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Page 9 of 17 · 97–108 of 204
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
Article · 2 min audio“躺平”是什么意思？What does 躺平 (lying flat) mean?In 2021 a young man wrote that he lived on 200 yuan a month and had stopped trying. Within weeks, all of China was talking about lying flat.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
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
