China's past is long enough that the famous parts crowd out the rest. These stories keep to what the record supports: a pharmacy selling the oldest Chinese writing as medicine, an emperor who standardized the width of cart axles, the anti-rust plating on Qin swords that turned out to be spilled lacquer, and an encyclopedia of 11,095 volumes that was too big to print.
Every tile in a Ancient China game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Dynasties and Rulers
nine stories
1The oldest Chinese writing was sold as medicine
On the tile: Oracle bones1899
Chinese pharmacies sold dragon bones, a folk remedy ground to powder from old bones turned up in farm fields. In 1899 Wang Yirong, an official of the Imperial Academy, looked at some that had not yet been ground and saw rows of ancient characters. They were Shang divination records cut into ox shoulder blades and turtle shells, the oldest known Chinese writing, and an unknown number had already gone into the medicine jars. In 1908 the scholar Luo Zhenyu traced the supply to fields outside Anyang.
2The argument that made a rebel the rightful ruler
On the tile: Zhou dynastyc. 1050 BC
The Zhou overthrew the Shang around 1046 BC and needed a better case than force. Their own King Wen had already supplied one: his authority, he said, came straight from Heaven, which picked a ruler and expected him to govern for the good of his people. The catch was built in. A ruler who failed would watch his state suffer floods and droughts, and would lose the right to govern. Every dynasty that followed borrowed the argument, foreign conquerors included, down to the last emperor.
Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BC and then went after the details. Weights and measures became one system, the coinage became one currency, and the rival scripts of the old kingdoms gave way to writing that could be read across the empire. Then he went smaller still. Even the axle widths of chariots and carts were made uniform, so that travelers could use any road in the country. One empire, one script, one coin, and one width of cartwheel.
Emperor Wu sent Zhang Qian west in 138 BC to find allies against the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu caught him instead and held him about ten years. He escaped, reached the people he had been sent to recruit, failed to talk them into a war, was caught a second time, and reached home only in 126 BC. What he brought back was not an alliance but a report: cities, markets, wine and the famous horses of Ferghana. The trade route that grew along his path is the one later called the Silk Road.
Wu Zetian ran the Tang court from behind the throne for years, and in 690 she stopped working through other people. She declared a new dynasty, the Zhou, and took the title of emperor herself, the only woman in Chinese history to hold it. She made commanders sit competence examinations modeled on the civil service exams, and she put newly invented characters into official use, somewhere between ten and thirty of them, replacing forms everyone already knew. The characters did not outlive her.
The Qin empire outlasted its founder by only a few years, and the man who picked up the pieces was nobody's idea of an emperor. Liu Bang came from peasant stock and struck later historians as blunt and crude, but he knew how to win people over. He beat the aristocrat Xiang Yu at Gaixia in 202 BC and took the throne as Gaozu. Remembering where he came from, he cut taxes and opened official posts to men of any class.
Famine killed Zhu Yuanzhang's parents in 1344, and the orphaned teenager took refuge in a Buddhist temple. He left it to beg, then to soldier. In 1352 he joined a Red Turban band under Guo Zixing, raised twenty-four men from his own district within a year, took Nanjing in 1356, and in January 1368 announced the founding of a dynasty he called the Ming, meaning radiance. It lasted until 1644, nearly three centuries.
In 1414 part of the fourth Ming treasure fleet reached Bengal, where envoys from Malindi on the East African coast had brought giraffes as tribute. One of them was handed to the Chinese, who took it home. Court scholars studied the cloven hooves, the ox-like tail and the skin-covered horns and identified a qilin, an auspicious beast whose arrival was read as proof of a virtuous reign. Copies of the painting made to mark it went to high officials. Later fleets brought lions, zebras, ostriches and more giraffes, until the voyages ended in 1433.
Passing the civil service examination could raise a family for generations, so candidates cheated with real craft. One survivor of that effort sits in a Princeton library: a strip of yellowing silk, six by twenty-nine inches, folded three times into almost nothing. As many as eleven essays are packed onto it in characters so small the Chinese call the style fly-head script, after the head of a fly. The examinations it was made to beat were abolished in 1905, after more than twelve centuries.
1Paper was already old when Cai Lun got the credit
On the tile: Paper2nd century BCMyth busted
The standard story hands paper to Cai Lun, director of the imperial workshops, in 105 CE. He earned part of it, since his soaked and pressed plant fibers made a better sheet at lower cost. But paper was already there. Chinese sites have yielded coarse hemp paper from the second century BC, and a tomb at Fangmatan, excavated in 1986, gave up a scrap of a paper map about two inches across, drawn with mountains, waterways and roads.
Chinese emperors employed Taoist alchemists to find an elixir of longevity, and the alchemists worked through every mixture that looked promising. Saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal was not the elixir. Singed beards, burned hands and burned-down workshops taught them what it was instead, and by the Smithsonian's account they stumbled on the explosive rather than planned it. A book of tales from 1264 describes one thing they got: the ground rat, a tube most likely of bamboo that shot about the floor at firework displays when lit.
