China

On 13 September 1971 a plane carrying Mao’s anointed heir crashed in Eastern Mongolia. What really happened to Lin Biao?

As Late Imperial China sought to rebuild as a modern state from the ashes of war, a new national post office was born.

Rosemary Wakeman’s The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918-1941 is a tale of three cities linked by globalisation and a singular global citizen.

How did the People’s Republic of China cope with a literary canon filled with un-communist ideas? Comics called lianhuanhua were the answer, at least for a while.

‘What is the most common misconception about my field? That China has “5,000 years” of continuous history.’

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.