History
The Only Reform Left Standing
On the last day of 1898, in a house the neighbourhood still thought of as a dead princess’s, a university that was not yet a university opened its doors.
21 min read
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History
The Garden the Indemnity Bought
On the morning of 30 March 1911, a sixteen-year-old boy from Shaanxi sat in a new hall on the north-western edge of Beijing and was told where his breakfast had come from. The hall had no famous name yet.
31 min read
Culture
Ming Book of the West
Journey to the West (Xiyou ji) is usually introduced as a story about a monk, a monkey, and a road to India. That is not wrong. It is incomplete.
16 min read
Culture
Why China Is Red
If you have ever stood on the central axis of Beijing on a pale winter morning and looked at the north gate of the Forbidden City, you know the red I mean. It is not the thin, cheerful red of a London bus or a Coke can.
15 min read
People
Frank Dikötter and the History of China
There are historians who write about China from the perspective of leaders and slogans and there are historians who try to write about China from the perspective of the people who had to live through those slogans.
15 min read
History
The May Fourth Movement and Modern China
If you stand on the campus of Peking University in early May, when the willow trees around Weiming Lake are heavy and green and students gather in noisy discussion groups that seem to never end, you may notice a modest stone marker that does not commemorate an emperor or a victorious general.
17 min read
Places
Chongqing East and the Lines Still to Come
Chongqing has never been a simple city to move through. It is a place of ridges and gorges, rivers and bridges, stacked neighborhoods and tunnels carved through stone.
23 min read
History
Chinese Civil War in the 1800s
The mid nineteenth century nearly broke the Qing empire. Between 1850 and 1878 China was consumed by overlapping civil wars whose combined death toll ranks among the highest in human history.
12 min read
History
Sanguineous Chinese History
China’s history contains some of the largest recorded episodes of mass death in human experience, not because Chinese people are uniquely violent, but because the country has long combined enormous population, recurring cycles of unification and collapse, ideological campaigns, and weak constraints on state power.
9 min read
Places
Beijing’s Second Back Door
Some airports are machines for moving bodies.
10 min read
Culture
The Timeless Wisdom of Sun Tzu
The philosophical depth of Sun Tzu extends far beyond military conflict.
7 min read
Culture
The Architecture of Harmony
During an era defined by fractured kingdoms, relentless violence, and the disintegration of moral authority, a solitary scholar walked the winding dusty roads of central China.
19 min read
History
The First Emperor of Clay and Steel
In the year 221 BCE, a man who had spent his life surrounded by violence, intrigue, and relentless warfare looked out over a landscape transformed by his own hand.
18 min read
Economy
The Pharmacy Behind the Pharmacy
The pill in a Western blister pack is a finished object. It has a brand, a barcode, a country of origin printed on the carton that is usually India, Ireland, Germany, or the United States. That label is not a lie.
9 min read
Science & Tech
The Airport That Came Before the Aircraft
At two o’clock on the afternoon of 5 May 2017, runway four at Shanghai Pudong went quiet in the particular way a busy airport goes quiet when everyone has agreed to look at one aeroplane.
24 min read
Economy
The Parcel at the Door
On 12 February 2023, in the first quarter of the Super Bowl at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, a thirty-second film appeared twice.
36 min read
Economy
Xiaomi Is More Than China’s Samsung
Xiaomi is a consumer-electronics company that used phones as a beachhead, built one of the world’s largest IoT ecosystems, and then did what Apple spent a decade and roughly $10 billion failing to do: put a competitive electric car on the road in three years.
10 min read
Culture
The Living Architecture of Chinese Social Life
Few words travel from Chinese into English as often, or as incompletely, as guanxi (关系). Dictionaries render it as “relationships” or “connections.” Business handbooks treat it as a networking tactic.
15 min read
Economy
Build Your Dreams
In March 2025, a battery company from Shenzhen that had once made the electronics in your laptop overtook Tesla to become the world’s largest seller of electric vehicles.
13 min read
Places
Shanghai Underground
At eight o’clock on a weekday morning, the largest machine in the world is running beneath Shanghai.
14 min read
Places
The Skyline Across the River
Every evening on the Bund, thousands of people turn their backs on the most famous mile of architecture in Asia and photograph the other side. What they are photographing did not exist when some of them were born.
14 min read
Places
The Bund
There is a bend in the Huangpu River, a mile and a half of waterfront on the western bank, where the whole story of modern Shanghai is written in stone. Stand there at dusk and you can read it in both directions.
15 min read
Culture
The Shanghai That Never Was
It opens with a gong, a dragon, and a blonde in a red-sequined dress singing Cole Porter in Mandarin.
8 min read
Places
The Greatest City on Earth
In the middle of the eighth century, if you could have seen the earth from the moon on a clear night, one city would have burned brighter than any other.
15 min read
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