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China Today
Long-form features on the China of right now — what people are cooking, building, climbing and queueing for — each one carrying the Chinese the story is actually told in.
The cuisine that gives away the cooking
Hotpot hands you boiling fat and raw offal and then walks away. What a cuisine gives up when it gives away the cooking, and what it gets back for it.
More features
A win is a win, and other things that do not translate
Joanna Wietrzyk finished her Hyrox Beijing race after a bowel accident and won. Australia debated her; China debated the organisers. Why the readings split.
The sacred mountain that survived by being a staircase
Mount Tai’s meaning was never at the summit. It was in the climb, which is why a crowd that knows nothing of the old rite still performs it.
The most looked-at landscape in China
The Li River is famous for being looked at, and almost everyone looks at it wrong. The naming system is a piece of practical technology for directing attention.
Every feature carries its own vocabulary
Six to eight words lifted from the reporting — characters, pinyin, a plain-English gloss and audio in the same voice used everywhere else on the site. Read the piece in English, leave with the Chinese it was told in.
FAQs
How often do new features go up?
Roughly one a fortnight. Each piece is reported research rather than a news summary, and the vocabulary panel takes as long to verify as the writing does.
Do I need to read Chinese to follow these?
No. Every feature is written in English and every Chinese word on the page carries pinyin and a plain-English gloss beside it, so nothing depends on recognising a character.
Where do the words and the audio come from?
Every gloss is checked against CC-CEDICT, the open Chinese-English dictionary, rather than written from memory. The audio is the same native voice used across the rest of the site.