The dispatch archive.

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

111 dispatches found

October 2026

High-key editorial illustration of a county-town street in north China in the early 1980s, grey brick and earth walls with tiled roofs and a bare poplar, a flat cinnabar red and cream notice panel painted on one wall with no writing, a woman in a blue jacket holding a small child's hand, an old man with a bicycle leaning against the wall.

History

The One-Child Policy, 1980 to 2015

On 25 September 1980 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party published an open letter addressed to all its members and to the members of the Communist Youth League.

Hand-painted watercolour illustration of a European Jesuit in a black cassock and a Chinese scholar in a blue-grey robe examining a bronze armillary sphere on a wooden table in a walled Chinese courtyard, with a red veranda pillar, a grey-tiled wall and a misty blue hill beyond.

History

The Jesuits at the Chinese Court

In the spring of 1601 a mechanical clock was carried into the Forbidden City at Beijing, and for the first time in the history of the Ming court the hours were announced by something other than a watchman striking a bronze bell.

Hand-painted watercolour illustration of an early Chinese bronze foundry, with foundry workers in grey and indigo robes pressing clay mould sections beside a finished green-patinated ritual tripod bearing a raised animal-mask pattern, a rust-red robed worker holding a tray of glowing molten bronze, and misty blue-green mountains beyond the open doorway.

History

The Chinese Bronze Age

No culture has left behind a stranger set of objects than the bronze ritual vessels of early China.

Watercolour and ink illustration in cream rice paper with pale gold morning light and a single cinnabar accent, showing the triple-tiered circular roof of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests rising above its stone terrace and cypress trees, with a clear sky above the blue glazed tiles.

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.

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.

A painted Chinese landscape in cream, gold and indigo: a river winds between terraced fields and distant blue mountains, a pine tree spreads above a family gathered around a low table with a teapot, a farmer works the soil, and a figure sits in meditation on a river rock.

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.

History

The Northern Yuan

By the early spring of 1368 the Red Turban armies of Zhu Yuanzhang had been besieging Khanbaliq, the great Mongol capital on the road from Shangdu to the southern territories, for the better part of a year.

History

The Invention of Gunpowder and the Song Military Revolution

In the spring of 808 AD an obscure Taoist alchemist named Sun Simiao sat in his laboratory on Mount Taibai and wrote down the recipe for a mixture he called huo yao, which translates literally as ‘fire medicine’.

Painting of a Ming coastal fort with soldiers and a cannon watching junks off the Zhejiang coast in morning haze

History

The Wokou Pirates and the Ming Maritime Prohibition

The wokou also have a particular place in the modern Chinese historical imagination.

Hand-painted watercolour illustration of Koxinga’s fleet of Chinese war junks with red silk streamers and gilded sterns emerging from pale morning mist off the Dutch Fort Zeelandia and the red-roofed town of Tayouan on their sandbar in 1661, with the dune redoubt on the right, the hazy mountains of Taiwan beyond, and small figures watching from a sandbank in the foreground

History

Koxinga Takes Taiwan from the Dutch

On the morning of 30 April 1661 a thick mist lay over the sandbar of Tayouan, off the south-west coast of Taiwan, where the Dutch East India Company kept its fortress and its trading town.

Painting of Confucius riding an ox cart with his disciples across the Zhou plain at dawn

History

The Spring and Autumn Period and the Birth of Chinese Philosophy

The Spring and Autumn period takes its name from the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Luchun qiu, the chronicle of the state of Lu from 722 to 481 BCE, a chronicle that has been attributed, on the basis of a long tradition, to Confucius himself, and that is, in the modern scholarly view, the basic source for the political history of the period.