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Latest dispatches · page 5 of 14
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History
The First Transcontinental Railroad in the United States — completed at Promontory Summit, Utah on 10 May 1869 — was built largely by Chinese workers, who made up roughly 90 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad‘s workforce at the peak of construction.
Places
The Limehouse district of east London was the site of Britain‘s first Chinese community from the 1880s to the 1960s, with a peak population of roughly 1,200 in the 1930s.
History
A Jewish community existed at Kaifeng — the Northern Song capital — for roughly 700 years, from the late Tang period until the late Qing period.
Science & Tech
When a Y-20 took off from Tianjin on 13 March 2020, bound for Rome with nine tonnes of masks and ventilators, it was the largest Chinese-built aircraft to land in Europe since a 1960s-era Xian H-6 bomber diverted to a Soviet airfield.
Science & Tech
BGI — the Beijing Genomics Institute — was the world’s largest genome sequencing centre for most of the 2010s, with annual capacity of more than 100,000 whole human genomes and a project portfolio including the International HapMap Project, the 1000 Genomes Project, and the Earth BioGenome Project.
Economy
The Qinghai–Tibet plateau holds some of the world’s largest lithium reserves in the form of brine pools — salt lakes where dissolved lithium lies just below the surface.
Economy
CRRC — the Chinese state rail-equipment manufacturer — is the world’s largest train maker, producing roughly half of all the world’s locomotives and electric multiple units in any given year.
Culture
The standard list of Chinese regional cuisines — Lu, Chuan, Yue, Huai, Min, Zhe, Xiang, Hui — has eight entries and roughly four actual cuisines.
History
For two hundred years, the Catholic Church and the Chinese imperial court argued about whether Chinese Christians could continue to honour Confucius and the ancestors.
Culture
Buddhism entered China as a foreign religion from India in the early centuries CE — the first documented Buddhist community in Luoyang dates to 65 CE — and was transformed over the next thousand years into the Chan, Pure Land, and Tiantai schools that are now recognisably Chinese.
People
For two thousand years, the Kong family at Qufu supplied the Chinese empire with its Sicheng — the Worshipping Sage priest, the hereditary custodian of the Confucius temple.
Culture
For five dynasties and roughly seven hundred years, the Chinese imperial court classified the formula for true porcelain — the blue-and-white ware of Jingdezhen — as a state secret.
Science & Tech
The Chinese compass was not a navigation instrument for the first thousand years of its existence.
Science & Tech
Bi Sheng — a Northern Song artisan working in Bianjing — invented the world’s first movable-type printing press around 1040, four centuries before Gutenberg’s 1450 metal press.
Economy
The world’s first state-backed paper money appeared in Sichuan around 1024, and the world’s first state-backed paper-money crash followed within seventy years.
History
The Roman Empire paid for Chinese silk in gold, and the trade was so expensive to the Roman treasury that the Senate repeatedly tried to ban the import.
People
When the United Nations advance up the Korean peninsula forced the question of whether China would permit the unification of Korea under Syngman Rhee, the People’s Volunteers crossed the Yalu River on 19 October 1950 and committed the largest ground campaign by an Asian army since 1945.
History
In February 1979 China and Vietnam fought a short, brutal war along their shared border.
History
Between 1884 and 1885 France and the Qing dynasty fought a war in Indochina that France effectively won on land and lost politically at the table.
People
Bound feet and all, the daughter of a Zhejiang merchant family became the most famous anti-Qing revolutionary of 1907.
History
The daughter of China’s most distinguished calligrapher was captured by a steppe khan in 195 CE and returned twelve years later with two long laments that became the founding texts of the autobiographical tradition in Chinese poetry.
People
A former Cantonese waterfront prostitute turned pirate commander, Ching Shih controlled more than a thousand junks and seventy thousand pirates along the South China coast in the 1800s — and retired on her own terms to run a gambling house.
People
Of the hundreds of poets who worked the ci lyric form in the Song dynasty, one has survived as the form’s most quoted voice — and the only one most readers outside the period can name.
People
In 690 a former low-ranking palace attendant of the Tang dynasty took the dragon throne in her own name — the only woman ever to rule China as emperor proper — and for fifteen years reshaped the dynasty’s religion, court politics, and official record-keeping.
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