The dispatch archive.

Every Huaxia Click dispatch, newest first. Find a story by topic or search the complete collection.

322 dispatches found

September 2026

Painted illustration of a writer's desk with a red notebook and old Chinese books by a window over foggy wartime Chongqing

People

The British Writers Who Explain China

In the summer of 1943, a Cambridge biochemist arrived in Chongqing, China’s battered wartime capital, carrying little more than a red notebook and a question that would occupy the rest of his life.

Painted illustration of the red-brick Saint Sophia Cathedral in Harbin with its green onion domes on a snowy winter morning

Places

How Harbin Became China’s Ice City

Every winter, workers on the frozen Songhua River at Harbin cut the ice into heavy blocks.

Painted illustration of the brick Ohel Moishe Synagogue in Shanghai's Hongkew district, with refugees in the lane outside

History

Jewish Shanghai of Refugees and Tycoons

Between 1938 and 1941, as country after country closed its doors to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, a Chinese port city under Japanese military pressure became one of the last places in the world they could reach.

Hand-painted watercolour of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge and the Yellow Crane Tower in pale morning haze

Places

How Three Towns Became Wuhan

Wuhan is not one city.

Painted illustration of the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge stretching low across the Pearl River estuary in the morning haze

Places

How the Pearl River Delta Became a Megalopolis

Fly into the Pearl River Delta at night and the old map stops making sense. There is no visible gap between Guangzhou and Foshan, or between Shenzhen and Dongguan.

Places

Macau Lives on a Gaming Licence

Macau, a historic Sino-Portuguese city, is the smallest and, by some measures, the richest territory in China, and it is still easiest to misread.

Painted illustration of the early Shanghai Bund in the 1850s, a row of low verandahed trading houses behind a busy river of sailing ships and junks

Places

The Long History of Shanghai’s Bund

Stand on the riverside promenade in central Shanghai and you face two centuries at once.

Painted illustration of a grey-brick farming village with fish ponds outside Shenzhen around 1980, with the first new concrete blocks and cranes rising beyond the fields

Places

How Shenzhen Was Built From Border Villages

In 1979 the place now called Shenzhen was an agricultural county on the border with British Hong Kong.

Painted illustration of the Nanpu Bridge over the Huangpu in 1991, its white H-shaped pylons and cable fans reaching toward a still low-rise Pudong

Places

How Pudong Was Built on Mud

Every evening crowds gather on the Bund to photograph the towers across the Huangpu.

Painted illustration of the white Shanghai Maglev train gliding along its elevated concrete guideway over fields and canals

Science & Tech

Shanghai’s Maglev and the Future That Stalled

Step off Line 2 of the Shanghai Metro at Longyang Road and you reach the platform of one of the strangest railways in the world. The train waiting there has no wheels touching a rail and no engine on board.

Painted illustration of a Hong Kong film backlot at dusk, a mock Qing-era street with lanterns beneath wire-work rigging

People

How Donnie Yen Fought His Way to Stardom

Donnie Yen spent more than two decades as a respected but not quite top-tier name in Hong Kong action cinema before a single role, Ip Man, made him one of the most recognisable faces in the Chinese-speaking world.

Painted illustration of the three-tiered Lingying archway at the Foshan Ancestral Temple in Guangdong on a quiet morning

People

How Dennis To Became the Young Ip Man

Few actors have been as closely tied to one role as Dennis To Yu-hang (杜宇航). He won a world wushu title for Hong Kong at 18 and got into films with small parts in Donnie Yen’s Ip Man and Ip Man 2.