140 entries · 9 categories
Thought, place, time, lived life. What the language is used to say.
The hundred schools and what they argued about.
孔子ConfuciusHis life, the Analects 论语, and the civilization he shaped.
孙子兵法The Art of WarThirteen terse chapters on conflict, attributed to the strategist Sun Wu, that became the oldest and most influential military treatise in the world. The supreme art is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
孟子MenciusHuman nature as inherently good: the sprouts of virtue.
庄子ZhuangziThe butterfly dream, Cook Ding, and Daoist freedom from convention.
心学Wang YangmingInnate knowing 良知 and the unity of knowledge and action.
易经The Book of ChangesThe oldest and most cryptic of the Chinese classics: a manual of divination, a philosophy of change, and a map of the universe encoded in 64 hexagrams.
正名Rectification of NamesConfucius told Zilu that governing begins with calling things by their right names, because a ruler who does not rule like a ruler has no claim to the title 君.
法家LegalismHan Feizi, statecraft, and the realpolitik that unified China.
王阳明Wang Yangming and the School of MindWang Yangming broke Neo-Confucianism open: instead of investigating external things to reach moral truth, he turned inward and declared that the moral mind already knows, and that knowing and acting are one indivisible movement.
理学Neo-ConfucianismZhu Xi, the Great Ultimate 太极, and the Song-Ming synthesis.
老子Laozi & the DaodejingThe 81 chapters, wu wei 无为, and the paradox at the heart of Daoist thought.
荀子XunziHuman nature as bad: ritual and education as correction.
道德经DaodejingEighty-one short chapters of paradox and indirection that became the foundational text of Daoism and one of the most translated books in human history. The way that can be spoken is not the constant way.
阴阳五行Yin-Yang and the Five PhasesThe cosmological engine of classical thought: correspondence, resonance, and transformation.
墨家MohismThe one Chinese philosophical school that fielded an army of engineers and nearly matched Confucianism in institutional scale before vanishing for fifteen centuries.
↑ Top
宗教
zōngjiào
Religion
15 entries
Buddhism, Daoism, folk practice, ancestor rites.
伊斯兰教Islam in ChinaHui Muslims, Uyghur traditions, and 1400 years of Islamic presence.
佛教Buddhism in ChinaTwo thousand years of transmission, transformation, and sinicization.
佛经Buddhist ScripturesThe core Mahāyāna sutras the site presents in full: the Chan canon (心经, 金刚经, 坛经) and the Pure Land canon (阿弥陀经, 无量寿经, 观无量寿经). Each linked here gets its own page with full text, line-by-line audio, pinyin gloss, English translation, and commentary.
儒家ConfucianismThe school of the ru: ritual, hierarchy, and moral cultivation as state religion.
净土宗Pure LandFaith, Amitabha, and the Western Paradise: the most widely practiced Buddhism in China.
城隍The City GodEvery Chinese city had a City God who served as its divine magistrate, managing the dead and the living with the same bureaucratic precision as any imperial official.
妈祖the Sea GoddessCoastal goddess of sailors, fishermen, and the overseas Chinese diaspora.
心经The Heart SutraThe Heart Sutra: 260 characters that condense the entire Prajñāpāramitā teaching of emptiness. Translated by Xuanzang in 649 CE; chanted daily across China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam ever since. The full text, line by line, with audio, gloss, and commentary.
民间信仰Folk ReligionKitchen gods, city gods, and the living popular religion beneath Buddhism and Daoism.
祖先崇拜Ancestor VenerationTablets, offerings, and the living debt to the dead: the deep continuity of Chinese ancestor veneration.
禅宗Chán BuddhismThe meditative school that became Japanese Zen: sudden enlightenment and the patriarchs.
萨满教ShamanismManchu, Mongol, and northern indigenous shamanic traditions.
观音Guanyin, Bodhisattva of CompassionA male Indian bodhisattva who became, by the Song dynasty, the most beloved female deity in China, and whose invocation may be the most widely spoken Buddhist phrase in the world.
道教DaoismDaoism as organized religion: distinct from Daoist philosophy.
阿弥陀经The Smaller Amitabha SutraThe shorter Pure Land sutra: ~1,800 characters in which the Buddha describes Amitābha's Western Pure Land to Śāriputra and names the practice of single-minded recollection of the Buddha's name. The daily-recitation text of Pure Land Buddhism.