3The oldest dated printed book was made to give away
On the tile: Diamond Sutra868
On May 11, 868, a scroll came off a set of woodblocks: seven printed sheets pasted into a roll about sixteen feet long, opening with a woodblock picture of the Buddha. The note at the end says Wang Jie had it made for universal distribution on behalf of his two parents. Because he put the date on it, this copy stands as the oldest complete dated printed book known in the world. It lasted because it was sealed in a cave near Dunhuang, unopened until about 1900.
Zhang Heng's instrument of 132 was a large urn ringed by eight dragon heads facing the eight principal directions, each holding a ball, with an open-mouthed toad below each one. When the ground moved, a dragon dropped its ball into the toad beneath it, and which one fell indicated where the shaking had come from. The inner mechanism is unknown, though most guesses involve a pendulum. It is reported to have caught an earthquake four hundred miles off that nobody at the instrument felt.
5A clock twelve meters tall, run entirely by water
On the tile: Clock tower1088
Su Song's astronomical clock tower went up in 1088. Twelve meters tall and driven entirely by water power, it carried an armillary sphere on top for observing the sky, a turning celestial globe in the middle, and the timekeeping apparatus below, working on a principle the Hong Kong Space Museum compares to the escapement of a modern clock. The tower was destroyed after the upheaval called the Jingkang Incident, and the technique for building it was lost for centuries; the tower was rebuilt only in recent decades.
Chromium on the surface of bronze weapons from the terracotta pits looked like an answer: Qin metalworkers had invented anti-rust plating two thousand years before anyone else. A study published in 2019 took that apart. The chromium came from lacquer on the wooden parts the weapons touched, which is why it turns up on pommels, fittings and crossbow triggers and never on the blades. What kept the bronzes bright was more likely their tin content and a moderately alkaline, fine-grained burial soil.
At Lajia in Qinghai an earthenware bowl lay upside down under ten feet of sediment, and the seal it made held. Inside were long, thin yellow noodles, still recognizable after about four thousand years. The team led by Houyuan Lu identified the grain as two kinds of millet, broomcorn and foxtail, rather than wheat, and published the find in Nature in 2005 as the earliest example of noodles yet recovered anywhere.
The earliest known record of paper used in the toilet is a sixth-century scholar setting a limit. Yan Zhitui wrote to his family that paper bearing quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics, or the names of sages, he dared not use for such purposes, which says plainly what he did with the rest. By the ninth century foreign writers had noticed the Chinese habit and disapproved. In 1393 the Bureau of Imperial Supplies made 720,000 sheets for the court, and 15,000 perfumed ones, three inches square, for the imperial family.
About 1,500 years ago Chinese builders began stirring sticky rice soup into slaked lime, and the mortar they got went into tombs, pagodas and city walls that are still standing. Bingjian Zhang and colleagues, publishing through the American Chemical Society, found the reason. Amylopectin from the rice keeps the calcium carbonate crystals small, producing a dense mortar that resists water. Some of the structures have shrugged off earthquakes and modern bulldozers.
The Great Wall is the usual answer to the question of what human structure can be seen from space, and it is the wrong one. NASA puts it plainly: the wall is not visible from the moon, and it is difficult or impossible to see from Earth orbit without the high-powered lenses used to photograph it. Astronauts have tried and never reliably managed it, and China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, said he could not see it. The wall is long but narrow, and it matches the ground around it.
On March 29, 1974, a farmer named Yang Zhifa was sinking a well east of Xi'an when he turned up broken pottery. Beneath the field lay the guard of Qin Shi Huang's tomb. More than two thousand warriors and horses have been dug out of three pits so far, with perhaps six thousand more still underground. They did not look as they do now: every figure was painted in bright colors, nearly all of which is gone, and only traces survive on a few of them.
Sima Qian wrote that the first emperor's burial chamber held rivers and seas made of mercury. The mound has never been opened, so in a study published in 2020 a team aimed laser radar at the air above it. They measured mercury vapor at up to 27 nanograms per cubic meter, well above the local background of 5 to 10. Their conclusion was careful: the readings add to the credibility of a record written about 2,200 years ago.
The builders of the Forbidden City needed enormous stones from quarries outside Beijing, and they moved them in winter. Crews dug wells every half kilometer along the route, poured the water out to freeze into a path, and dragged the loaded sledge over it, pouring more water at the contact surface as they went. A record of a winter haul in 1557 describes a stone of about 123 tons taken more than 70 kilometers. Researchers calculated that water on ice cut the crew from roughly 1,500 men to fewer than 50.
Around 256 BC, on the Chengdu flatlands, engineers took on the Min River without damming it. A levee splits the current, a weir throws off gravel and flood water, and a channel cut through rock lets the rest run on to the farmland. UNESCO describes the system as handling diversion, sediment, flood control and flow control by using the natural landscape rather than blocking it. It still controls the Min and still waters the plain.
