Choose a levelRead at your level
Every reading sits at the level where most of its words are taught
All readings at HSK 6
Page 1 of 2 · 1–12 of 20
Article · 1 min audio雨后的气味从哪里来？Why rain has a smellA familiar smell. A tiny bubble. A closer look at the ground beneath your feet.HSK 6
Article · 3 min audio为什么中国只有一个时区？Why does China have only one time zone?Nine in the morning, and the stars are still out. One country, one clock, and a sun that keeps its own hours.HSK 6
Article · 3 min audio什么是春运？What is Chunyun, China’s Spring Festival travel rush?Over nine billion trips in forty days. One train ticket everyone wants. And a suitcase that goes home half full and comes back stuffed.HSK 6
Article · 3 min audio在太空能看见长城吗？Can you see the Great Wall of China from space?A famous fact, older than spaceflight itself. Then China’s first astronaut went up, looked down, and didn’t see it.HSK 6
Article · 3 min audio汉字没有字母，中国人怎么打字？How do Chinese people type without an alphabet?Thousands of characters. The same twenty-six keys as English. How Chinese gets typed, looked up and put in order, and why so many people forget how to write it by hand.HSK 6
Story · 2 min audio明天的购物单Tomorrow’s Shopping ListA notebook tells Xu Ran what she will buy tomorrow: a bowl, bandages, and cat food. She does not own a cat, and she has no intention of getting one.HSK 6
Story · 3 min audio庄周梦蝶Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, and what it meansZhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, wakes up, and cannot say which of them was dreaming. Two thousand years on, nobody has settled it.HSK 6
Story · 3 min audio桃花源记The Peach Blossom Spring, retold in modern ChineseA fisherman rows into a peach grove and comes out in a village that has never heard of the Han dynasty. He marks the way home. No one ever finds it again.HSK 6
Article · 3 min audio《红楼梦》到底讲了什么？What is Dream of the Red Chamber about?A stone that wanted to see the world, a garden full of cousins, a girl who repays a debt with tears, and a great family that loses everything. Here is China’s most argued-over novel in one reading.HSK 6
Article · 2 min audio李白是谁？Who was Li Bai? China’s poet of the moonEvery Chinese child can recite his twenty-character poem about moonlight, yet the words they learn are not quite the ones he wrote. Meet Li Bai, the Banished Immortal.HSK 6
Article · 3 min audio苏东坡：诗人和吃货Su Dongpo, poet and cook: the story behind Dongpo porkDongpo pork is named after a poet. He was jailed, sent ever further from the capital, and cooked his way through every exile.HSK 6
Article · 2 min audio敦煌莫高窟是什么？What are the Dunhuang caves?In 1900 a caretaker sweeping sand found a crack in a cave wall, and behind it fifty thousand manuscripts sealed for nine centuries. Welcome to the Mogao caves.HSK 6
