(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, horses, camels, and spices to China and […]
Flavors From the Silk Road Read More »
(通行南北的面条) 6 min read Food plays an outsized role in Chinese culture, and among different Chinese foods, noodles may be the most loved. The type of noodle consumed in China differs from region to region. People in wheat growing areas prefer wheat noodles, while those in rice growing areas favor rice noodles. Moreover, different
Chinese Noodles, from North to South Read More »
(通行南北的饺子) Reading Time: 4 minutes Every Saturday, I join a group of friends in a decades-old ritual—a dim-sum lunch that includes a plethora of small Cantonese dishes of dumplings, buns, meat balls, pastries, crepe rolls, and fritters. Dim sum (点心) is literally “touch the heart”, but this lunch—reminiscent of our years in Hong Kong where
Chinese Dumplings， from North to South Read More »
(“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
Enlightenment from the Dao Read More »
(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
Secrets of Sanxingdui Read More »
(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) were first identified in the 1930s, when jade artifacts were unearthed during road construction. In
The Forgotten Liangzhu Read More »
(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
Oracle Bone Script—the Origin of Chinese Writing Read More »
(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
Yinxu—Where Chinese History Began Read More »
(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
Exploring the Origin of Chinese Civilization in Erlitou Read More »
(中华文明如何开始) 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 complex process of convergence,
How Chinese Civilization Began Read More »
