148 Fun Facts About China

Beijing's name literally means what?

Northern capital: bei means north and jing capital, the mirror of Nanjing, the 'southern capital'. When the Nationalists ruled from Nanjing after 1928, the city was demoted to Beiping, 'northern peace'.

Which river is recognized as the longest in China?

The Yangtze flows from the Tibetan Plateau to the East China Sea; so much shipping, fishing and dam-building crowded it that its own river dolphin, the baiji, was declared functionally extinct in 2006.

Which large desert is partially located in northern China and southern Mongolia?

The Gobi Desert gave science its first recognised dinosaur eggs in the 1920s; a dinosaur found beside them was named Oviraptor, 'egg robber', but the eggs later proved to be its own.

Which mountain range forms the natural border between China and Nepal?

The Himalayas rose when the Indian plate rammed into Eurasia tens of millions of years ago; India is still pushing north, so the range keeps rising by more than a centimetre a year.

Which dynasty is credited with unifying China for the first time?

The Qin dynasty ended the Warring States period and unified China in 221 BCE, yet it fell apart within four years of its First Emperor's death in 210 BCE.

Which river winds past the karst peaks of Guilin in Guangxi?

The Li River winds between limestone karst towers from Guilin down to Yangshuo, a view so prized that it is printed on the back of one of China's banknotes.

The Terracotta Army was found in 1974 by farmers who were digging what?

A well: the farmers struck the first clay figures near Lintong in March 1974. The warriors were once brightly painted, but the lacquer under the colour curls within seconds of meeting dry air.

Which food was mixed into the lime mortar of the Great Wall's Ming-era sections?

Sticky rice: builders stirred a soup of it into slaked lime, and its starch made a mortar so tough and water-resistant that it also held together tombs, pagodas and city walls.

Where in Beijing was the People's Republic proclaimed in 1949?

Tiananmen Gate: the new government was proclaimed from the top of this old palace gateway to a vast crowd in the square below, and 1 October has been China's National Day ever since.

Who was the founding leader of the People's Republic of China?

Mao Zedong was once a university library assistant; three decades later his forces won the civil war, drove the Nationalists to Taiwan and founded the People's Republic in 1949.

A 1971 visit by American players of which sport began a thaw in US–China relations?

Table tennis: the US team's April 1971 tour, dubbed 'ping-pong diplomacy', was the first official American delegation in China's capital since 1949 and cleared the way for a presidential visit within a year.

Which 1966 movement aimed to preserve Chinese communism by purging capitalist and traditional elements?

The Cultural Revolution, launched in May 1966, closed schools and universities and set student Red Guards loose on the 'Four Olds'; it ended only in 1976 with the arrest of the Gang of Four.

Which merchant's account of his years in Mongol-ruled China amazed medieval Europe?

Marco Polo set out along the Silk Road in 1271 and came home in 1295; captured in a war with Genoa, he dictated his travels to a cellmate, the romance writer Rustichello of Pisa.

Which ancient Chinese divination text is built around 64 six-line figures called hexagrams?

The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is consulted by counting out yarrow stalks to pick a hexagram; Leibniz, the pioneer of binary arithmetic, later matched its broken and unbroken lines to his own binary numbers.

China's currency, the renminbi, is counted in which basic unit?

The yuan is the unit of the renminbi, 'the people's currency', first issued in December 1948, almost a year before the People's Republic existed, while hyperinflation was wrecking the Nationalists' money.

Which traditional Chinese game, often played with tiles, translates to 'sparrow' in some dialects?

Mahjong is written with characters that mean 'sparrow' in Cantonese and other southern dialects; the clacking of tiles being shuffled is said to sound like chattering sparrows.

Which animal comes first in the twelve-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac?

Rat: in one telling of the Great Race folk tale, the rat hitched a ride across the river on the ox's back, then leapt off at the far bank to finish first, leaving the ox in second place.

What is the official language of mainland China?

Mandarin was named by Europeans after the imperial officials, or 'mandarins', who used it as their common tongue; China calls its standard form Putonghua, 'common speech'.

Which Chinese philosopher's sayings on ethics and social harmony were collected by his followers in the Analects?

