China

Forty years of opening and reform persuaded a lot of people that the Chinese are not really communists. But modern China was modelled on the USSR, and its leaders want to revert to their Leninist roots.

How did Uyghur chieftain Yolbars Khan come to be buried in a Chinese Nationalist grave in Taipei? The answer reveals much about China’s violent relationship with its most western province.

How did Sun Tzu and The Art of War become synonymous with strategy in the West?

Recent protests in China are part of a long tradition of student activism, but results are often lacklustre.

On 8 February 1644, Li Zicheng, a rebel warlord, proclaimed the foundation of his own Shun dynasty.

The discovery of a cave full of manuscripts on the edge of the Gobi Desert reveals the details of everyday life on the Silk Road.

In Republican China, amid the chaos of dynastic collapse and war, opium became a rare stable currency, yielding huge riches for those who knew how to work the system.

Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’ policy was boldly pragmatic, but it was not the first time such an idea had been tried – nor the first time that it failed.

In the 1930s several prominent Black intellectuals visited Shanghai, bringing politics, culture and anti-colonial fervour with them. 

The elixir of life, a mythical substance from ancient Chinese literature, underpins an enormous industry in modern China.