Stories from China
Stories rooted in place
People, food, culture and everyday life, kept in the specific places where each story belongs.
Arts & Traditions
The Bell That Rang Twice: Inside Marquis Yi’s Bronze Orchestra
A single bronze bell could sound two different notes. In the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, that technical feat became an orchestra, a written theory of music and a language of political power.
History & Heritage
The Woman Named on the Bones: Finding Fu Hao
Oracle bones recorded her name. An undisturbed tomb gave that name objects, authority and a place in Shang history — while leaving important parts of Fu Hao’s life unresolved.
History & Heritage
A Thousand Hands, Repaired One by One: Saving Dazu’s Golden Guanyin
Dazu’s great Thousand-Hand Guanyin is stone, lacquer, colour and gold at once. Saving it required seven years of research — and difficult choices about how old sacred art should look.
Arts & Traditions
A City Unrolled: Walking Through Zhang Zeduan’s Handscroll
Zhang Zeduan’s handscroll does not show its city all at once. It makes the viewer travel — from quiet fields to a dangerous bridge, through a gate and into crowded urban life.
Cities & Architecture
A Mountain Made of Holes: Getting Lost in Suzhou’s Lion Grove
Lion Grove compresses mountains into a city garden. Its rockery is not scenery viewed from a path; it is a labyrinth that makes the visitor climb, turn and lose direction.
Arts & Traditions
The Paper That Lets the Ink Breathe
In Anhui, a sheet of paper begins as bark, straw, water and patient work. What makes Xuan paper extraordinary is not that it stays blank, but what happens when ink finally touches it.
History & Heritage
A Thousand Metres Down for a Pinch of Salt
In Zigong, salt was not scraped from a shore. Workers drilled through the Sichuan earth until brine and gas rose from astonishing depths — and built a city around what came up.
Nature & Landscapes
The Birds That Leave Beijing for Africa
Beneath the eaves of Beijing's Summer Palace, a small dark bird begins a journey that tracking research has followed across continents and back.
Arts & Traditions
The Theatre That Fits in a Leather Box
A Shaanxi shadow puppet can be almost flat and still carry an entire character. Behind the screen, a maker's carved leather and a performer's hand turn a box of pieces into a world.
Nature & Landscapes
Seven Birds, and a Place to Return To
In 1981, researchers found seven wild crested ibises in Shaanxi. Their descendants made a remarkable recovery — but the story is as much about rice fields, winter water and patient protection as it is about one rare bird.
History & Heritage
The Ship Raised With the Sea Around It
When archaeologists found a Southern Song trading ship beneath the South China Sea, they did not lift its treasures one by one. They raised the wreck, its cargo, the mud and part of the seabed together.
History & Heritage
The Fossils That Survived as Copies
The original Peking Man fossils vanished during wartime. Science continued through casts, drawings, measurements and a site whose evidence could not be packed into a box.
Cities & Architecture
Remittance Towers: Wealth, Fear and Home in Kaiping
In the fields of Kaiping, overseas earnings became concrete towers. Their balconies announced success; their shutters, bars and watchtowers prepared for danger.
Cities & Architecture
The Tower That Survived — and Leaned
Yingxian’s wooden pagoda has endured for nearly a millennium, but survival is not stillness. Its structure flexed, was damaged, repaired, altered and slowly tilted.
History & Heritage
Before the Army Turned Grey: The Vanishing Colours of the Terracotta Warriors
The Terracotta Army is famous for its ranks of grey clay soldiers. But grey was never the plan. Their lost colours reveal why discovery can also be the moment of greatest danger.
Cities & Architecture
Names Fired Into the Wall: Nanjing’s Hidden Ledger
Nanjing’s Ming city wall was built from bricks carrying places, officials, kiln workers and labourers in their clay. Six centuries later, the old system of accountability has become an archive of human lives.
Cities & Architecture
A City Built for One Winter: How Harbin Turns a Frozen River Into Architecture
Every winter, blocks leave the Songhua River and return as towers, halls and illuminated streets. The surprise is not that Harbin’s ice city melts, but how much work is designed around that certainty.
Cities & Architecture
One Door, Many Homes: Inside Fujian’s Tulou
Behind a single fortified entrance, households shared courtyards, wells, stairways and a life organised vertically. Fujian’s tulou are not simply round houses — they are architecture built around living together.
Nature & Landscapes
Rebuilt to Survive: The Living Logic of Dujiangyan
Dujiangyan has shared the Min River for more than two millennia without a high dam. Its secret is not an untouched ancient machine, but a design that survives through adjustment and rebuilding.
History & Heritage
The Library That Scattered Across the World
A sealed chamber at Mogao held more than 50,000 manuscripts, paintings, textiles and printed works. Within a decade of its rediscovery, that library had been divided among collections around the world.
Arts & Traditions
Seventy-Two Hands: How Jingdezhen Made Porcelain for the World
In China’s porcelain capital, a cup begins in a mountain, passes through dozens of specialists, and may survive for centuries because someone once smashed it.
Arts & Traditions
Tile Cats: The Rooftop Guardians of Yunnan
Across Yunnan’s old rooftops, fierce-faced tile cats guard homes, swallow misfortune, and carry a craft tradition shaped by local hands.
History & Heritage
The Ancient Tea Horse Road: Yunnan’s Living History
Once a caravan network carrying tea, horses, and ideas across the mountains, the Tea Horse Road still lives in Yunnan’s villages, trails, and memories.
Nature & Landscapes
Green Lake: The Eye of Kunming
Tea tables, lotus ponds, winter gulls, old lanes, and everyday rituals make Green Lake one of the clearest windows into Kunming life.
Cities & Architecture
Shaxi: The Ancient Tea Horse Town Where Time Slows Down
Between Dali and Lijiang, Shaxi preserves an old caravan square, Friday market, temple art, village lanes, and the confidence of a place still lived in.