Confucius spent years travelling from state to state in search of a ruler who would act on his teaching and found none; his followers compiled the Analects only after his death in 479 BCE.

Which of these inventions is attributed to ancient China?

Block printing began in China as a way of stamping patterns on cloth before 220 AD; under the Tang, Buddhists took it up to multiply sacred texts, since every copy was thought to earn merit.

Which emperor ordered the Forbidden City built from 1406 as the new seat of his dynasty?

The Yongle Emperor, who had seized the throne from his nephew in a civil war, moved the court from Nanjing to his own power base and began the Forbidden City there in 1406; it was finished in 1420.

Which animal has China loaned to foreign zoos for decades as a gesture of diplomacy?

Giant pandas were handed out as state gifts until 1984; since then they have only been leased, for up to $1 million a year, and any cubs born abroad remain China's property.

Which dam near Yichang in Hubei is the world's largest power station by installed capacity?

The Three Gorges Dam can generate 22,500 MW; filling the reservoir behind it, which stretches some 600 km upstream, flooded towns and villages and forced over a million people to move.

Which classic Chinese novel follows the Monkey King on a monk's quest to fetch scriptures from India?

Journey to the West sends the trickster Sun Wukong to guard the monk Xuanzang, a real pilgrim who went to India in the 7th century; the hero later became Son Goku of Dragon Ball.

What is the traditional Chinese New Year also known as?

The Spring Festival is the mainland's usual name for Chinese New Year; in legend its firecrackers and red decorations began as a way to frighten off Nian, a beast that raided villages each New Year's Eve.

What is the highest mountain peak in China?

Mount Everest (Qomolangma) has its summit on the China–Nepal border; the two countries long quoted different heights for it and only announced an agreed figure, 8,848.86 m, in December 2020.

Macau returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1999 after 442 years under which European power?

Portugal settled Macau as a trading post in the 1550s; after its 1974 revolution it stopped treating the enclave as a province and called it a territory under Portuguese administration, long before handing it back in 1999.

Which art form was prized above all other visual arts in traditional China, even painting?

Calligraphy came first because the scholars who ran the government lived by the written word; a character's form was meant to show the writer's moral worth, not only its meaning.

Which Chinese philosophical system is traditionally traced to the sage Laozi?

Daoism traces itself to Laozi, who in the oldest account wrote down his teaching at a border pass, at the request of its keeper, before heading west and vanishing from the record.

What are the large circular communal dwellings of Fujian province called?

Tulou are earthen strongholds built by Fujian clans: thick rammed-earth walls, a single gate and room for as many as 800 people let a whole lineage shut out bandits.

Which river, the cradle of Chinese civilisation, is nicknamed 'China's Sorrow' for its floods?

The Yellow River earned the name 'China's Sorrow' because the silt it carries keeps raising its bed above the surrounding plain; one count has it flooding 1,593 times between 595 BC and 1946.

Which era of rival states followed the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 AD?

Three Kingdoms: Wei, Shu and Wu fought over China until 280, and their generals and schemers became folk heroes through the 14th-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

What is the traditional Chinese women's garment with a high collar and form-fitting silhouette?

The cheongsam (qipao) took its fitted shape in the 1920s, when fashionable city women recut the loose, straight robe of the imperial era into a tailored dress.

Which Chinese martial art of slow, flowing movements is taught in Yang, Wu and Chen styles?

Tai Chi Chuan began as a combat art in the Chen family's village; its slow forms drill balance and alignment for techniques that advanced students also practise at full speed.

Which invention are Tang-era alchemists thought to have stumbled on while seeking an elixir of life?

Gunpowder is thought to have come from alchemists mixing saltpetre and sulphur in search of an elixir of life; a text of about 850 warns that such mixtures had burned hands, faces and even the house they were working in.

Which Chinese thinker is traditionally credited with 'The Art of War'?

Sun Tzu is said to have proved his methods to the King of Wu by drilling 180 palace concubines and executing the king's two favourites when the women laughed at his orders; scholars doubt he wrote all of The Art of War.

What is the world's longest artificial waterway, connecting Beijing with Hangzhou, called?

The Grand Canal runs about 1,800 km; emperors linked it up so that grain collected as tax in the fertile south could be shipped cheaply to the capital and the armies of the north.

