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.
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318 dispatches found
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.
Dispatch
Five Thousand Years of Trouble
Every tradition needs a founding moment, and Chinese martial arts is no exception.
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.
Dispatch
Li Bing and the River That Would Not Flood
The Min comes out of its gorge in the wrong mood.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
