History
The Yellow Emperor and China’s First Family Tree
Every spring, on the Qingming festival, when Chinese families sweep the graves of their ancestors, a far larger act of ancestral remembrance takes place on a forested hill in Shaanxi province.
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History
The Tea Horse Road and Its Mountain Empire
For more than a thousand years, mule caravans carried compressed tea from the cloud forests of Yunnan across the Himalayan foothills into Tibet, exchanging bricks for horses and binding a frontier into the Chinese state.
History
The Great Foreign Hongs of Imperial China
The history of foreigners in imperial China is not only a history of missionaries, diplomats, explorers, and adventurers.
History
The History Behind China’s Fear of Chaos
To understand modern China, it helps to begin with a word that appears constantly in Chinese political language but is easy for outsiders to misunderstand: chaos.
History
Red Dawn Over China and the Communist Victory
In February 2026 Bloomsbury published Frank Dikötter’s Red Dawn Over China, a book with a question baked into its subtitle: how communism conquered a quarter of humanity.
History
The Great Leap and Mao’s Cultural Revolution
Western accounts often fold the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution into one blur: Mao, chaos, and a great many deaths. That shorthand hides what actually happened.
History
Plague and the Fall of Yuan China
The mid fourteenth century crisis that Europeans call the Black Death had a Chinese chapter that is harder to name and impossible to ignore.
History
The Red Turban Uprising Broke Yuan Rule
The Red Turban uprising was not one tidy army with one programme.
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.
History
Why the Ming Replaced a Failing Yuan
The Ming did not appear because a Chinese essence suddenly woke up and expelled Mongol strangers.
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.