Which of these major Chinese holidays is also known as the Mid-Autumn Festival?

The Moon Festival falls on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, when the full moon is said to be at its brightest and roundest; that roundness stands for family reunion, hence the shared mooncakes.

What is the largest city in China by urban population?

Shanghai counted about 24.9 million residents in the 2020 census; Chongqing's 32 million are spread across a municipality the size of Austria, much of it countryside, so it is not the bigger city.

Which Chinese tea, oxidised only partway, includes the Tieguanyin and Da Hong Pao varieties?

Oolong tea is made by withering the leaves, then bruising them so they oxidise only partway before being fired; the name means 'black dragon'.

Which slogan sums up Hong Kong's 1997 handover?

'One country, two systems' let Hong Kong keep its own currency, courts and capitalist economy when British rule ended on 1 July 1997; the same formula was applied to Macau two years later.

Which Chinese opera form took shape after Anhui troupes arrived at the Qing court in 1790?

Peking Opera (Jingju) took shape after the Four Great Anhui Troupes arrived in Beijing in 1790 for the Qianlong Emperor's 80th birthday, blending Anhui and Hubei styles into its hallmark singing, mime and acrobatics.

Which Chinese leader launched the late-1970s economic reforms behind China's rapid growth?

Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader by 1978 without ever holding the top party or state office, and steered China toward a 'socialist market economy' through reform and opening-up.

Which Chinese art of growing miniature trees and landscapes in trays inspired Japan's bonsai?

Penjing has been practised in China for more than a thousand years; travellers and Buddhist students carried potted trees home to Japan, where the art narrowed to single trees and became bonsai.

Which Chinese invention was first used for fortune-telling and feng shui?

The compass began as a lodestone pointer used by Han-era diviners to align buildings and tell fortunes; more than a thousand years passed before sailors steered by a magnetised needle.

What is the Chinese steamed bun with a filling of meat or vegetables called?

Baozi were originally just called mantou; a legend first written down about a thousand years ago credits the strategist Zhuge Liang with inventing the filled bun as a stand-in for human heads owed to a river god.

In the Chinese opera art of bian lian, what do performers swap in the blink of an eye?

Their masks: bian lian means 'face-changing', and performers flick through painted faces with the swipe of a fan or a turn of the head, by methods handed down inside families as a closely kept secret.

Which desert fills most of the Tarim Basin in far-western China?

The Taklamakan fills the Tarim Basin, some 1,000 km long and 400 km wide, and the Silk Road split to skirt its northern and southern edges.

Which city, the eastern end of the Silk Road, was capital to the Western Han, the Tang and other dynasties?

Chang'an (Xi'an) held close to a million people at its Tang-era height, laid out on a grid so admired that Japan copied it for its own capitals at Nara and Kyoto.

What Chinese spirit distilled from fermented sorghum is considered the national liquor?

Baijiu is little known abroad, yet in 2018 drinkers, almost all of them in China, got through more of it by volume than whisky, vodka, gin, rum and tequila combined.

Which province overtook Henan and Shandong in 2005 to become China's most populous?

Guangdong passed Henan and Shandong in January 2005 on the strength of some 31 million migrant workers drawn to the Pearl River Delta's factories; its population topped 126 million in the 2020 census.

Which region is China's largest province-level division by area?

Xinjiang covers over 1.6 million square kilometres, about a sixth of China, and lies so far west that many residents keep 'Xinjiang time', two hours behind the national clock.

Poyang, China's largest freshwater lake, shrinks to a fraction of its size in which season?

Winter is the dry season: swollen by the summer rains, Poyang spreads over about 3,500 square kilometres, then shrinks to a marsh where most of the world's Siberian cranes spend the cold months.

With all of China on Beijing time, which city sees summer sunsets after 10 pm?

Kashgar lies so far west that its sun runs over two and a half hours behind the capital's, yet China, though five time zones wide, officially keeps a single clock.

Which national forest park renamed a sandstone pillar 'Avatar Hallelujah Mountain' in 2010?

Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in Hunan renamed the 1,080-metre Southern Sky Column 'Avatar Hallelujah Mountain' in January 2010, after the pillar inspired the floating mountains in James Cameron's film.

