The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭), Hall Of Longevity (长生殿), Thousands Of Martyrs (千忠戮) and A Peach Flower Fan (桃花扇) are the four most celebrated classic Chinese opera dramas since Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644) until this day. Author Kong Shangren Kong Shangren (1648 – 1718), the author of A Peach Flower Fan, was a 64th-generation descendant of Confucius and an eyewitness to […]
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Oracle Turtle Scripts This is Oracle Turtle Script, the early Chinese written language carved on a turtle shell during Shang Dynasty (1600 BC – 1046 BC) – an era ruled by merchants with a social system chiefly based on written business contacts. This script used to be considered as the earliest form of Chinese characters by archaeologists. But the evidence […]
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This more than 3,000-year-old bronze vessel was recovered by a Beijing museum researcher in 2002 from an antique market in Hong Kong. On the bottom of the container, there are 98 Chinese characters with the opening lines praising the legendary Great Yu’s hydraulic projects nearly 5,000 years ago to control the flood from the Yellow River. An Ancient Reference to […]
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This is a stone carving taken from the graveyard of the 2nd Tang Dynasty emperor Li Shimin ( 598-649) in Shaanxi Province. The artefact was smashed into small pieces and smuggled to America in 1914. Now it is used as a room decor in a restaurant in The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These are a pair […]
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Wenfeng Pagoda (Cultural Peak Pagoda) in Fenyang, Shanxi Province, was built at the end of the Ming Dynasty in the middle of the 17th century. The structure is 84.93 metres tall and has 13 floors. After a magnitude 6 earthquake in 1932, the pagoda began to tilt towards the east and, further owing to the collapsible nature of the yellow […]
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The building in the cliff edge is a library in the ancient Cloud Rock Temple (云岩寺) in Sichuan Province. There are a thousand paths to enlightenment, but only two ways to access the 1,000-year-old sutra library: one is via a long and winding mountain track that is time-consuming, and another is a shortcut through a bridge formed by just two […]
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Believe it or not, this is not an artwork crafted by a human artist but a plant created by nature. Ganoderma, a genus of polypore mushrooms that grow on wood, is traditionally regarded in China as having a magic effect on youthful looking and longevity. In Chinese folk tales, some certain types of Ganoderma are also described as possessing a power […]
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There are more than 380 varieties of tea-trees growing around the world, of which over 260 are in southern China, mainly in Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces. Apart from the different species of tea trees, based on the time of fermentation, Chinese tea products can also be categorised into 6 major flavours: Green Tea, White Tea, […]
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As the birthplace of paper and printing, ancient China developed the whole range of bookbinding techniques, from Policy Briefing (简策) during pre-paper age, Scroll (卷轴) with paper and silk, Sutra (经折), Butterfly (蝴蝶), Amalgamation (和合), Back-cover (包背), Wire-bound (线装) to Dragon Scale (龙鳞). Among all bookbinding styles, Dragon Scale is one of the most fascinating. The final product of the […]
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Chinese archaeologists have discovered from a cave in Hunan Province 47 human teeth fossils, almost identical to our own. The breakthrough archaeological discovery suggests modern humans lived in China more than 80,000, probably 120,000, years ago, according to a research paper by Liu Wu (刘武) and Wu Xiujie (吴秀杰) published on Nature. The new finding once again challenges the “Out […]
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Sitting on a hilltop 1214 metres above sea level, this is an ancient pyramid in Fuzhou, Jiangxi province, in the south of Yangtze River. The massive structure has a base floor area over 5,000 sqm, with 4 levels in total, each of which is about 1.5m in height and has a 1.2m setback from the front of the lower level. […]
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The White Deer Plain (白鹿原) is a Chinese TV drama narrating the history of an old village on the conservative Yellow Plateau in Shaanxi Province, the home to First Emperor Qin’s terracotta warriors. The man standing at the door to the main living/bedroom is played by He Bing (何冰), one of China’s best actors who won last year’s major Chinese […]
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