This archive gathers solutions-journalism stories and milestones from China — covering advances in clean energy, public health, technology, conservation, and more. Each entry highlights progress worth knowing about.
New Culture Movement thinkers in 1915 Shanghai launched a magazine that would reshape modern China. Chen Duxiu’s New Youth called for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” to replace Confucian tradition, while Hu Shih urged writers to abandon classical Chinese for the language people actually spoke. Four years later, those ideas spilled into the streets.
He traveled to Hong Kong in 1894 at the request of the Japanese government during an outbreak of the bubonic plague, and identified a bacterium that he concluded was causing the disease.
The Siku Quanshu, commissioned by China’s Qianlong Emperor in 1772, set out to gather every important book in the empire into one library. Over a decade, more than 361 scholars and nearly 3,826 scribes copied roughly 2.3 million pages by hand. It remains one of history’s most ambitious attempts to hold a civilization’s knowledge in one place.
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio took shape over roughly 40 years, as Qing dynasty scholar Pu Songling gathered nearly 500 tales of fox spirits, ghosts, and human folly between the 1670s and 1714. Legend says he set tea outside his studio and invited passing travelers to share what they’d seen. It remains a high point of classical Chinese fiction.
A-Ma Temple rose on the rocky southern tip of the Macau peninsula in 1488, built by Fujianese fishermen and traders who needed somewhere to pray before facing the South China Sea. When Portuguese sailors later asked locals the name of the place, the answer eventually became “Macau.” A working people’s sanctuary, quietly lending its name to a city.
Marco Polo’s Travels was dictated in 1298 to a fellow prisoner, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa, while both sat in a Genoese jail. Their collaboration described Kublai Khan’s court and a named, navigable Asia for readers who assumed it was fiction. Nearly two centuries later, an annotated copy sailed west with Columbus.
Fishing reel history traces back to 1195 C.E., when Chinese court painter Ma Yuan depicted a solitary angler on a winter lake — the earliest unambiguous image of a reel ever found. Chinese texts had described such “angling lathes” since the 3rd century. The painting captures a quiet moment where centuries of accumulated know-how finally became visible.
Dry docks first appeared in Song Dynasty China, when palace official Huang Huai-Hsin devised a way to repair the emperor’s decaying dragon ships without destroying them. Engineers dug a basin beside Chin-ming Lake, floated the 200-foot vessels in over submerged beams, then pumped the water out. Europe wouldn’t build anything comparable for another four centuries.
Movable type printing began around 1040 C.E., when a Chinese craftsman named Bi Sheng pressed porcelain characters into resin and locked them in an iron frame. His name survived only because the scholar Shen Kuo bothered to write it down decades later. It was the first practical way to rearrange and reuse the written word.
The Song dynasty began in 960 C.E., when a general named Zhao Kuangyin reunited a fractured China and opened three centuries of extraordinary flourishing. Its court issued the world’s first true banknotes, refined the compass, and embraced movable type. Knowledge, commerce, and civic life — not just armies — held a vast society together.
