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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The 9th Fairy’s Platform (九仙女台), a Daoist temple, was initially built during the Tang Dynasty in the middle of a river in Shanxi Province. As legend has it, a female immortal from a celestial world once visited this place in the appearance of a homeless girl and lived on a rock in the river. By then there were two dragons fighting […]
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Lady Chang’e and the Moon Day As Chinese legend goes, a long long time ago right here on this planet, ten suns suddenly appeared in the sky and refused to go away. The land was burning and the people were dying. A man named Houyi heroically shot down the nine suns and left only one to light the sky. Life […]
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The love story between stars of Altair and Vega located in the two sides of Milky Way is one of the oldest Chinese fairy tales. A Forbidden Love between Two Stars As legend goes, in the beginning, there was no Milky Way in the sky and the stars could easily meet each other whenever they pleased. Vega is said to be […]
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A firewood collector watching two immortals paying chess in Mt. Lanke in Zhejiang Province – a coloured ink painting by Ming Dynasty scholar, politician and artist Zhang Yining (张以宁 1301-1370) The legend of Mt. Lanke During Jin Dynasty in the 4th century, a guy went to Mt. Lanke collecting firewoods and saw two men playing chess Weiqi (Go) on a stone. Like […]
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The mythical tale about encountering immortals in Mt. Tiantai was first recorded on Search for Immortals (搜神記) by a scholar official in East Jin in the 4th century. It’s a clear evidence that Chinese have entertained the concept of relativity in time at least 2,000 years go. The illustrations were produced by Zhao Cangyun (赵苍云), an ancient Chinese scholar artist living […]
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A love story about a pair of white butterflies is one of the most enduring Chinese legends that has been told for hundreds, probably thousands, of years in China. As the legend goes, the butterflies were initially humans, one is named Zhu Yingtai and another is called Liang Shanbo. Zhu Yingtai was an academically talented teenage girl. After a decade […]
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Broken Bridge is in fact never broken, but when both the bridge and the lake are covered by snow, the bridge seems broken when viewing it from one side because the bridge abruptly descends to a water level on the other side. Broken Bridge, the Witness to a Snake’s Love for a Man The initial bridge was said to be built a […]
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Journey to the West is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature written by Wu Cheng’en (1501 – 1582), a Ming Dynasty scholar, which is loosely based on a true event in Chinese history. The Legend of Journey to the West In the early years of Tang Dynasty, there was a young monk named Xuanzang who detected a great […]
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