ONE OF THE MOST charming things about historical Chinese officials is their reverence for poetry, and the incorporation of that fact into hiring practices. A love of literature was not seen as a dilletante interest, but a necessary qualification for high rank in the Chinese government.
And perhaps the most extreme example is the famous…
YOU MAY NEVER have been anywhere near the Wudang Mountains (武當山) in the northwestern part of Hubei, China, but it will probably still be very familiar to you.
And that’s true, whether you are from the east or the west.
That’s because it is the archetypal location of so many books and movies and television…
MOVE OVER, The Lord of the Rings. There’s a new three-part big-budget fantasy movie in town, and it is making a big splash.
Part one of the Fengshen Trilogy has a tight grip on the top of the box office chart in China, and is far ahead of Hollywood’s Barbie in popularity and earnings in…
CANTONESE OPERA (粵劇), one of the most representative cultural symbols of the Lingnan region (嶺南地區), the area south of the Nanling mountains (南嶺山脈), is the foundation and origin of modern Cantonese music.
The first time I heard about Cantonese music was when I was learning the Guzheng (古箏). My teacher said that it would be…
As U.S. politicians call for laws against Chinese people buying property in the country, there are fears that the dark mentality behind the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act is still present, and may even be growing. Portia Chung reports.
ISSUES INVOLVING PEOPLE with Asian roots are burning hot in the headlines in the United States right…
A TRIO OF HONG KONG friends thought about the best way to heal Hong Kong as a community after the traumas of recent times and came up with a simple but transformative idea.
What if people just set aside politics and other concerns for a while and did something creative, which would be good for…
THREE DECADES AGO, Chinese archeologists found an ancient book written on 800 strips of bamboo. It was more than 23 centuries old.
The text was identified as a partial copy of the Tao Te Ching (道德經), the book on which Taoism (or Daoism) is based—and which introduced the world to the classic Chinese sage Laozu…
GOLD ISN’T JUST BEAUTIFUL AND RARE. It is also durable. No historian can document every detail of history, but burial objects in gold often tell a story better than other records.
Thanks to the generous donation from the owners of Mengdiexuan (夢蝶軒), Betty Lo(盧茵茵) and Kenneth Chu (朱偉基), the public has the opportunity to remember…
SURVIVING ZODIAC HEAD STATUES from a glorious imperial garden destroyed by British and French soldiers in the Opium War in 1860 are on show at City University of Hong Kong.
The Old Summer Palace, known as Yuanmingyuan (圓明園), was a huge area, covering more than 3.5 square kilometres of land in Beijing. Historians say it…
CHINESE ENGINEERS SET a new record for the fastest train in the world, and are eyeing their ultimate target—to create railway transport that’s faster than commercial aircraft.
The country’s next-generation high-speed train recently set a record of 453 kmh (281 mph) during a test run along a section of the railway from Fuqing to Qianzhou…
