Culture
Christopher Lee’s Cold War Fu Manchu
Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu was already half a century old when Christopher Lee put on the makeup.
The dispatch archive.
Every Huaxia Click dispatch, newest first. Find a story by topic or search the complete collection.
318 dispatches found
History
Why Hongwu and Yongle Are Era Names
English language history habitually calls Ming rulers the Hongwu Emperor and the Yongle Emperor. The phrasing sounds like a surname and a given name, or like a regnal style in the European sense. It is neither.
Economy
BYD Turned Batteries Into the World’s EV Contender
For most of the electric car era outside China, the story was told as Tesla versus everyone else. Tesla set the aspirational template: software heavy, battery hungry, vertically ambitious, and culturally loud.
Economy
DJI Made Consumer Drones a Chinese Industry
Twenty years ago a ready to fly camera drone was a curiosity for specialist hobbyists. Today it is a mass market appliance, and for most of the world that appliance was designed in Shenzhen.
People
The Peasant Who Built the Ming Dynasty
Zhu Yuanzhang, remembered as the Hongwu Emperor and Ming Taizu, ruled China from 1368 to 1398 as the founding sovereign of the Ming dynasty.
History
Why the Ming Replaced a Failing Yuan
The Ming did not appear because a Chinese essence suddenly woke up and expelled Mongol strangers.
Culture
Foreign Devil Talk Was China’s Countervailing Fear
Western Yellow Peril stories cast China as an organised threat to white civilisation. Chinese “foreign devil” language ran the insult the other way.
Culture
Fu Manchu Taught Westerners to Fear China
Sax Rohmer did not invent Western fear of China. He packaged it.
History
The Two Faces of the Boxer Rebellion
The Boxer Rebellion is too often told as a single picture: fists raised against churches, diplomats trapped behind Legation walls, and a multinational rescue column marching on Peking. That picture is not false.
History
What the Century of Humiliation Really Means
The phrase “century of humiliation” is often treated in Western commentary as a mood: a permanent grievance, a psychological wound, a slogan that explains every Chinese diplomatic reflex.
History
The Second Opium War Reaches Peking
Western memory of the Opium Wars often stops at Canton factories, opium chests, and a few coastal bombardments. Chinese memory does not.
History
The Yuan Dynasty Was China’s First Global Century
Western textbooks still treat the Yuan as a foreign interruption: Mongols rode in, Chinese civilisation paused, Ming restored the script. That story flatters a tidy national timeline and misses what actually happened.
