The Context

A world where the widowed, disabled and anyone in need are all cared for was an ideal envisioned by Confucian scholars during the Warring States period from the fifth to third century BCE. Their writings make up the earliest recorded ideas about charity in China’s history.  Government-sponsored charity mainly included disaster relief. This falls far short of modern Western charity, a virtue that h...

Our previous podcast discussed some of the ancient hermits that feature in the Palace Museum’s Figure Paintings Across the Ages exhibition. They gave up political pursuits right from the start and never wavered. But unlike them, most hermit scholars depicted in the exhibition were deeply involved in politics in some way.  For Jiang Ziya and the four old men, they lived in seclusion just to wait fo...

At the Palace Museum exhibition, a total of 76 paintings include portraits of the most famous hermit-scholars in China’s history. It is the second in a series of four ancient portrait exhibitions by the Palace Museum. Unlike this group of hermits, the other three exhibitions feature figures who either actively sought to make their name in the world, or tried to enjoy life. While paintings of relig...

“Globally, around 14 percent of food produced is lost between harvest and retail, while an estimated 17 percent of total global food production is wasted,” according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Food supply is not just an agricultural issue. On September 23, the first UN Food Systems Summit was held in New York. More than 150 countries made a joint commitment on transfo...

On August 21, the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, DC celebrated the first birthday of panda cub Xiao Qi Ji, which translates to Little Miracle. The zoo had held an online contest where the public could vote on a list of names. He “shared not one but two delicious fruitsicle cakes with his mother, Mei Xiang,” the zoo said on its website.  The cub’s birth definitely comes as a little...

Today we discuss how a ferocious, exotic beast, lion, has become an auspicious, cute cultural icon in ancient China. The lion originally came from Africa. It trekked from Egypt into Europe and Asia Minor from the Mediterranean, and into the Iranian Plateau and India. There was no human intervention in their migration. There are two sub-spices of Asian lions: Persian lions and Indian lions.  When t...

On August 30, China announced a policy that restricts the time minors can play online games to three hours a week. The new rules limit those under 18 access to online gaming platforms to one hour from 8 to 9pm on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and on official holidays.  However, on Saturday 8pm that week, many complained they could not log on their accounts for Arena of Valor, a popular game by T...

If Wuhan was the place in China that received most attention in 2020, Henan Province has certainly captured its share of attention this year. Henan in history is repeatedly referred to as the “zhongyuan,” or “central plain.” It is the thousands of years of its history as the “zhongyuan” that has created and shaped the land as the symbol of the most glorious – and the most painful memories of China...

Even if we trace archaeology back to da Vinci and Raphael, there is another related discipline that began much earlier. Epigraphy, the study of ancient inscriptions, was first developed in ancient China. Unlike archaeology, it aimed to challenge and verify interpretations of classical Confucianism texts.  A movement similar to the Renaissance blossomed in China during the 9th and 11th century. Lea...

By August 2, at least 302 people had died and some 50 were registered as missing due to the catastrophic floods that swept through parts of central China’s Henan Province after days of torrential downpours in mid-July. By 7am on August 9, nearly 15 million people in Henan had been affected by the floods. In Europe, about 200 people died in the flood which hit Germany and Belgium also in mid-July....

At one time, archaeology was not a place for outsiders. But in recent years, it has captured the public imagination in China with movie blockbusters about tomb raiding like The Lost Tomb and the mysterious new findings of the Sanxingdui excavations. There is even a popular toy that lets children play archaeologist: a box containing a Terracotta warrior replica buried in dirt and tiny excavation to...

Humans in prehistory period relied on hunting and gathering to survive. When agriculture was developed, hunting became an important sport and entertainment for elites. It often carried military and political significance. 

 The construction of the Hangou canal began in 486 BCE, 1,090 years before Emperor Yang launched his canal project. It became the earliest part of what became the Sui Grand Canal. Its initiator was a ruler who was as ambitious and ill-fated as Emperor Yang.  Cities along the Grand Canal also were affected as the length and contour of the canal changed. At 1,800 kilometers long, the Yuan canal is a...

