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Latest dispatches · page 2 of 14
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Economy
China now produces more than a quarter of the world’s manufacturing value added, runs the largest goods trade surplus ever recorded, and holds a commanding share of global output in industries as different as steel, ships, solar modules, batteries and industrial robots.
History
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
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’.
History
The wokou also have a particular place in the modern Chinese historical imagination.
History
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.
Science & Tech
In the spring of 2024, a small group of engineers at the Shanghai AI Lab and at DeepSeek-AI released, in open-source form, a distributed-training library that they called DualPipe.
Science & Tech
In the late summer of 2018, in a quiet clean room at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, a small group of Chinese photonic chip researchers gathered around a single optical bench.
Science & Tech
In the autumn of 2016, in a small conference room in the Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone, in the central Chinese province of Hubei, a small group of semiconductor industry engineers gathered around a single legal document.
Science & Tech
In the late summer of 2016, in a small conference room in the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, in the western suburbs of Beijing, a small group of computer science researchers and a small group of venture capital investors gathered around a single legal document.
Science & Tech
On a winter afternoon in late November 2020, in a small conference room in the Zhongguancun district of Beijing, a small group of senior engineers gathered around a single printed circuit board.
Science & Tech
In the autumn of 1978, in the small auditorium of the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, in the western suburbs of Beijing, a young computer science faculty member named Xu Xiangshan delivered a lecture that was, in many respects, the first lecture on artificial intelligence ever delivered in the People’s Republic of China.
Science & Tech
In the autumn of 2022, in a small conference room in the Shenzhen headquarters of Huawei Technologies, a small group of senior engineers gathered around a single printed circuit board.
Science & Tech
In the late summer of 2023, a quiet but consequential shift began to take place in the global conversation about artificial intelligence.
Science & Tech
In the last week of January 2025, a small artificial intelligence laboratory in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou released, in quick succession, two open-source large language models that, within a matter of days, would upend the global conversation about the cost, the ownership, and the future of frontier AI.
History
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.
History
To understand the invasions, one has to understand what they meant to the side that sent them. Khubilai Khan had spent most of his long political life extending the reach of the Mongol empire eastward and southward.
History
The wall that most visitors to China know as the Great Wall is in its essentials a Ming wall.
Science & Tech
On 24 September 2026 China Southern Airlines collected its thirteenth C919 at the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China’s assembly centre beside Shanghai Pudong airport.
History
In the early summer of 1357, in the Marinid city of Fez, an old man who had spent more than half of his life on the road dictated his memoirs to a young court secretary named Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi.
History
In the spring of 1295 a Venetian merchant galley fought its way through a small naval engagement in the waters off the island of Curzola, on the Dalmatian coast, and was taken by the Genoese.
Science & Tech
The Tower That Should Not Have Existed In the late spring of 1092, in the imperial capital of the Northern Song dynasty, an enormous tower of carved wood, bronze, and gold-leafed tile was raised on the eastern flank of the palace precinct at Kaifeng.
History
On 29 March 1974, a group of farmers in the village of Xiyang, in the Lintong district east of the city of Xi'an in central China, were drilling a well in the hard, yellow loess of the plain at the foot of Mount Li, when their steel bit broke through into a hollow space a few metres below the surface.
Culture
The Boy in the Cave The most famous fictional Chinese boy in the European imagination was never actually Chinese.
History
In the autumn of 9 CE, a forty-three year old Han court official named Wang Mang received the formal abdication of the infant emperor Ruzi and proclaimed a new dynasty, which he called the Xin, meaning the New.
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