The Potala Palace, former home of the Dalai Lamas, stands in which city?

The Potala Palace rises on Marpo Ri hill at about 3,700 metres in Lhasa; the Dalai Lamas lived there from 1649 until 1959, when the 14th fled during an uprising against Chinese rule.

Harbin, host of the world's largest ice and snow festival, is the capital of which province?

Harbin is the capital of Heilongjiang, where January averages about −17 °C; that deep cold lets builders cut blocks of ice from the frozen Songhua River and stack them into full-size illuminated buildings.

The Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge holds which world record?

At 55 km, including a 6.7 km undersea tunnel between two artificial islands, the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge opened in 2018 as the world's longest sea crossing, keeping shipping lanes into the Pearl River open.

The Mogao Caves, a Silk Road system of Buddhist temples, lie just outside which oasis town?

The Mogao Caves lie 25 km southeast of Dunhuang in Gansu; a walled-up 'Library Cave' rediscovered there in 1900 held the Diamond Sutra of 868, the earliest dated printed book to survive.

China's Lancang River becomes which great Southeast Asian river downstream?

The Mekong, called the Lancang on its upper course, swells so much in the monsoon that it forces Cambodia's Tonle Sap River to flow backwards for months each year.

Which city bordering Hong Kong became a special economic zone in 1980?

Shenzhen was a border town of about 30,000 people; its position beside Hong Kong drew foreign investment and migrant workers, and the breakneck building that followed gave China the phrase 'Shenzhen speed'.

Which Ming admiral led seven treasure voyages as far as East Africa?

Zheng He, a Muslim-born court eunuch captured as a boy, commanded the fleets; a giraffe brought home from Africa was hailed at court as a qilin, a mythical beast of good omen.

Which 1842 agreement ended the First Opium War and ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain?

The Treaty of Nanjing, signed aboard HMS Cornwallis on 29 August 1842, ceded Hong Kong Island 'in perpetuity', a clause overtaken by the 1984 Joint Declaration and the 1997 handover.

Which rebellion's leader, Hong Xiuquan, proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ?

The Taiping Rebellion grew from a Christian tract that convinced Hong Xiuquan his earlier visions made him Christ's younger brother; the war he began in 1850 lasted until 1864 and cost an estimated 20 million lives.

Who was elected provisional president of the new Republic of China in December 1911?

Sun Yat-sen was elected provisional president on 29 December 1911 and held the post barely ten weeks before stepping aside for Yuan Shikai on 10 March 1912.

Only about one in ten finished which Red Army trek of 1934–35?

The Long March began as a breakout from Nationalist encirclement in Jiangxi and crossed 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers; the survivors made northern Shaanxi their new headquarters.

Which former concubine ruled as China's only female emperor?

Wu Zetian entered the palace as a teenage concubine, outlasted two emperors and in 690 took the throne under the dynastic name Zhou; a coup removed her in 705, months before her death.

Which grandson of Genghis Khan proclaimed himself emperor of a new Chinese dynasty in 1271?

Kublai Khan finished the conquest of China in 1279, but the two fleets he sent against Japan were scattered by storms that the Japanese named kamikaze, 'divine wind'.

Puyi, the last Qing emperor, later reigned over which Japanese puppet state?

Puyi was installed in Manchukuo, Japan's puppet state in Manchuria, first as chief executive in 1932 and from 1934 as the Kangde Emperor; he died an ordinary citizen of the People's Republic in 1967.

Which 1,300-year-old institution did the Qing court abolish in 1905?

Civil service exams had picked China's officials since the Sui dynasty; the 1905 edict scrapped them so that new Western-style schools, not essays on the classics, would train the next generation.

During the Great Leap Forward, villagers were urged to produce which metal in backyard furnaces?

Steel was the target of the 1958 drive: farm implements and household metal were melted down in the furnaces, yet most of them could turn out only unusable pig iron.

Which spacecraft programme made China the third country to launch its own astronaut in 2003?

Shenzhou 5 carried fighter pilot Yang Liwei on a 21-hour solo flight in October 2003; back on Earth he reported that he had not been able to see the Great Wall from orbit.

What first did China's Chang'e 4 achieve in January 2019?

