China is the third-largest country in the world by area and the second most populous, with around 1.4 billion people. It has the longest continuous written history of any country — over 3,000 years of records — and it invented paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass. It also has deserts, tropical rainforest, the world's highest plateau and part of Mount Everest, all inside one border.
One Time Zone for a Whole Country
China spans about 5,250 kilometres from east to west, wide enough to cover five time zones. It uses one.
Everywhere in the country runs on Beijing time. That works reasonably in the east, but in Xinjiang in the far west the sun can rise at 10am and set after midnight in summer. Many people there quietly keep a second, unofficial local time two hours behind.
China had five time zones until 1949, when they were merged into one for national unity. It is the largest country in the world with a single time zone, and Russia by comparison has eleven.
The Great Wall
The Great Wall is not one wall and was not built all at once. It is a network of walls, watchtowers and fortifications built and rebuilt over roughly 2,000 years by different dynasties.
A Chinese government survey completed in 2012 measured all the branches together at 21,196 kilometres — more than half the distance around the equator. Most of what tourists visit near Beijing is Ming dynasty work from the 1400s and 1500s.
You cannot see it from space with the naked eye, whatever you have been told. It is long but narrow, roughly the width of a road, and no astronaut has been able to pick it out unaided. Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei confirmed as much after his 2003 flight.
One Written Language, Many Spoken Ones
Chinese is not really one language. Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Hokkien, Hakka and others are as different from each other as French is from Spanish, and speakers often cannot understand one another.
What holds them together is the writing. Chinese characters stand for meanings rather than sounds, so the same written sentence can be read aloud in completely different ways by a person from Beijing and a person from Guangzhou, and both understand it.
There are around 50,000 characters in the largest dictionaries. You need about 2,500 to read a newspaper and around 3,500 for general literacy. Mainland China uses simplified characters, introduced in the 1950s to raise literacy; Taiwan and Hong Kong use the traditional forms.
Try Writing a Character
Some Chinese characters started as simple pictures, and you can still see it.
The character for mountain, shan, is 山 — three peaks. Sun, ri, is 日, originally a circle with a dot. Moon, yue, is 月, a crescent. Tree, mu, is 木, a trunk with branches and roots.
Now combine them. Two trees together, 林, means woods. Three trees, 森, means forest. Sun and moon together, 明, means bright. Put a person 人 next to a tree 木 and you get 休, meaning rest — someone leaning against a tree. Try inventing your own combinations and see whether the logic holds.
The Four Great Inventions
Chinese tradition names four inventions that changed the world, and the claim holds up well.
Paper was developed around 105 CE by a court official named Cai Lun, from mulberry bark, rags and fishing nets. Printing came next: woodblock printing by the 600s and movable type by around 1040, four centuries before Gutenberg.
Gunpowder was discovered by alchemists looking for a potion of immortality, which did not go as planned. The compass was first used for divination and then for navigation by the 1000s. Silk, the wheelbarrow, the seismometer, paper money, the crossbow, porcelain and the mechanical clock are all Chinese too.
Enormous Geography
The Tibetan Plateau in the west averages 4,500 metres above sea level and is called the roof of the world. It is roughly the size of Western Europe and is where the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers all begin.
The Gobi Desert in the north is a cold desert where temperatures drop below minus 40 in winter. The Taklamakan in the north-west is one of the largest sand deserts in the world. The far south, around Yunnan and Hainan, is tropical.
The Yangtze is Asia's longest river at about 6,300 kilometres. The Yellow River is called the cradle of Chinese civilisation and also China's sorrow, because its floods have killed more people than any other natural feature in history — one flood in 1931 may have killed over a million.
Dynasties and the Terracotta Army
China was ruled by dynasties — families of emperors — for over two thousand years, from the Qin in 221 BCE to the Qing, which ended in 1912.
Qin Shi Huang was the first emperor and unified the country. He standardised writing, weights, measures and even the axle width of carts so that wheel ruts on roads would fit every vehicle. He also began the first version of the Great Wall.
His tomb near Xi'an was guarded by the Terracotta Army: over 8,000 life-sized clay soldiers, plus horses and chariots, buried around 210 BCE and forgotten. Farmers digging a well found them by accident in 1974. Every face is different, and traces of paint show they were originally brightly coloured. The tomb mound itself has never been excavated, partly because ancient accounts describe it as containing rivers of mercury — and soil tests around it do show unusually high mercury levels.
Animals Found Nowhere Else
The giant panda lives only in bamboo forests in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. It is a bear whose digestive system is built for meat, but it eats almost nothing but bamboo — which is so low in nutrition that it has to eat for up to 14 hours a day and gets through 12 to 38 kilograms.
Wild panda numbers have recovered from around 1,100 in the 1980s to over 1,800, and the species was moved from endangered to vulnerable in 2016.
China also has the golden snub-nosed monkey, which lives higher up mountains than any other monkey and survives temperatures well below freezing; the red panda, which is not closely related to the giant panda at all; and the Chinese giant salamander, the largest amphibian in the world at up to 1.8 metres.
Food Across a Continent
Chinese food varies enormously by region. Sichuan food is famously numbing and spicy from Sichuan peppercorns; Cantonese food is mild and steamed, and gave the world dim sum; northern food is built on wheat — noodles, dumplings and steamed buns — while southern food is built on rice.
Noodles are ancient there. A bowl of 4,000-year-old noodles made from millet was found preserved under a collapsed settlement at Lajia in Qinghai in 2005.
Tea originated in China and was drunk there for thousands of years before it reached anywhere else. Chopsticks have been used for around 3,000 years and are the standard eating tool for well over a billion people.
Festivals
Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, is the biggest holiday. It follows the lunar calendar and falls between 21 January and 20 February.
It triggers the largest annual human movement on Earth. Over a forty-day travel period, billions of journeys are made as people return to their home towns — a phenomenon called chunyun.
Each year has an animal from a twelve-year cycle: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. Red envelopes with money inside are given to children, and red decorations go up everywhere because red is thought to bring luck and scare off bad fortune.
School and Family
Chinese schools start at 7.30 or 8am and often run until late afternoon, with a long midday break in which younger pupils nap at their desks. The school year is graded by a set of exams, and the most important is the gaokao, the national university entrance test taken at eighteen.
The gaokao lasts two or three days and largely decides where a student can study. Construction near exam halls is halted, traffic is diverted, and police escort late candidates. Around 13 million people sat it in recent years — more than the population of Belgium.
Family structures changed dramatically because of the one-child policy, in force from 1980 to 2015. It produced a generation of children with no siblings, no aunts and no uncles, and it left China with a population that is ageing fast. The rules have since been relaxed to allow three children, and the birth rate has kept falling anyway.
The Modern Country
China has built more high-speed railway than the rest of the world combined — over 45,000 kilometres, from nothing in 2008. Trains run at up to 350 kilometres an hour.
It has the most skyscrapers of any country and half of the world's hundred tallest buildings. It also has the world's largest hydroelectric project, the Three Gorges Dam, whose reservoir is so massive that filling it measurably slowed the Earth's rotation by a fraction of a microsecond.
China became the third country to send a person into space independently in 2003, the first to land on the far side of the Moon in 2019, and operates its own space station. To keep exploring, read about religion in China and see the full list of countries in Asia.
