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History

The people and moments that shaped China, told simply.

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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

30 readings

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

Story · 3 min audio空城计The Empty Fort Strategy: Zhuge Liang's famous bluffTwo and a half thousand soldiers. A hundred and fifty thousand at the gate. Zhuge Liang opens the doors and starts to play music.HSK 5

Story · 3 min audio草船借箭Borrowing arrows with straw boatsMake 100,000 arrows in ten days, or die. Zhuge Liang says three days will do, then does nothing for two.HSK 5

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

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