Chang'e 4 landed on the far side of the Moon on 3 January 2019; because that side never faces Earth, the lander could only talk to home through Queqiao, a relay satellite parked beyond the Moon.

What does Tiangong, the name of China's space station, mean in English?

Heavenly Palace was built alone: a 2011 US law barred NASA from working with China's space agencies, shutting the country out of the International Space Station, and the first module flew in April 2021.

Which Beijing venue staged the opening ceremonies of both the 2008 and 2022 Olympics?

The Bird's Nest, built for the 2008 Games, hosted the ceremonies again in 2022 without staging a single event, as Beijing became the first city to hold the Olympics in both seasons.

Which NBA team made Chinese centre Yao Ming the first overall pick of the 2002 draft?

The Houston Rockets took Yao Ming first overall in 2002; Chinese basketball officials had said they would not let him leave for America unless the Rockets used the top pick on him.

Which Grand Slam did Li Na win in 2011 by beating defending champion Francesca Schiavone?

Li Na won the 2011 French Open three years after quitting China's state-run sports system to manage her own career; an estimated 116 million people at home watched the final.

What does the pen name of Nobel laureate Mo Yan literally mean?

Mo Yan means 'don't speak', a nod to his parents' warnings to hold his tongue; born Guan Moye, he adopted the pen name in 1981 while writing as a serving PLA soldier.

Tu Youyou won a Nobel Prize for discovering artemisinin, a treatment for which disease?

Tu Youyou isolated artemisinin from sweet wormwood in 1972 after combing ancient Chinese medical texts for Project 523, a secret military effort against malaria; she shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The Dragon Boat Festival honours which poet and minister of the ancient state of Chu?

Qu Yuan, a Chu minister and poet, drowned himself in the Miluo River in 278 BCE; legend says villagers raced out in boats and threw rice into the water to keep fish from his body.

Who wrote the 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber?

Cao Xueqin wrote Dream of the Red Chamber in the mid-18th century, drawing on his own family's fall from wealth; the book is so dense that an entire academic field, 'Redology', is devoted to it.

Tsingtao Brewery was founded in 1903 in a Chinese port leased to which foreign power?

Germany had seized Qingdao in 1897 and taken a 99-year lease on the bay; an Anglo-German company founded the brewery there, and it outlived the colony, which Japan captured in 1914.

Which Beijing tech company, founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012, created TikTok and its Chinese twin Douyin?

ByteDance began in a rented flat, where Zhang Yiming's team built the news app Toutiao around a feed chosen by algorithm; the same idea later drove Douyin and TikTok.

Zhou Youguang, an economist who lived to 111, led the team behind which Chinese writing reform of 1958?

Hanyu Pinyin took Zhou Youguang's committee about three years; he had been a banker posted to New York and London, and in old age he became an outspoken advocate of democracy.

Eastern Han court eunuch Cai Lun is celebrated for transforming the manufacture of what?

Cai Lun's recipe of tree bark, hemp ends, rags and fishing nets, presented to the Han court in 105 AD, made paper cheap enough to spread across the world.

Jingdezhen in Jiangxi is known as China's capital of which craft?

Porcelain made the town's name: in 1004 it was renamed after the reign title Jingde, the era in which its kilns rose to fame.

On China's national flag, what does the large star represent?

The Communist Party is the large star. Zeng Liansong's winning design of 1949 also had a hammer and sickle inside it, which the committee removed for looking too much like the Soviet flag.

What is the national anthem of the People's Republic of China?

March of the Volunteers was written for a 1935 film as Japan pushed into China; three decades later its lyricist, Tian Han, died in prison, and his words were only fully restored to the anthem in 1982.

Which ethnic group, concentrated in Guangxi, is China's largest minority?

The Zhuang gave their name to Guangxi when it was made an autonomous region in 1958, yet even there they remain a minority, outnumbered by Han Chinese.

Which Hebei city was flattened by a pre-dawn earthquake on 28 July 1976?

Tangshan was struck at 3:42 am, when most people were asleep in unreinforced brick homes that collapsed on them, which is why the official death toll reached about 242,000.

Jiuzhaigou, famed for multi-level waterfalls and turquoise pools, is in which province?

