Stories: China

Stories connected to China.

• The Forbidden City has feline guards.Roughly 150 to 200 cats live in Beijing's Forbidden City. Museum staff manage their health and numbers, while…
• A woman sings on screen. A man supplied her voice.In the 1931 Chinese sound film Sing-Song Girl Red Peony, the lead actress Hu Die's singing was overdubbed by…
• A hare that prefers the forest to open ground.The Manchurian hare lives in forests of northeastern China and eastern Russia and avoids open areas. Its wood…
• British novel. Japanese text. Chinese silent film.The 1926 Chinese silent film Lonely Orchid adapted a British novel through a Japanese translation and then a…
• A children's book looked at hardship too.Ye Shengtao's The Scarecrow, published in China in 1923, collected 23 fairy tales. Alongside childhood wonder…
• An early Chinese pop hit. A critic heard a cat.Li Minghui's 1928 recording of Drizzle became an early Chinese popular-music success. Writer Lu Xun disliked…
• A studio spent its last money on a movie. It worked.Founded in Shanghai in 1922, Mingxing Film Company struggled after its early comedies failed to attract audie…
• Chaplin visited Shanghai on film before he did in life.A 1922 Chinese comedy imagined Charlie Chaplin visiting Shanghai, with an impersonator playing him. Chaplin h…
• An early landmark of modern Chinese drama was staged by students in Tokyo.In 1907, Chinese students in Tokyo staged Black Slave's Cry to Heaven, an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin, at…
• Even above 4,000 metres, a columbine can bloom.Aquilegia moorcroftiana grows across parts of Central Asia and the Himalayas. It is reported as the highest-g…
• The film's rough waves? White fabric and plastic bags.The 2021 film A New Old Play follows a Sichuan opera actor's life. Director Qiu Jiongjiong deliberately used…
• Uncovered heads could seem rude. So priests wore a hat at Mass.In 17th-century China, missionaries adapted Catholic practice to local ideas of respect by using a ceremonial…
• A lily hangs like a lantern. Its shape shields what is inside.Lilium lophophorum grows at 2,500–4,500 metres in western China. Its flower nods downward, with petal tips dr…
• An elm leaf has a zigzag cut. A tiny larva made it while eating.The elm zigzag sawfly is native to China and Japan. Early in its growth, its larva eats a distinctive zigzag…
• A poet wrote that immortality could be learned. He reportedly avoided the topic with the emperor.Tang-era Daoist poet Wu Yun wrote a treatise titled Immortality Can Be Learned. Two traditional histories say…
• A 1931 Chinese film survived. Its soundtrack did not.Two Stars in the Milky Way used written intertitles for dialogue and separately recorded sound for songs. It…
• Shakespeare reached a Chinese stage. The script travelled through Japanese.The troupe that followed China's Spring Willow Society adapted Othello as The Traitor from a Japanese transla…
• He copied a trick with limbs. His own leg was really cut off.In the Ming-era fantasy novel Journey to the South, arhats pretend to sever their limbs to trick the hero Hua…
• From the mountain to the temple, a monkey comes to see a nun.Xing Xing, a Tibetan macaque in China's Zhejiang province, lost an arm and came under the care of a temple. S…
• Even a roadside flower has an ancient paper trail.The leaves of Taraxacum mongolicum, a dandelion species, were documented in the Chinese materia medica Xinxiu…
• Archaeologists found hundreds of bells. Most were around dogs' necks.At Yinxu in China, about 350 late-Shang clapper-bells known as ling have been recovered. Most were found arou…
• She escaped occupied Hong Kong. Then kept nursing across Asia.US-born Elsie Chin nursed the wounded during the 1941 battle for Hong Kong. After the Japanese occupation, sh…
• Two brothers founded a film studio. The younger brother and his partner starred.Shanghai's Huaju Film Company was founded in 1925 by brothers Zhang Qingpu and Zhang Huimin. Many of its film…
• His 70,000-book library was sealed. He wrote in school copybooks.During China's Cultural Revolution, historian Gu Jiegang lost access to a library of more than 70,000 volumes…
• It is not a film about dolls. Yet critics compared it with Barbie.The 2024 Chinese comedy-drama Her Story follows a single mother and her female neighbor. Its focus on women's…
• Who belongs in a book illustration? This publisher chose himself.Yu Xiangdou, a Chinese publisher active around the late Ming dynasty, liked placing portraits of himself in h…
• A Trojan War tapestry set— made by Chinese artisans in Macau.In the 1620s, Ming Chinese embroiderers in Macau made seven hangings depicting the Trojan War. Despite the We…
• When the field was suppressed, a psychologist secretly wrote a vast manuscript.Chinese psychologist Pan Shu continued writing during the Cultural Revolution, when psychology research was r…
• A tiny animal from 520 million years ago had twice the expected antennae.Antennacanthopodia fossils from Yunnan, China, resemble an ancient relative of today's velvet worms. The anim…
• A Ming emperor abolished a practice that cost concubines their lives.During his second reign in the 15th century, Emperor Yingzong of Ming abolished the practice of concubines co…
• At Beijing's Winter Games, this flag bearer wore no shirt.Nathan Crumpton, American Samoa's only athlete at the 2022 Winter Olympics, carried the flag shirtless in tra…
• The pirate leader negotiated retirementAfter her husband died, Zheng Yi Sao led a pirate confederation off China’s coast. In 1810 she negotiated sur…
• The writer brought a gibbon in a little dinner jacketAccounts of writer Emily Hahn’s life in 1930s Shanghai describe her taking her pet gibbon, Mr. Mills, to dinn…
• A shuttlecock game can rely on feet rather than handsIn Chinese jianzi, players keep a feathered shuttlecock from reaching the ground with body parts other than t…
• A hundred beads helped count a survey journeyNineteenth-century surveyor Nain Singh and colleagues trained for British expeditions to Tibet. A prayer-bead…
• Plants covered the homes people leftHoutouwan on China’s Shengshan Island was a fishing village. Its population declined from the 1990s, and vege…
• Fuel for a 1907 motoring race travelled by camelThe 1907 Peking-to-Paris race relied on fuel stations arranged along its route. Camels carried supplies ahead…
• A cat needed a mail officerSimon, the cat aboard HMS Amethyst, resumed catching rats after recovering from injuries in the 1949 Yangtze…
• That apparent dead leaf may be a mothUropyia meticulodina occurs in Japan, Taiwan and parts of China. Its adult form mimics a dead leaf, with a wi…
• Its back spines were once mistaken for walking legsHallucigenia was a Cambrian animal with legs and spines on its back. A 1977 reconstruction treated the spines…