Fresh explainers, culture news, practical guides, and evergreen stories for readers who want to understand China with context.
Winter in Shanghai hands you a paradox in the first week of December: the forecast says 8°C, which sounds manageable, and yet you are colder inside your apartment than you were on the …
November 11 is the one day of the year that looks like its own joke: 11/11, four solitary ones lined up in a row. In China, that row of ones is not …
Ask a young Chinese person where to find the best hotpot in Chengdu, and the answer will not be Google, Yelp, or even Douyin. It will be …
Douyin (抖音, dǒuyīn, literally “shaking sound”) is where China watches short video. The app that became TikTok for the rest of the world …
Sitting down in a Chinese restaurant with a menu full of characters you cannot read is one of those travel moments that can go two ways: a guessing …
For over two thousand years, the most important objects in a Chinese scholar’s life were not a computer or a phone, but four simple tools: a …
Somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago, a religion born in the foothills of the Himalayas crossed the mountains and deserts into China — and …
Walk down any street in China after dark and you will see them: groups of people gathered around steaming metal pots, chopsticks in hand, laughing and …
The first time you see a Chinese lion dance, you feel it before you understand it. A drum beats — slow, then fast, then urgent. Cymbals crash like …
When travelers visit China, they often encounter a string of names — Tang, Song, Ming, Qing — that can blur together. Chinese history is famously …
If you have ever walked through a Chinese park on a weekday afternoon and seen a crowd gathered around a small wooden table, you have probably watched …