Sichuan's Jiuzhaigou strings its lakes behind natural dams of rock and mineral deposits; the earthquake of August 2017 burst the dam holding Huohua Lake and damaged Nuorilang Waterfall.

Pu'er, a fermented tea pressed into cakes, is traditionally produced in which province?

Pu'er takes its name from a market town in southern Yunnan; pressing the tea into bricks and cakes made it easy to carry by caravan along the Tea Horse Road into Tibet.

Hu Huanyong drew the Heihe–Tengchong line across 1930s China to map a divide in what?

Population density: his map showed most Chinese living east of the line, and they still do, because much of the west is high plateau, desert and mountain.

Who was the first sitting US president to visit the People's Republic of China, in 1972?

Richard Nixon, who had made his name as a leading anti-communist, spent 21–28 February 1972 in China and called it 'the week that changed the world'.

Jiaozi, regarded as the world's first banknotes, appeared under which dynasty?

Song merchants in Chengdu first issued jiaozi as private promissory notes; when several issuers went bankrupt, the government took over and printed the first state notes in 1024.

The artisan Bi Sheng is credited with inventing what in China around the 1040s?

Bi Sheng's movable type used baked clay characters set in an iron frame; the method was recorded only in Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays, four centuries before Gutenberg.

China's Chang'e 5 lunar mission lifted off in 2020 from Wenchang, a launch site on which southern island?

Hainan was chosen for Wenchang because it lies just 19° north of the equator, which lets rockets lift heavier payloads, and beside the sea, so the biggest rockets can be delivered by ship.

Which woman dominated the Qing court as regent from 1861 until her death in 1908?

Empress Dowager Cixi began as a concubine who bore the Xianfeng Emperor his only son; in the 1861 Xinyou Coup she and Ci'an ousted the regents the dying emperor had named.

Which treat served in Chinese restaurants across America most likely began with Japanese immigrant bakers?

The fortune cookie resembles a cracker baked in Kyoto since the 19th century, and until around World War II Americans knew it as a 'fortune tea cake'.

Which fruit native to China was known in English as the 'Chinese gooseberry' until exporters renamed it in 1959?

Kiwifruit was coined by the exporter Turners & Growers as a nod to the New Zealanders' nickname, after a US client warned that 'gooseberry' was causing trouble at quarantine.

Phone numbers and addresses with fours are widely avoided in China because 'four' sounds like the word for what?

Death (sǐ) and four (sì) differ only in tone, and 14 is thought even unluckier because it sounds like 'is dead'.

In Chinese legend, which animal won the Jade Emperor's contest and so opens every cycle of the zodiac?

The Rat took the first year of the cycle as its prize for winning the race, with the Ox placed second and the Tiger third.

An upturned pot unearthed at Lajia in northwest China in 2005 held the world's oldest known example of which food?

The noodles were thin strands radiocarbon dated to around 4,000 years ago, and experiments suggest they needed more than millet, perhaps barley or wheat.

Which popular aquarium pet was first bred for colour in imperial China more than a thousand years ago?

The goldfish descends from dull grey carp whose rare red and orange mutants were first recorded in China during the Jin dynasty, some 1,600 years ago.

Cuju, a game described in an ancient Chinese military manual, is recognised as one of the earliest forms of which sport?

Football's ancient cousin had teams kicking a ball through an opening into a central hoop, and players could use any part of the body except their hands.

In 132, Chinese polymath Zhang Heng unveiled a device that dropped bronze balls into toads' mouths to detect what?

Earthquakes far from the court tripped the device, and whichever toad caught the ball showed the direction the tremor had come from.

Which legendary heroine of a Northern Wei-era ballad disguised herself as a man to take her father's place in the army?

Hua Mulan is known from the Ballad of Mulan, a folk poem that survives only as excerpts copied into a later anthology after the original collection was lost.

What nickname did the lattice of steel beams around China's National Stadium, built for the 2008 Olympics, earn it?

The Bird's Nest look was an accident of engineering: the steel was woven to hide the supports of a retractable roof that was later dropped from the design.

Which film star, born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, founded the martial art Jeet Kune Do?

Bruce Lee died six days before the release of Enter the Dragon, having entered Hong Kong films as a child actor through his father.