↑ Top
Dynasties, ruptures, and the long arc.
三国The Three KingdomsAfter the Han collapsed, China split into three rival states: Wei, Shu, and Wu. The sixty years of their wars produced the most beloved cast of heroes, traitors, and strategists in Chinese history.
元朝The Yuan DynastyKublai Khan, Mongol rule, and China as the center of a world empire.
兵马俑The Terracotta ArmyThousands of life-sized clay soldiers, each with a different face, buried to guard the First Emperor in death. A farmer digging a well found them in 1974, and the silent army became the most astonishing archaeological discovery of the century.
史记Records of the Grand HistorianSima Qian wrote the founding work of Chinese historiography under the shadow of his own mutilation: a vast history from the legendary Yellow Emperor to his own Han dynasty, and the model every later dynastic history would follow.
周朝The Zhou DynastyThe longest dynasty in Chinese history and the philosophical seedbed of Chinese civilization: where the Mandate of Heaven was born, Confucius lived, and nearly every idea that shaped imperial China was first argued.
唐朝The Tang DynastyThe cosmopolitan golden age: poetry, Buddhism, and the Silk Road.
夏商周The Three DynastiesThe legendary and early historical origins of Chinese civilization.
太平天国The Taiping Heavenly KingdomThe millenarian rebellion that killed 20–30 million people and nearly toppled the Qing dynasty: the deadliest civil war in human history.
宋朝The Song DynastyEconomic revolution, printing, compass: the dynasty modernity missed.
战国时期Warring States PeriodThe most chaotic political era in Chinese history was also the condition that produced every major Chinese philosophical tradition. Political fragmentation and intellectual diversity are not separate stories.
改革开放Reform and Opening UpDeng Xiaoping's 1978 pivot that transformed China from a closed command economy into the world's second largest economy in four decades.
文化大革命The Cultural Revolution1966–76: Red Guards, struggle sessions, and the destruction of the past.
明朝The Ming DynastyThe Great Wall rebuilt, Zheng He's voyages, and the inward turn.
春秋时代the Spring and Autumn Period (722–481 BCE)The era named after a chronicle Confucius wrote about it: four centuries when Zhou ritual authority collapsed in practice while remaining indispensable in theory.
曹操The Warlord-PoetThe man who held the dying Han together by force, wrote some of the finest poetry in the language, and became Chinese literature's most magnificent villain.
汉朝The Han DynastyWhy Chinese call themselves 汉人: the dynasty that defined the civilization.
汉朝The Han DynastyThe dynasty that named the Chinese people and script: 400 years of empire, the Silk Road, Confucian statecraft, and Sima Qian writing history from prison.
清朝The Qing DynastyManchu rule, the long peace, and the slow unraveling before 1911.
玄奘The Pilgrim of the WestThe Tang monk who crossed the deserts to India for the scriptures, studied sixteen years, and came home to translate them: the historical figure behind Journey to the West.
科举The Imperial Examination SystemThe exam that governed Chinese civilization for 1,300 years: selecting officials by merit, enshrining the Confucian canon, and shaping every dynasty from the Sui through the Qing.
秦始皇The First EmperorUnification, standardization, and the terror that made China.
秦朝The Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE)Fifteen years of imperial rule, fifteen centuries of imperial inheritance. The Qin unified the warring states, standardized writing, currency, and roads, built the first long wall, burned the books, and collapsed under the weight of its own apparatus.
辛亥革命The 1911 RevolutionThe end of empire, Sun Yat-sen, and the birth of the Republic.
长城The Great WallTwo millennia of walls, watchtowers, and beacon fires: what the Great Wall actually was, and why "the wall" is a translation that flattens a complicated history.
隋朝The Sui DynastyA short, ferocious dynasty that reunified China after nearly four centuries of division, dug the Grand Canal, and laid the institutions the glorious Tang would inherit, then burned itself out in a single generation.
↑ Top
地理
dìlǐ
Geography
11 entries
Places, dialects, and the shape of the land.
Interactive · 互动地图
中国地图 · Map of China
Toggle layers: modern provinces, dynastic extents, major rivers, dialect zones, and cultural sites. Click any marker to open the linked entry.
