic speck in the South Atlantic where the British government kept the most famous prisoner in the world.

Painted illustration of a Go game in progress on a wooden board by a window overlooking a canal of timber houses in Wuzhen

Culture

Go and the Chinese Art of Territory

In the last week of May 2017, in the canal town of Wuzhen, a place of whitewashed walls and stone bridges that China had lately turned into the venue for its World Internet Conference, the best player alive sat down to the oldest board game on earth.