Sections of the Grand Canal were dug from the fifth century BC onward, but it became one system under the Sui in the seventh century, tying the rice country of the south to the capitals and armies of the north. For the New Bian Canal alone, begun in 605, a million conscripted laborers were mustered, working in conditions that left a lasting disaffection with the Sui government. The canal outlasted the dynasty that unified it, and it is still a working inland waterway.
Wang Yuanlu, a Taoist priest looking after the Mogao caves near Dunhuang, came across a hidden chamber in 1900. Inside were about fifty thousand manuscripts, paintings and other objects, spanning seven centuries from the fourth to the eleventh, packed in and walled up in the early 1000s and untouched since. The printed Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest complete dated printed book known, came out of that room, along with scriptures, contracts, letters and account books nobody expected to survive.
8A stone arch still in use after fourteen centuries
On the tile: Anji Bridge605
Li Chun completed the Zhaozhou Bridge in 605, one stone arch spanning about 37 meters. He did two unusual things. He flattened the arch into a shallow segment rather than a half circle, and he opened the spandrels with smaller arches at each end, which carry the deck load down to the main arch and let flood water through instead of shoving against it. The American Society of Civil Engineers calls it the world's oldest open-spandrel arch bridge, and it remains in use today.
A set of bronze bells came out of the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng at Suizhou in 1978, hung in tiers on a timber frame and dating back about 2,400 years. It is the largest and best preserved set of bronze bells known, and the bells carry inscriptions running to 3,755 characters. The remarkable part is the casting: each bell sounds two different tones, and the set lays out a twelve-tone tuning system nobody knew existed before the tomb was opened.
The Analects is the closest we get to hearing Confucius, and he did not write it. Followers assembled the sayings after his death, and even then nothing proves the words are his. The book has him saying that at fifteen he set his mind on learning, at forty he had no doubts, and at seventy he could follow what his heart desired without overstepping what was right. In life he served the state of Lu, traveled, was jailed five days by mistake, and went home to teach.
Zhuangzi ends a chapter with a small unsettling story about himself. He dreamt he was a butterfly, flying about and enjoying it, with no idea he was Zhuang Zhou. Then he woke, and was plainly Zhou again. What he could not settle was whether Zhou had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly was now dreaming it was Zhou. Between the two, he says, there must be a difference, and he calls the whole business the Transformation of Things.
Mencius grew up poor and fatherless, and tradition gives his mother the credit for the rest. They lived first near a graveyard, where the boy took to imitating the undertaker and the professional mourners. She moved them into town, and he began copying the merchants and the noises of the slaughterhouse. She moved a third time, to a house beside a school, and he started imitating the teachers. A Chinese saying still sums her up as Mencius' mother, three moves.
When Ban Gu died with the Book of Han unfinished, his sister Ban Zhao took it over. She checked, edited and finalized it, continued the eight chronological tables and shared in the treatise on astronomy, and one scholarly estimate puts about a quarter of the whole project in her hands. She also taught inside the palace, instructing Empress Deng and the court women in astronomy, mathematics, history and the classics. She is called the first woman historian of China.
Zu Chongzhi worked out that pi lies between 3.1415926 and 3.1415927, and offered 355 over 113 as a fraction anyone could use, correct to six decimal places. He set the work out in a book called Zhui shu. The Imperial Academy decided it was too advanced for its students and took it off the syllabus, which is almost certainly why the text did not survive; it was lost by the early twelfth century.
6He left the country illegally and came back a hero
On the tile: Xuanzang629-645
Xuanzang could not get the Chinese Buddhist texts to agree with one another, so he went to check them at the source. Refused a travel permit, he slipped out of Chang'an in 629, went around the Takla Makan, through Samarkand and over the Hindu Kush into India, and studied for years at Nalanda. He returned in 645 with 657 items packed in 520 cases and spent the rest of his life translating, finishing about 75 of them in 1,335 chapters.
7The most admired calligraphy, known only by copies
On the tile: Wang Xizhi4th centuryLegend
Wang Xizhi's preface to a set of poems composed at the Orchid Pavilion has long been called the finest running script ever to come from a calligrapher's brush. The story goes that the Tang emperor Taizong loved it so much that he took it to his grave, one of the objects buried with him, never to be seen again. What is not in doubt is that the original is long gone. Everything studied since the Tang has been a copy made by a later hand.
The best-known story about Li Bai has him drunk in a boat, leaning out to seize the moon's reflection in the water, and drowning. It is popular legend, and it is not what the record supports. He returned to eastern China and died in a relative's house. His poems are full of wine and moonlight, which is probably why the moon ended up with the credit for a death it had nothing to do with.
9The largest reference work of its age, 4 percent left
On the tile: Encyclopedia1403-1408
Zhu Di, the Yongle emperor, ordered a compilation of everything worth knowing, and between 1403 and 1408 scholars delivered it: 11,095 volumes holding some 370 million Chinese characters, every one of them written out by hand. A full duplicate was copied out between 1562 and 1567, and the original edition was later lost entirely. Less than four percent of the work survives today, and about a tenth of that sits in the Asian Division of the Library of Congress.