上海ShanghaiFrom fishing village to the most cosmopolitan city in Asia: a port that absorbed empires, reinvented itself three times, and has never quite decided whether it belongs to China or the world.
八大菜系Cuisines as GeographyRead the Eight Great Cuisines as a geographic document: what the land, climate, and trade routes of each region produced at the table, and what the table tells you about the land.
北京BeijingCapital geography: the hutong grid, the Forbidden City, and the northern axis that has organized Chinese power for seven centuries.
台湾TaiwanAn island with multiple names, multiple claims, and the most consequential unresolved question in East Asian geopolitics.
四川盆地The Sichuan BasinAn inland depression ringed by mountains on all four sides: the warm, humid, fog-wrapped basin that gave China its most distinctive regional cuisine, its Bronze Age mystery, and the world's longest-running irrigation system.
新疆XinjiangChina's largest province. A vast desert interior crossed by the Silk Road, home to Uyghur civilization, bounded by the Tianshan mountains, and at the center of contested questions about identity and governance.
方言The Dialect MapChinese is not one language but a family: seven major dialect groups whose speakers cannot understand one another, united by a shared written script and divided by a history of geography and migration.
西藏TibetThe Roof of the World: a plateau so high it generates its own weather, a civilization shaped by altitude, and a Buddhism that grew from the landscape as much as from doctrine.
长江The Yangtze RiverThe longest river in Asia: the southern spine of Chinese civilization, the Three Gorges, and the river that divides north from south.
香港Hong KongThe entrepôt that became a world city: a harbor geography that made it the gateway between East and West, and a Cantonese identity that survived colonial rule and asks harder questions under reunification.
黄河Yellow RiverThe cradle of Chinese civilization: a river that floods, destroys, and nourishes in equal measure, its loess-yellow waters shaping every dynasty that tried to master it.
↑ Top
What people make and how they live with it.
中元节The Ghost FestivalOn the 15th of the 7th lunar month, the gates of the underworld open and the living set out food, burn paper, and float lanterns for the dead.
中秋节Mid-Autumn FestivalThe moon at its fullest, the family reunited: the festival that turns a celestial event into a meditation on longing and belonging.
京剧Peking OperaChina's national theatrical art: acrobatics, painted faces, falsetto voices, and two centuries of stylized storytelling.
太极Tai ChiThe slow-motion practice in the park at dawn. Its philosophy is older than the movements, and the movements carry the whole philosophy.
春节Spring FestivalLunar New Year. The largest annual human migration and the most important date on the Chinese calendar.
汉服Traditional Han DressAncient silhouettes worn in modern streets: the revival of Han dynasty clothing and the identity politics it carries.
清明节Tomb-Sweeping DayThe day the living visit the dead: a spring festival of grief, gratitude, and continuity across generations.
生肖Chinese ZodiacThe twelve animals, what they mean, and why your birth year still shapes how people see you.
端午节Dragon Boat FestivalRice dumplings thrown into a river for a drowned poet: the festival that fused an act of mourning into one of China's great summer celebrations.
红包Red EnvelopesMoney wrapped in red: the gift that is never just money, and the ritual that binds generations, occasions, and now hundreds of millions of WeChat users.
茶文化Tea CultureTea as civilization: the way a leaf became a philosophical practice, a diplomatic currency, and the shape of daily life across two millennia.
重阳节Double Ninth FestivalThe festival named for two nines produced one of the Tang dynasty most memorized poems, and a linguistic trick that lets urban dwellers eat a cake instead of climbing a mountain.
↑ Top
日常
rìcháng
Everyday Life
14 entries
Names, numbers, gifts, gestures, taboos.
口语连接词Conversational ConnectorsThe discourse markers that make spoken Chinese sound natural: buying time, opining, hedging, redirecting, agreeing, and exiting a conversation without abruptness.
吃饭文化Chinese Food CultureEating in China is not primarily about food. It is the medium through which relationships are initiated, obligations are incurred, hierarchies are performed, and social bonds are maintained.
姓名NamesFamily name first, given name second: the structure, meaning-making, and social logic of Chinese personal names.
家庭Family StructureChinese kinship terminology is a precision instrument: each relative has one specific term, and that precision maps an obligation network, not just a family tree.
敬酒Toasting CultureThe Chinese toast is a social instrument with its own grammar, hierarchy, and rules of engagement, not a punctuation mark at the end of a speech.
