Chinese Festivals

(中国的节日) Reading Time: 6 minutes  Festivals, deeply embedded in Chinese history and traditions, are key parts of Chinese culture. They are not only markers of the seasons to be celebrated, but also powerful expressions of cultural identity, values, and social cohesion. They provide occasions for social interactions, family gatherings, and the transmission of cultural knowledge to […]

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Enlightenment from the Dao

(“道” 的启示) 5 min read   Daoism (道家), together with Confucianism (儒家), is one of China’s two major indigenous philosophical traditions. This article focuses on Daoism as a philosophy rather than as a religious movement. The term Daoism derives from the Daodejing (道德经), the foundational text of Daoist thought. Traditionally, this work of roughly 5,000

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Flavors of the Chinese Silk Road

(丝路上的美食) Reading Time: 5 minutes  The ancient Silk Road—a network of routes that connected China to the Central Asia and finally Europe—started from Chang’an (长安), the modern-day Xi’an (西安). Through the Silk Road, merchants in camel and horse caravans from the west and south brought their musical instruments, rugs, ceramics, lacquer-wares, and spices to China and

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Secrets of Sanxingdui

(三星堆的秘密) 6 min read   About 70 kilometers north of Chengdu (成都), one of China’s largest metropolises, lie the ruins of Sanxingdui (三星堆). This Bronze Age culture (c. 1700–1150 BCE) flourished in what is now Sichuan Province (四川) for several centuries before mysteriously disappearing around the mid-12th century BCE.   Excavations over the past 50

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The Forgotten Liangzhu

(被遗忘了的良渚) 5 min read   Over half a dozen Neolithic cultures once dotted the vast expanse of what is now China, particularly along its two great river systems—the Yangtze (长江) and the Yellow (黄河) Rivers. The ruins of Liangzhu (良渚), named after a local community near present-day Hangzhou in the Yangtze Delta, were first identified

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Oracle Bone Script—the Origin of Chinese Writing

(甲骨文—中国文字的起源) 4 min read   One day in 1899, Wang Yirong (王懿荣), a renowned scholar of ancient Chinese texts, noticed unusual markings on a bone fragment floating in his herbal tonic. At the time, bone relics, commonly known as “dragon bones”, were widely prescribed in traditional Chinese medicine. What Wang found in his soup turned

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Yinxu—Where Chinese History Began

(中国历史起源地—殷墟) 4 min read   As a latecomer, China’s Bronze Age began around 2000 BCE, when the Xia (夏) people learned to mine and smelt copper and tin to produce bronze tools and weapons along the Yellow River (黄河) valley in northern China. By that time, civilizations in Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia were already well

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How Has the Chinese Civilization Remained Resilient?

(中华文明何以历久不衰?) 4 min read   While many of the world’s ancient civilizations survive only in museums, Chinese civilization has endured and continues to thrive after more than three millennia. This continuity—most evident in its written language, philosophical traditions, and historical records—creates a strong sense of identity linking past and present, a phenomenon rare in human

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Exploring the Origin of Chinese Civilization in Erlitou

(在二里头探索中华文明的起源) 5 min read   The Erlitou Site Museum of the Xia Capital (二里头夏都遗址博物馆) was the highlight of my visit to Luoyang (洛阳). Erlitou rose to prominence in 1959, when archaeologists unearthed artifacts dating back nearly 4,000 years—traces of what may be China’s earliest dynasty. Originally a Neolithic settlement from the 4th millennium BCE, it

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How Chinese Civilization Began

(中华文明如何开始) 5 min read   During China’s Neolithic era, more than half a dozen cultures were scattered across eastern Asia. The most prominent among them—Yangshao, Hongshan, Liangzhu, and Longshan (仰韶, 红山, 良渚, 龙山)—are named after the modern sites where they were first identified. Their development was not a simple, linear progression but a long and

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