DON’T TELL THE TEXAS TYCOONS! Foodies in the United States city of Houston, Texas, are waiting agog for the opening of a branch of Tim Ho Wan, a Michelin-starred restaurant from Hong Kong. Within weeks, they'll be spending their hard-earned cash on the eatery's speciality: traditional dim sum.
But few people know that dim…

Culture
ONLY IN HONG KONG would engineering details about a piece of major infrastructure be turned into music.
Hong Kong-born composer Chan Ming-chi noticed that the extraordinary Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge consists of three cable-stayed bridges, one undersea tunnel, and four artificial islands.
So he took the numbers three, one, and four – and turned them into…
ZHAO KUANGYIN (趙匡胤) was not having a good day. He was a high ranking soldier who felt he was destined to one day become leader of the country. But he had many battles ahead of him. On this particular day, he was a tired and hungry man, wandering through the city of Chang’an. This incident…
CHINESE EXPLORER ZHENG HE would sail from China with his boats laden with gifts. He took treasures from his country to give as presents or to use in trade with people he met around the world. He once came home with a giraffe.
On the way back to China, the ships would be too light…
I HAVE TO START BY saying that not every Chinese person has eaten snake-related dishes. In fact, I had never thought that snakes could be eaten until I read about it in a novel while I was in middle school. I was so astonished that I even re-checked the Chinese character “蛇” (“snake” in Chinese)…
Hong Kong became host to an extraordinary Communist school in the 1940s The British asked Communists to work as the police in the New Territories A Hong Kong war hero got an MBE before being killed by a Taiwanese bomb
ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY episodes in modern history was a “bromance” between British colonial…
THE TEA TRADER had no tea leaves to buy or sell. But he didn’t mind. Young merchant Liao had far more serious matters on his mind.
In January of 1938, he'd opened a tea import-export business called the Yuehua Company (粵華公司) at 18, Queen’s Road in Victoria, the main city and central business district of…
The last Emperor of the Southern Song was a fleeing young royal family member who lived in the Hong Kong town of Mui Wo on Lantau island. He’s been long forgotten now, but the opening of a new metro station named after a monument to him and his brother has revived interest in his astounding…
It sounds hard to believe, but civil service applicants in China had to write actual literature to win top jobs, becoming "jinshi" - a class of writer-administrators who advised the emperor. (Business people were ranked low on the ladder.) For centuries, it worked well - but at other times, the bureaucratic need for order and…
An ancient poem has been used for 15 centuries to teach Chinese children to read and write. H.C. Lu reports
LITERALLY BILLIONS OF PEOPLE worldwide have learned the Alphabet Song, in which the 26 letters of the alphabet are memorized by being rather awkwardly fitted to a French melody from the 1700s.
But few people…
