Surgeons who first examined Lady Xin Zhui's body in 1972 found her joints still movable, her skin elastic, and her blood group identifiable, some 2,100 years after her burial in a tomb northeast of modern Changsha, at Mawangdui.
一九七二年,医护人员首次对辛追夫人的遗体进行检验时发现,历经两千一百年,她的关节依然可以活动,皮肤仍富有弹性,甚至连血型都能辨识,而她的墓葬,就位于今日长沙城东北的马王堆。
Her tomb was one of three excavated...
Tao Yuanming wrote, in 365 AD, about a fisherman who stumbled into a hidden valley of blossoming peach trees, stayed for days, and marked his route home so carefully that he still could never find his way back a second time.
公元三六五年,陶渊明写下了一位渔夫的故事;他误入一片桃花盛开的隐秘山谷,在此逗留数日,归途中还特意沿路做下记号,可后来无论如何,却再也找不到回去的路。
That failure to relocate...
China's first domestically built mainline electric locomotive rolled off a production line in Zhuzhou in 1958, a single unit numbered 6Y1-0001 that gave the city a nickname it has kept ever since, the cradle of China's electric locomotives.
一九五八年,中国第一台国产干线电力机车,在株洲的生产线上正式下线,编号为6Y1-0001;这座城市也因此获得了一个沿用至今的称号——"中国电力机车的摇篮"。
CRRC Zhuzhou Locomotive now anchors a cluster...
Mao Zedong and Peng Dehuai were both born within a few kilometres of each other in rural Xiangtan, one in Shaoshan village in 1893, the other in nearby Wushi in 1898; one went on to found the People's Republic, the other was purged by...
Migrating geese flying south from Siberia each winter were once thought to travel no further than Hengyang before turning back north come spring, stopping instead at a modest 97-metre peak on the edge of the city that still carries their name.
相传每年冬天,从西伯利亚南飞的大雁,只会飞抵衡阳便不再南下,待到来年开春便折返北归,途中只在城边一座海拔仅九十七米的山峰稍作停留,这座山峰至今仍以雁为名。
Huiyan Peak, meaning Return-Goose...
Wei Yuan published a book in 1843 urging China to master Western technology to defeat the West with its own weapons; Chinese officials mostly ignored it, but Japanese readers importing copies 10 years later treated it as a founding text of their own modernisation.
一八四三年,魏源出版了一部著作,主张中国应当掌握西方的技术,以彼之道反制彼身;此书在中国国内大多无人问津,但十年后传入日本的读者,却将其奉为日本自身现代化运动的奠基之作。
The...
Fan Zhongyan never once stood inside Yueyang Tower before writing the essay about it that every Chinese schoolchild has since memorised, working instead from a single painting his exiled friend mailed him along with a request for a few commemorative words.
范仲淹在写下那篇后来令每个中国学生都能背诵的名篇之前,从未亲身登临过岳阳楼;他所依据的,仅仅是被贬谪的友人寄来的一幅画,以及一封请他题写几句纪念文字的信。
That friend, Teng Zijing,...
Government officials renamed the entire city in 1994, dropping thirteen centuries of history as Dayong to borrow the fame of a national park most of its own residents could not yet find on a map, a decision widely credited as China's most successful city...
Government planners closed Shaanxi's centuries-old Fu brick tea factory in 1958, ruling its supply chain too inefficient for a tea already being produced successfully in Yiyang's Anhua county since 1953, and handed the entire industry to Hunan for good.
一九五八年,政府主管部门以供应链效率低下为由,关停了陕西泾阳那座历史悠久的茯砖茶厂;而此时,湖南益阳安化早在一九五三年便已试制成功同类茶品,于是整个产业就此彻底转交湖南。
That which makes the tea worth...
Villagers in Chenzhou still credit a folk healer named Su Dan with predicting, shortly before he ascended to become an immortal, that a plague would strike the following year and could be cured with well water steeped in orange leaves.
郴州人至今仍传颂着草药郎中苏耽的故事,相传他在得道成仙前不久,曾预言来年将有瘟疫降临,而井水泡橘叶便可救治患者。
The plague duly struck, and...
Villagers in Jiangyong county buried the last known natural inheritor of Nüshu, He Yanxin, on 23 October 2025, closing a chapter in a script invented centuries earlier by women barred from standard Chinese literacy, who built an alphabet of their own instead.
二零二五年十月二十三日,江永县村民安葬了女书最后一位自然传人何艳新;这也为一段延续数百年的历史画上了句点——当年,女性被排除在正统汉字教育之外,便自创了一套属于她们自己的文字体系。
Nüshu had already...
Generals meeting at Zhijiang's airfield on 21 August 1945 accepted Japan's formal surrender in the China theatre, some ten days before the shipboard ceremony in Tokyo Bay that most history books remember instead, built around General Douglas MacArthur and the USS Missouri.
一九四五年八月二十一日,日方代表在芷江机场向中方正式递交投降书,接受了中国战区的受降;而多数历史书更为熟知的,却是十天后在东京湾军舰上举行的那场仪式,以及麦克阿瑟将军与"密苏里号"战舰。
Vice-general secretary Takeo...
Zhang Wulang, the Meishan hunting god still worshipped in temples around Loudi, is depicted standing on his hands, upside down, the only deity in the entire Chinese pantheon shown that way; a legacy, locals say, of the Meishan Man who resisted imperial rule here...
Shi Chengfu's courtyard became, on 3 November 2013, the exact spot where President Xi Jinping first used the phrase "targeted poverty alleviation" during a visit to Shibadong, a Miao village in Huayuan county, a phrase that went on to shape rural policy across the...
