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History
On 26 September 1959, a rig in the Songliao Basin of Heilongjiang Province pushed a column of oil out of the Songji No. 3 well at a rate of 13.02 tonnes a day, and the sound it made reached the Politburo in Beijing.
History
The road up to Lhasa in the autumn of 1720 was lined with the dismantled walls of a city that had just been taken by an army it had never seen.
History
On a clear, hard morning in the autumn of 1903, a train came down off the plateau west of Harbin and out onto the flat white plain of the Sungari, where the thermometer read twenty degrees below zero and the wind crossed the frozen fields without meeting anything to slow it.
History
The ledger at Ningbo in 1854 was a bad ledger.
Culture
Somewhere between her fourth birthday and her seventh, a girl in certain parts of China had her feet broken. The word her family used was not broken.
History
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
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.
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
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.
Science & Tech
On 19 August 2026 Unitree Robotics began trading on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the first company built around humanoid robots to list on China’s mainland exchanges.
Economy
Walk through any British high street or hospital store room and the same pattern repeats.
Science & Tech
On 31 July 2020 China declared its third-generation BeiDou Navigation Satellite System open for global service.
Economy
In 2014 Huawei became the first Chinese company to appear in Interbrand’s annual list of the world’s 100 best global brands, at 94th place. Twelve years later the picture looks very different.
Economy
Samsung began in 1938 as a small trading shop in Daegu selling dried fish, fruit and noodles.
Economy
In the first half of 2026, more than four-fifths of the merchant-ship tonnage ordered anywhere in the world went to Chinese yards.
Places
On 28 September 2025 a four-lane expressway bridge opened across the Huajiang Grand Canyon in Guizhou, in China’s mountainous south-west, with its road deck 625 metres above the Beipan River.
History
In December 755 a frontier commander named An Lushan turned his army south from Fanyang, near modern Beijing, and marched on the Tang empire’s eastern capital at Luoyang. Within weeks he held the city.
Science & Tech
In February 2024 a new Chinese building rose on Inexpressible Island, a wind-scoured rock in Terra Nova Bay on Antarctica’s Ross Sea coast.
People
For most British and American readers, the Second World War in Asia used to be a story about Pearl Harbor, Burma and the atomic bombs, with China as a backdrop where a corrupt government waited for the Americans to win its war.
Science & Tech
On the outskirts of Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, a large circular pit has been filling up with machinery. In October 2025 engineers lowered a 400-tonne steel base into it.
Places
Every winter, workers on the frozen Songhua River at Harbin cut the ice into heavy blocks.
History
Between 1938 and 1941, as country after country closed its doors to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, a Chinese port city under Japanese military pressure became one of the last places in the world they could reach.
Places
Wuhan is not one city.
Places
Fly into the Pearl River Delta at night and the old map stops making sense. There is no visible gap between Guangzhou and Foshan, or between Shenzhen and Dongguan.