Which southern Chinese tradition of small shared dishes grew out of teahouse meals known as yum cha?

Dim sum took off in the tenth century, when a surge of commercial travellers began stopping at teahouses for small portions to go with their tea.

Zhōngguó, the name China uses for itself in Standard Chinese, is usually translated into English as what?

Middle Kingdom, or more literally 'Central State', is only one of the country's names for itself: another, Jiǔzhōu, means 'nine states'.

By what name is Go, the board game of black and white stones invented in China over 2,500 years ago, known there?

Weiqi means 'encirclement board game'; the name Go is a short form of the Japanese igo, itself borrowed from the Chinese word.

An American team's 1971 invitation to play exhibition matches in China opened a thaw named after which sport?

Ping-pong diplomacy began when American player Glenn Cowan missed his team's bus at the world championships in Japan and hopped on China's instead.

At Chinese New Year, what do elders traditionally give children inside red envelopes known as hongbao?

Cash in red envelopes went digital in the mid-2010s, when messaging apps with mobile wallets began letting users send virtual packets for the holiday.

Which Tencent 'super-app', known in mainland China as Weixin, combines messaging, social media and mobile payments?

WeChat's Chinese name means 'micro-message', a modest label for a service that has been described as China's 'app for everything'.

Which entrepreneur, a university English graduate once turned down for a job at KFC, co-founded Alibaba in 1999?

Jack Ma sat China's university entrance exam three times before getting in, and practised his English as a boy by chatting to foreign hotel guests in Hangzhou.

Which traveller dictated the story of his years in China to a cellmate while a prisoner of the Genoese?

Marco Polo's cellmate Rustichello da Pisa turned the tales into a book that gave Europeans their first comprehensive look at China.

China's system of internet censorship and filtering is popularly known by which nickname?

The Great Firewall combines the word 'firewall' with the Great Wall of China, and it blocks selected foreign websites and slows cross-border internet traffic.

Which anti-foreign uprising in north China was defeated by an Eight-Nation Alliance?

The Boxer Rebellion got its English name because many of its fighters practised martial arts that Westerners then called 'Chinese boxing'.

Which Nationalist leader, once head of the Whampoa Military Academy, retreated to Taiwan after losing China's civil war?

Chiang Kai-shek went on to rule Taiwan as president of a de facto one-party state for the remaining 25 years of his life.

In Journey to the West, which trickster born from a stone rebels against heaven before joining a monk's pilgrimage?

The Monkey King, Sun Wukong, can cover 108,000 li, some 54,000 km, in a single somersault, and the Buddha jailed him under a mountain for his revolt.

At which complex, crowned by a triple-gabled circular hall, did China's emperors pray each year for a good harvest?

The Temple of Heaven's great round hall is built entirely of wood without a single nail, and the original burned down after a lightning strike in 1889.

Which constitutional principle governs Hong Kong and Macau as special administrative regions of China?

One country, two systems was formulated in the early 1980s, during negotiations with the United Kingdom over the future of Hong Kong.

FAST, a 500-metre dish set in a natural basin in southwest China, is the world's largest single-dish telescope for what?

Radio waves are what the dish listens for, so 9,110 people living within 5 km of it were relocated to create a radio-quiet area.

Which fan-leaved tree, sole survivor of an order over 290 million years old, may survive in the wild only in China?

The ginkgo was thought extinct in the wild for centuries, yet this 'living fossil' is disease-resistant, long-lived and still commonly planted.

China's own media call its astronauts hángtiānyuán, but which informal term do English-language news outlets often use?

Taikonaut is built on tàikōng, the Chinese word for 'space', while the official term hángtiānyuán means 'celestial navigator'.

Which celebration on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month brings China's New Year season to a close?

The Lantern Festival falls on a full moon, and children go out that night carrying lanterns and solving the riddles written on them.

The world's largest amphibians, found in China and able to reach 1.8 metres long, are giant forms of which animal?

Salamander giants in China can weigh 50 kg, yet they are critically endangered in the wild, partly because they are eaten as a delicacy.

Which artist displayed 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds at London's Tate Modern in 2010?

Ai Weiwei was arrested at an airport in China the following April and held for 81 days without charge.

Which computer engineer at a power plant wrote The Three-Body Problem, winner of the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel?