 “The same water either supports or overturns boats on it,”  Li Shimin, the second emperor of the Tang in the 7th century, often  cited these Confucius’ remarks which compared water to the people and boats to sovereigns.  He did this to repeatedly remind himself of the lessons he learned from the fall of the Sui. He founded a golden age in China's history.  The Grand Canal witnessed and even...

 Zhang Xifeng, a 17-year-old student at Hengshui High School of Hebei Province, went viral. In his speech on Anhui TV program Super Speaker, Zhang compared himself to a humble “country pig” and shared his ambition to “grab a city cabbage.” While he did not specify what “city cabbage” is, for a young man from a small town, the metaphor likely refers to a well-paid job and a wife from a middle-class...

There were 200 million skilled workers in China at the end of 2020, only 26 percent of the country’s total workforce.  Given this, vocational education has drawn unprecedented attention among policymakers in China, the world’s largest manufacturer. But parents, particularly those in urban areas, are against sending their children to vocational high schools or colleges. The problem is that blue col...

One day, more than 2,000 years ago, Emperor Yuan of China’s Western Han dynasty and his concubines were watching animal baiting. Suddenly a black bear jumped out of the enclosure and attacked the spectators. The emperor and his concubines were scared and ran away. But one of the concubines, Feng Yuan  did not. She stood right in front of the bear, while two guards tried to stop the bear with their...

A Chinese woman living in German-occupied Belgium in the 1940s finally succeeded in her mission: an audience with the top Nazi leader in Belgium, General Alexander von Falkenhausen. It was not the first time that Qian Xiuling had met the general, and she was counting on their prior connection to aid her. She told Falkenhausen that 96 people were being held hostage in the Belgian city of Écaussinne...

On May 31, China announced a further relaxation in its family planning policy, allowing couples to have up to three children. Supportive measures will be formulated to encourage couples to have more children. The announcement came right after the release of the seventh national population census which shows the population is aging and the birth rate is falling.   Ancient Chinese dynasties used dif...

In a recent TV series,  the two mothers even seem paranoid sometimes, while the two fathers  seem normal. This is because they are less involved in their children’s education.  There is an ancient Chinese saying that goes, “it’s a father’s fault if he just feeds but does not teach his children.”  So this raises the question: did fathers in ancient China take part in their children’s education?

In 2020, nearly 376 million Chinese people did not live in the cities where they had registered their household information, up by more than 154 million in the 2010 census. This sounds a bit odd when it’s compared to the Chinese tradition of emotionally being attached to one’s homeland where one is born and lives on the land that you farm.  In world history, flows of people, either in peaceful or...

In May, a herd of 15 wild Asian elephants continued their northern venture in  southwest China’s Yunnan Province after their year-long journey from their home in Xishuangbanna Yunnan.  Yunnan is th only area of China with wild Asian elephants. But for millennia, the habitat of wild Asian elephants stretched much farther north into China before human encroachment forced them south.  An example of h...

Six out of the top 10 most attractive tourist sites during the 5-day Labor Day holiday in China were historical sites. Three are in Beijing - the Great Wall, the Summer Palace and Yuanmingyuan, or Old Summer Palace. The other three are the Longmen Grottoes in the ancient city of Luoyang in central China, the Ming Dynasty city wall in Xi’an in China’s northwest and the Humble Administrator’s Garden...

On April 23, a wild male Siberian tiger appeared in a village in Heilongjiang Province in China’s northeast. It injured a local woman working on farmland and smashed the window of a passing car. It was later captured by police and forestry authorities. It will remain under a 45-day quarantine check-up before it is released back into the wild. Footage showing how it was captured went viral online....

Among about 2,000 artifacts and thousands of fragments of relics unearthed in the eight pits of the Sanxingdui Ruins site in Sichuan Province in China’s southwest, bronze masks and figurines have attracted the most attention. They are of unusual appearance, and have particularly protruding eyes. Do they resemble the ancient Shu people of this area, or perhaps people from West Asia or even further...