Science & Tech
Dujiangyan Still Feeds Sichuan
Most great works of ancient engineering survive as ruins. Dujiangyan is different.
17 min read
Latest dispatches · page 10 of 14
Search all dispatches
People
Shen Kuo Wrote His Masterpiece in Disgrace
In 1088, a disgraced former general and finance commissioner settled into a garden estate on the edge of Zhenjiang, a city on the southern bank of the Yangtze.
17 min read
Economy
Elon Musk and China
Few relationships in modern global business are as complicated, consequential, and closely watched as Elon Musk’s relationship with China.
18 min read
People
Wang Zhenyi Brought the Heavens Down to Earth
In the late eighteenth century, long before electric light, photography, computers or modern observatories, a young Chinese woman stood in a room trying to recreate the movement of the heavens.
20 min read
Culture
South China Morning Post
On 30 August 1945, with Japanese personnel still occupying its office, a small group of South China Morning Post staff produced a free leaflet announcing the approaching British fleet.
16 min read
Economy
Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation
HSBC began not as an abstract financial empire but as a practical response to the extraordinary commercial growth of nineteenth century Asia.
15 min read
People
The Father of Fibre Optics
Sir Charles Kuen Kao was one of the most important electrical engineers and physicists of the twentieth century.
16 min read
Economy
China’s Belt and Road Initiative
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is one of the most ambitious international economic projects of the twenty-first century.
15 min read
History
When Pope and Emperor Clashed Over Confucius
When Matteo Ricci 利瑪竇 (1552–1610) arrived in China in 1583, he did not come as a conqueror or a trader. He came as a mathematician.
14 min read
Culture
Suzhou’s Gardens Hold the World in a Courtyard
The City and Its Gardeners In the southern reaches of the Yangtze delta, on a network of canals that link the Grand Canal to Lake Tai 太湖, lies the city of Suzhou 蘇州.
16 min read
Culture
How the Forbidden City Encoded the Cosmos
The Emperor and His City In the spring of 1406, the Yongle emperor of Ming China issued an order that would consume the labour of perhaps a hundred thousand workers for fifteen years.
16 min read
Science & Tech
The 1,700-Year-Old Recipe That Won a Nobel Prize
On the evening of December 10, 2015, in the blue and gold concert hall in Stockholm, an eighty-four-year-old Chinese woman in a dark suit walked across the stage to accept the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
14 min read
Culture
The Bells That Waited 2,400 Years
In the spring of 1978, on a low hill called Leigudun outside the city of Suizhou in Hubei, a unit of the People’s Liberation Army was doing what armies do in peacetime: flattening ground.
15 min read
Economy
Why the Pig Matters More Than the Panda
In a refrigerated warehouse somewhere in central China, behind doors that open by government order and not very often, sits a commodity most countries would never think to stockpile: frozen pork.
15 min read
Culture
The Secret China Kept for Three Thousand Years
In the year 16, the Roman Senate passed a law about cloth. No man, the senators decreed, should any longer disgrace himself by wearing silk.
16 min read
Science & Tech
The Race to Five-Minute EV Charging
For as long as electric cars have existed, one number has haunted them: the clock. Not range, not price, not even charging availability. Time.
17 min read
Economy
How China Skipped the Credit Card
Walk down a market street in any Chinese city today and you will see something that still startles visitors.
15 min read
History
Zheng He Ruled the Ocean Before Da Gama
On the eleventh of July 1405, at the anchorage of Liujiagang where the Yangtze meets the sea, the largest fleet the world had ever seen put out under sail.
14 min read
History
The First Emperor Gave China Its Operating System
In March 1974, in a drought year, farmers digging a well outside the town of Lintong in Shaanxi province struck terracotta.
15 min read
History
The Exam That Ruled China for 1,300 Years
Every year, in the second week of June, China holds its breath. Construction sites near schools fall silent. Traffic police close roads and ban horns.
15 min read
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.
16 min read
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.
19 min read
Economy
China Farms More Fish Than Everyone Else
In the fifth century BC, a man who had just helped destroy a kingdom sat down beside a pond and began, of all things, to give advice about fish.
18 min read
Culture
The Library in the Sand at Dunhuang
In 1900 a caretaker at a half forgotten Buddhist cave complex in the Gobi Desert chipped through a sealed wall and found a library that had not been opened for nine centuries.
18 min read
No recent stories match. Try another topic or search the full archive.
