China has had its fair share of severe earthquakes over the centuries, most recently in Sichuan in 2008 and Tangshan in 1976. But the largest in its history happened this week during the Ming dynasty.
Subways have become a dime a dozen in 21st-century Chinese cities, another box the country can tick off on its list of modernizations. But China’s first public subway was a disruptive challenge, both a state secret and urban leveler.
U.S. and U.K. citizens were above Chinese law for 100 years, with diplomats claiming China was too “narrow-minded” to judge them fairly. World War II allowed China to take back control, but some say it has never trusted international law since.
The rape of a Chinese official’s daughter by two American GIs made the KMT look spineless — and galvanized Chinese popular opinion that the U.S. was China’s new colonizer.
A stock exchange in a communist country was unlikely, but its location was unlikelier still, in the ballroom of a grand hotel with its own rich past.
On December 11, 1936, divisions in the Nationalist camp boiled over. Their brief mutiny against Chiang Kai-shek had momentous consequences for Chinese history, forcing Chiang to ally with the Communists against the Japanese.
In the wake of widespread protests across China last month, the successes of Taiwan’s democratic protests in 1979 provide an interesting parallel.
The Army-Navy game is one of the most honored traditions in college football. It's usually played in Philadelphia…but not always.
A compassionate monk arrived at an abandoned temple near Hangzhou with the task of making the area safe from tiger attacks. His tactics weren’t groundbreaking, but his results — at least for historians — tell us more about the region than we could have otherwise known.