数字Lucky & Unlucky NumbersIn China, numbers carry sound, sound carries meaning, and meaning can determine whether you close the deal or jinx the wedding.
称呼Forms of AddressIn Chinese, how you address someone is not a formality. It is a precise statement of how you understand the relationship between you.
筷子ChopsticksThe rules, the taboos, and what not to do: the etiquette that marks insider from outsider at the Chinese table.
红白喜事Weddings & FuneralsThe phrase tells the story: red and white, marriage and death, both require the whole community to show up.
请客吃饭Treating to a MealThe Chinese banquet is a social institution that happens to involve food.
迷信SuperstitionsSuperstition in China is a living system that coexists comfortably with education, modernity, and pragmatism, not a holdover from ignorance.
送礼Gift-GivingGift-giving in China is less about generosity than about maintenance: a technology for building and sustaining the relationships that make life work.
面子实践Face in PracticeFace in Chinese social life is a recurring set of transactions with specific mechanics: how face is given, taken, lost, and preserved in concrete situations.
颜色Colors and LuckRed for joy, white for death, green hats and yellow emperors: the symbolic weight of color in Chinese daily life.
↑ Top
饮食
yǐnshí
Culinary
17 entries
What is cooked, drunk, and shared at the table.
乌龙茶Oolong TeaThe most complex and technically demanding tea category: partially oxidized, spanning a full spectrum from near-green to near-black, with a vocabulary of flavor unmatched in tea.
八大菜系Eight Great CuisinesHow geography, climate, and dynasty shaped eight distinct schools of Chinese cooking.
川菜Sichuan CuisineThe mala kitchen: how a landlocked basin built the most complex spice vocabulary in the world.
火锅HotpotThe communal pot at the center of the table: a social institution disguised as a meal.
白茶White TeaThe most minimal of all tea categories: plucked, withered, and dried, with no firing and no rolling, yielding a tea of extraordinary delicacy.
白酒BaijiuChina's fiery grain spirit: the most consumed distilled liquor in the world by volume, and what it means to drink together.
粤菜Cantonese CuisineFreshness as philosophy: the cooking tradition that traveled the world and stayed true to itself.
红茶Red Tea (Black Tea)Fully oxidized: what the world calls black tea, China calls red, named for the color of the liquor. From Keemun to Dianhong, China's contribution to global tea culture.
绿茶Green TeaThe oldest and most-consumed tea category: unoxidized, fixed by heat, and expressing the full range from grassy Longjing to umami-rich Biluochun.
花草茶Tisanes & Herbal InfusionsNot tea, but often called tea. The world of Chinese herbal infusions, floral teas, and medicinal brews that share the cup but not the leaf of Camellia sinensis.
茶TeaSix tea categories, production, and the cup that connects China to the world.
豆腐TofuTwo thousand years of soybeans and water: the food that fed a civilization without meat.
面条NoodlesFour thousand years of wheat in water: noodle cultures from Lanzhou to Suzhou.
饺子DumplingsFolded, boiled, and shared: the dumpling as ritual food, family labor, and cultural marker.
鲁菜Shandong CuisineThe oldest school: how the home province of Confucius fed the imperial court for two thousand years.
黄茶Yellow TeaThe rarest of the six categories: like green tea, but mellowed by a slow smothering step that removes the raw edge and creates a silky, sweet cup.
黑茶Dark Tea & Pu-erhPost-fermented, microbially aged: the only tea category that genuinely improves with decades of storage, and the trade commodity that crossed the Tea-Horse Road to Tibet.
↑ Top
艺文
yìwén
Arts & Literature
19 entries
Poetry, painting, calligraphy, opera.
三国演义Romance of the Three KingdomsThe 14th-century novel that turned the wars after the Han into the great epic of Chinese loyalty and cunning. Sworn brothers, a god-like strategist, and the maxim that the realm long divided must unite.
书法CalligraphyThe art of the brush, where writing becomes the most personal expression of character.
书法风格The Five Scripts of Chinese CalligraphyFive script styles chart two thousand years of Chinese writing, from the solemn bronze inscriptions of the Zhou to the explosive cursive of the Tang masters.
古琴the scholar's zitherThe seven-string zither Confucius played throughout his life, and the origin of 知音, the word for a person who truly understands you.
