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Chinese culture

The customs behind everyday Chinese life, explained.

Choose a levelRead at your level

Every reading sits at the level where most of its words are taught

HSK 167 readings HSK 232 readings HSK 328 readings HSK 435 readings HSK 519 readings HSK 620 readings

73 readings

Story · 1 min audio我要一杯茶How to order tea in ChineseA hot afternoon. A small tea house. One visitor who just wants tea, and finds out there is no such thing.HSK 1

Article · 1 min audio中国人早饭吃什么？What do Chinese people eat for breakfast?Seven a.m. at a Beijing crossroads: buns, soy milk, fried dough and a pancake with an egg. And why the real answer depends on the city.HSK 2

Article · 1 min audio什么时候去北京最好？The four seasons in Chinese: when is the best time to visit Beijing?A friend wants to visit Beijing and asks when to come. Spring has wind, summer has rain, winter has cold. And autumn?HSK 2

Article · 1 min audio你属什么？What is my Chinese zodiac sign? How to ask 你属什么A friend's grandma asks what you “belong to”. She is not asking about your family. She is working out your age.HSK 2

Article · 2 min audio兵马俑是什么？What is the Terracotta Army?In a dry spring in 1974, farmers dug a well and found a clay face looking back at them. Behind it stood eight thousand more.HSK 5

Article · 2 min audio孔子是谁？Who was Confucius?A stranger said Confucius looked like a stray dog. Confucius laughed and said: that's exactly right.HSK 4

Article · 2 min audio郑和是谁？Who was Zheng He? China's admiral of the treasure shipsSix hundred years ago a giraffe sailed into China, and the court thought it was a creature from legend. The man whose fleet carried it began life as a captured boy.HSK 4

Article · 2 min audio豆腐是谁发明的？Who invented tofu? The legend of Liu AnA prince tried to make a medicine to live forever. He failed, the story goes, but what came out of his pot is on dinner tables two thousand years later.HSK 4

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