Housing in Hong Kong is inexpensive or rent-free! Seriously? Well, a lot of it is - the homes for almost a third of the population. The city has a huge government housing program, and an ambitious new administration is going to make it grow faster than ever. Andrew Lam reports.
HONG KONG’S NEW GOVERNMENT is…
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)…
A BANANA SALESMAN stepped into a department store called David Jones & Co and saw the future.
This was 1890s Sydney, and the man, Ma Ying-piu (馬應彪), had never seen anything like it. In front of him was a huge space in which people bought an unimaginably wide variety of goods, and above were multiple…
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 early Australian leader said: “the doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman”.
Inter-group violence and “yellow peril” fears were a key factor motivating the setting up of Australia's political map.
Fear of China is still so entrenched that it’s no surprise…
Shopkeepers in China 900 years ago accidentally created restaurant food culture, and their achievement is listed among Life magazine's 100 greatest achievements of the past millennium. Emily Zhou reports
IN OR ABOUT THE YEAR 1120 AD, a shopkeeper in the old Chinese city of Kaifeng had an idea. There were lots of merchants arriving from…
SMILE PLEASE! Archeologists have found toothbrushes more than a thousand years old – and they are remarkably similar to modern ones. They had the same shape, although were made of bone, not plastic. And instead of the nylon brushes of today’s equivalents, the ancient ones had hog bristles. There were different varieties, just like today.…
As Hong Kong gets ready for a new leader on May 8, with all eyes on former police officer John Lee Ka-chiu, there's much discussion about the presence/ absence of our ability to choose our head of state. Yet too much of conventional wisdom on that huge subject is not just factually incorrect, but the…
From a single ancient scroll painting, shown in part below, historians discovered three items of food history the Chinese may have pioneered: the three-meals-a-day tradition, the hot food delivery service, and the drive-in cafe. Emily Zhou reports.
THE CHINESE HABIT of painting large, hyper-detailed landscapes on giant scrolls has been a boon for historians. And…