唐诗Tang PoetryLi Bai, Du Fu, and the golden age of regulated verse.
四大名著Four Great Classical NovelsThe four novels every educated Chinese person has read: the canonical stories of war, outlaws, pilgrims, and dreams.
宋词Song Dynasty LyricThe poem that sings: fixed tune patterns, named meters, and three masters who defined what the Chinese lyric could feel.
山水画landscape paintingChinese landscape painting encodes a theory in its name: 山 (mountain, yang, permanent) and 水 (water, yin, changing) in dynamic tension. A space to inhabit in the imagination, not a view to frame.
文房四宝Four Treasures of the StudyThe four instruments through which a scholar thought, wrote, painted, and demonstrated who he was: brush, ink, inkstone, and paper.
昆曲Kun OperaThe oldest surviving form of Chinese opera, refined to such perfection over four centuries that it nearly disappeared from its own beauty.
楚辞Songs of ChuThe shamanistic southern voice that gave Chinese literature its second pole: visionary, romantic, and inconsolably exiled.
水浒传Water MarginOne hundred and eight outlaws, each driven from honest life by a corrupt officialdom, gather at the marsh of Liangshan to rob the rich and defy the state. The 14th-century novel of righteous banditry and brotherhood.
水墨画Ink-Wash PaintingWhere the brush meets philosophy: five tones of ink, the art of leaving space, and landscapes that are not about landscape at all.
生旦净末丑Role Types in Peking OperaFive role categories, each a complete performance tradition -- voice, movement, makeup, and costume as a total semiotic system.
篆刻Seal CarvingThe art of the name: bronze to stone, dynasty to dynasty, two schools of carvers, and the small red square that authenticates everything.
红楼梦Dream of the Red ChamberThe 18th-century novel that many call the greatest in the Chinese language: the slow decline of a great family, a doomed love among the young, and a sense that all the beauty and luxury of the world is a passing dream.
西游记Journey to the WestA Buddhist monk, a rebellious immortal monkey, a glutton pig, and a river demon travel west for the scriptures. The 16th-century novel of pilgrimage, magic, and mischief that gave the world the Monkey King.
诗经Book of SongsChina oldest poetry anthology: three hundred poems that Confucius said no educated person could afford to ignore.
鲁迅Lu XunThe writer who looked at traditional Chinese society and saw cannibalism, and the complicated, unresolvable legacy he left behind.
↑ Top
科技
kējì
Science & Medicine
12 entries
Astronomy, medicine, and technology before modernity.
丝绸SilkThe thread that built the first global trade network: Chinese silk, the secret of sericulture, and the road that carried it west.
中医Traditional Chinese MedicineQi, yin-yang, the five phases, and a medical system that has treated a fifth of humanity for two thousand years.
二十四节气24 Solar TermsThe sun moves 15 degrees and the world changes: a precision agricultural calendar that doubled as a medical manual and is now UNESCO heritage.
五行Five PhasesThe Qin dynasty dressed its armies in black and flew black banners because its theorists believed they ruled under the Water phase: this is how consequentially the Five Phases shaped Chinese history.
历法The Lunisolar CalendarNeither purely solar nor purely lunar, the Chinese calendar has kept farmers, physicians, and dynasties synchronized with the cosmos for three thousand years.
四大发明Four Great InventionsCompass, gunpowder, paper, and printing: the Chinese technologies that remade the medieval world.
天干地支Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches: the 60-year cycleA combinatorial timekeeping system the Shang scribes used in 1250 BCE to date their divination sessions, and that Chinese people still use to name years, hours, and contract parties today.
星宿Chinese ConstellationsChina mapped the entire sky independently of Greece: 1,464 stars, 28 lunar mansions, and four mythological guardians that divided the cosmos long before Ptolemy.
本草纲目The Great PharmacopeiaLi Shizhen spent 27 years cataloguing 1,892 drugs, producing one of the greatest works of natural science in any civilization.
算盘The AbacusBefore the electronic calculator, a bead frame and trained fingers could outrun early computers on everyday arithmetic.
针灸AcupunctureNeedles, meridians, and the ancient practice that resists simple verdicts from modern science.
风水Geomancy as Proto-ScienceBefore the terms ecology, hydrology, and orientation science existed, the fengshui master was reading the same landscape, just with a different vocabulary.
↑ Top