In the Hall of the People in Beijing, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang sign an agreement committing Britain to return Hong Kong to China in 1997 in return for terms guaranteeing a 50-year extension of its capitalist system. Hong Kong–a ...read more
After Chinese officials – alarmed at the June 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square – ordered soldiers and police to shoot and kill student protesters, one solitary man stood out from the crowd. Historian and journalist T.D. Allman, who witnessed the ...read more
The Qing Dynasty was the final imperial dynasty in China, lasting from 1644 to 1912. It was an era noted for its initial prosperity and tumultuous final years, and for being only the second time that China was not ruled by the Han people. FALL OF THE MING DYNASTY Near the ...read more
The Taiping Rebellion was a revolt against the Qing dynasty in China, fought with religious conviction over regional economic conditions, and lasting from 1850 to 1864. The Taiping forces were run as a cult-like group called the God Worshipping Society by self-proclaimed prophet ...read more
Whether a victory march, a commemoration of past conflict or a showy flexing of military muscle, the tradition of soldiers publicly parading with their weapons goes back for millennia. Long designed to stir flag-waving fervor and impress enemies, such lockstep ...read more
Tiananmen Square is a public plaza in central Beijing, the capital of China. It’s said to be the largest urban public space in the world. Although the site has social and historical significance within China, it’s perhaps best known worldwide as the site of the Tiananmen Square ...read more
The Han Dynasty ruled China from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D. Though tainted by deadly dramas within the royal court, it is also renowned for its promotion of Confucianism as the state religion and opening the Silk Road trade route to Europe. EMPEROR GAOZU Following a mass revolt ...read more
Humans have been recording earthquakes for nearly 4,000 years. From the ones we know about, the deadliest by far happened in China in 1556 A.D. On January 23 of that year, a powerful quake rocked the province of Shaanxi as well as the neighboring province of Shanxi, killing an ...read more
Wong Kim Ark was nearly home. As the steamship Coptic slipped through the Golden Gate on an August day in 1895, the young cook could see the buildings huddled on the steep hills of San Francisco, the city where he was born and spent most of his life. Returning to the United ...read more
It’s called “panda diplomacy” and it’s thought to have started as early as the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century when Empress Wu Zeitan sent a pair of bears (believed to be pandas) to Japan. This Chinese policy of sending pandas as diplomat gifts was revived in 1941, on the eve of ...read more
In the years since Mao Zedong’s communist revolution in 1949, relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States had been clouded by Cold War propaganda, trade embargos and diplomatic silence. The two superpowers had met on the battlefield during the Korean ...read more
Born in 1859, Yuan Shikai was part of a relatively affluent clan in Xiangcheng, Henan province. He was never a good student, but he excelled in physical activity; after twice failing the imperial examinations necessary to become a civil servant, he chose a military career. His ...read more
From Italian ravioli, to Polish piroshky, to Chinese pot stickers, the humble dumpling is beloved by eaters around the world. Truly a universal food, you’d be hard pressed to find a cultural cuisine that doesn’t include dumplings in some form, be it stuffed or boiled. Ghanaians ...read more
For most of the past century, scientists and medical researchers have hotly debated the origins of the 1918 influenza outbreak. Although the pandemic had been dubbed the “Spanish flu,” it only appeared to hit harder in neutral Spain because the country was free from wartime ...read more
In a press conference earlier this week, executives from the Seven Star Energy Investment Group revealed additional details for the park, officially known as the Romandisea Seven Star International Cultural Tourism Resort. Expected to cost 1 billion yuan ($165 million), it will ...read more
Security was extra tight at Maryland’s Andrews Air Force Base on April 16, 1972, as a pair of high-profile Chinese emissaries disembarked from a military plane. Government officials whisked the envoys into waiting vehicles that sped off with a police escort through the streets of ...read more
Chang’e 3 blasted off from Xichang Province in the south of China on December 2 Beijing time, aboard a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket. About five days later, it arrived in the moon’s orbit, some 60 miles (100 km) from its surface, and began preparing for landing. During ...read more
1. Qin Shi Huang (221-210 B.C.) China was unified in 221 B.C. when the Qin people came out of the west to prevail militarily over a number of rival states. Their leader, who declared himself Qin Shi Huang (First Emperor of Qin), established a strong centralized government, in ...read more
The government plans demolish a traditional neighborhood of “hutongs”—alleyways or narrow lanes created by the walls of single-story courtyard houses–in order to rebuild a public square and restore it to its 18th-century Qing Dynasty appearance. The plan has proved controversial ...read more
Born around 1254 in the Venetian Republic, Marco Polo headed to Asia with his merchant father at age 17. He would spend the next 24 years exploring distant lands and documenting his observations, which would later be published in a manuscript known as “The Travels of Marco Polo.” ...read more
Ping-Pong Diplomacy, April 6-17, 1971 The invitation to play in China came as a surprise to members of the U.S. Table Tennis Team. While in Nagoya, Japan, for the World Table Tennis Championship, the team’s peers from China invited them for an all-expenses-paid trip to the ...read more
Most experts agree that prehistoric humans began taming wolves tens of thousands of years ago, transforming dangerous pack predators into loyal companions and creating specialized dog breeds for different tasks. (In another version of this story, wolves engineered their own ...read more
A long-lost cousin of prehistory’s most infamous predator, Tyrannosaurus rex, has been found and identified, according to a paper published online on April 1, 2011, in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research. The gargantuan theropod has been dubbed Zhuchengtyrannus ...read more
In what begins as a fairly minor incident, the American consul and his staff in Mukden, China, are made virtual hostages by communist forces in China. The crisis did not end until a year later, by which time U.S. relations with the new communist government in China had been ...read more