When a million people converged on Tiananmen Square on April 4-5, 1976, to mourn Zhou Enlai, authorities used violence to disperse the gathering. Two years later, the central government reassessed the events of those days.
As many as 100,000 laborers died in the construction of the Kunming–Haiphong railway, which opened on April 1, 1910. The cost was not worth it.
In the spring of 1926, Nationalists and Communists in China were in a tenuous alliance. While this "First United Front" technically endured until a year later, the beginning of its unraveling can be traced back to a little-remembered event in history, when a warship arrived outside Chiang Kai-shek's office...
All the great European powers (plus the U.S.) got a slice of China in the late-19th century. All but Italy, that is.
Within his country, "the last emperor" of China was one of the most hated figures of his time. But for most of his life, Puyi had no agency, used as a pawn in competing agendas.
On a wintry day in 1784, a schooner docked in New York set sail for Guangzhou. This journey halfway around the globe would take half a year; it marked the beginning of the largest trading relationship that the world has ever known.
It's hard to know exactly what happened at the Battle of Red Cliffs some 1,800 years ago. But what is agreed upon is that this monumental battle changed Chinese history — and achieved a mythical status that still endures.
On February 11, 1958, the People's Republic of China introduced a new system for rendering the Chinese language, using not characters but the Latin alphabet. The move was revolutionary.
Beyond the suffering inflicted on tens of thousands of people, the Hu Weiyong purge fundamentally reshaped Ming government, concentrating power in the person of the emperor.