China
8 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- China's fleet reached Africa decades before Columbus sailed.
Between 1405 and 1433 Admiral Zheng He led seven expeditions. The first fleet counted 317 ships and nearly 28,000 men – …
- Gunpowder was a by-product of the search for immortality.
Daoist alchemists in Tang-era China were mixing substances for an elixir of life. The first relevant recipe appears in …
- How to type tens of thousands of Chinese characters with 26 keys.
You type the romanisation pinyin, say "ma", and the system lists every character with that pronunciation; you pick one …
- In western China the sun sometimes rises at 10 a.m.
China spans roughly 5,000 km from east to west, geographically five time zones. Officially, since 1949, only Beijing …
- The Terracotta Army was brightly coloured until we dug it up.
On 29 March 1974 farmers digging a well near Xi'an hit the figures – over 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots and hundreds of …
- The world's largest annual human migration has a date.
Chinese New Year follows a lunisolar calendar and falls between 21 January and 20 February, on the second new moon …
- Whether you say "tea" or "chai" reveals the trade route.
Almost every language has one of two words for tea. "Cha" from Cantonese and Mandarin travelled overland: Persian chay …
- You cannot see the Great Wall from the Moon.
The Moon averages 384,399 kilometres away – from there the wall would look as wide as a hair seen from three …