Liu Cixin became the first author from Asia to win the Hugo for Best Novel, with an English translation by the American writer Ken Liu.

Which director of Raise the Red Lantern and Hero staged the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics?

Zhang Yimou started out as a cinematographer and won Berlin's Golden Bear with Red Sorghum, his first film as a director.

Which two-stringed bowed instrument, its sound box covered in python skin, is sometimes called the Chinese violin?

The erhu owes its solo career to Liu Tianhua, who brought it to the capital in the 1920s and composed ten solo pieces for it.

Which name for China, long used in Europe and later only by poets, comes from the nomadic Khitan people?

Cathay first meant only northern China, where the Khitan ruled the Liao dynasty, and English kept using it until 'China' replaced it in the 19th century.

Inscribed oracle bones confirmed the existence of which early Chinese dynasty, once doubted by sceptical scholars?

Shang diviners' bones bear the earliest known body of Chinese writing, yet villagers who dug them up ground them into medicine as 'dragon bones'.

Which flying device, credited in China to Mozi and Lu Ban, did ancient armies use for signalling?

The kite of Mozi and Lu Ban was made of wood, and ancient Chinese texts also describe kites lifting men and measuring distances.

US Marines in World War II borrowed 'gung ho' from a Chinese slogan that they understood to mean what?

Work together was Major Evans Carlson's reading of gōnghé, which is really short for the Chinese name of an industrial cooperative.

Which ancient Chinese divination text, consulted by sorting yarrow stalks, is known in English as the Book of Changes?

The I Ching began as a fortune-telling manual some 3,000 years ago and joined the canon of Chinese classics in the 2nd century BC.

Which unofficial holiday on 11 November, started by students in China, became the world's biggest shopping day?

Singles' Day falls on 11/11 because the numeral 1 looks like a 'bare stick', Chinese internet slang for an unmarried man.

Which campaign grew out of 1919 student protests against the Treaty of Versailles leaving Shandong territory to Japan?

The May Fourth Movement is named for the day in 1919 when students gathered in front of Tiananmen to denounce their government's weak response to the treaty.

Which rover, delivered by the Tianwen-1 mission in 2021, made China the second country to operate a rover on Mars?

Zhurong is named after a mythical figure linked with fire, because Mars is known in Chinese as 'the Planet of Fire'.

Which Chinese character meaning good fortune is often hung upside down on doors at Chinese New Year?

Fu is flipped for a pun: 'upside down' and 'to arrive' sound the same in Chinese, so an upside-down fu says 'good luck arrives'.

Which classic Chinese novel, attributed to Shi Nai'an, follows 108 outlaws who gather at Mount Liang?

Water Margin, also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men Are Brothers, is regarded as one of the earliest great novels written in everyday Chinese.

Which celebration, often called China's Valentine's Day, marks the yearly meeting of the lovers Zhinü and Niulang?

The Qixi Festival is also called Qiqiao, 'beseeching craftsmanship', and falls on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month.

Which writer left medical school in Japan for literature and published the vernacular story Diary of a Madman in 1918?

Lu Xun also wrote The True Story of Ah Q, and Nobel laureate Kenzaburō Ōe called him the greatest writer Asia produced in the 20th century.

The monk Hai Tong began the 71-metre Leshan Giant Buddha in the 8th century hoping the statue would do what?

Calm the waters it apparently did: so much stone cut from the cliff ended up in the river below that the currents changed and became safe for passing ships.

Which Tang poet, nicknamed the Immortal of Poetry, drowned in legend while reaching for the moon's reflection?

Li Bai was also dubbed the Wine Immortal, and poems of his such as 'Quiet Night Thought' are still taught in schools in China.

Which sticky-rice parcels wrapped in bamboo leaves are traditionally eaten at China's Dragon Boat Festival?

Zongzi come sweet, filled with red bean paste, or savoury, stuffed with pork belly or Chinese sausage, and are sometimes called Chinese tamales.

Which faction led by Jiang Qing was removed in a bloodless coup in October 1976 and later charged with treason?

The Gang of Four fell to a move organised by Mao's successor Hua Guofeng, an episode remembered as the 'Smashing the Gang of Four'.