Until 2001 this city was called Tongshi, whose second character had a local pronunciation the dictionary did not recognise, ...

Geographer Hu Huanyong drew a line in 1935 from Aihui, now part of Heihe, to Tengchong in Yunnan, showing that 96 percent of China’s population lived on just 36 percent of its land; the line is now ...

Siping was a village called Sipingjie until 1902. That year the railway between Changchun and the port of Dalian was completed. A station opened, traders arrived and within a generation the village ...

Two railway stations stood about two kilometres apart from 1907, one run by Russia and one by Japan, because the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth had divided control of the railway between the two empires at ...

Tonghua was Manchukuo’s last capital, for nine days in August 1945, after the Kwantung Army ordered the government to retreat there from Changchun, and Puyi read his abdication edict at the ...

Chinese road trippers are swapping hotel rooms for the back seats of their own cars, folding them flat into beds and parking overnight at service stations, scenic car parks and even hotel grounds, ...

Nearly 200 springs in the mountains around Baishan flow a combined 455,000 cubic metres of water a day, and the city says an international drinking-water organisation named it China’s International ...

Shop signs, road signs and official seals across Yanbian, in China’s north-east, must carry both Korean and Chinese, and local rules say that when the two are set side by side the Korean comes first, ...

China’s best-known early human, Peking Man, vanished in December 1941 while his fossils from Zhoukoudian, now part of Beijing, were being shipped abroad for safekeeping on the eve of the Pacific War; ...

Three wartime banks, the North China Bank, the Beihai Bank and the Northwest Farmers Bank, merged in Shijiazhuang on 1 December 1948 to form the People’s Bank of China, which issued the first notes of ...

Five earthquakes of magnitude 6 or more struck the Xingtai region in just 21 days in March 1966, the first destructive quakes to hit a densely populated part of China since 1949, killing 8,064 people ...

Europeans knew this city as Kalgan until the mid-20th century, from a Mongolian word meaning a gate in a barrier; it was the Great Wall gate where camel caravans loaded with tea began their long ...