Imperial China

In the autumn of 629 CE, a twenty-seven-year-old Buddhist monk named Xuanzang slipped away from the Tang capital of Chang'an, defying an imperial ban on foreign travel to embark on a seventeen-year journey across the…

When the Li family seized power from the declining Sui dynasty in 618 CE, they initiated three centuries of imperial rule that transformed China into a sprawling, cosmopolitan empire.

For more than four decades, the entire machinery of the Chinese empire turned on the ambition of a single woman who began her rise as a teenage imperial concubine.

When Genghis Khan smeared the fat of a rabbit and an antelope onto the middle finger of his nine-year-old grandson, he reportedly warned his followers to heed the boy’s wisdom.

When Kublai Khan laid claim to the Mandate of Heaven in 1271 CE, he did something no non-Han ruler had ever accomplished: he established a dynasty, the Great Yuan, that would eventually bring the entirety of China…

In 1402, a prince of the Ming dynasty named Zhu Di seized the imperial throne from his nephew after a devastating three-year civil war.

When the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty collapsed in 1368 CE, the rise of the Great Ming restored Han rule to the imperial throne, inaugurating nearly three centuries of immense military and architectural ambition.

In the autumn of 1382, a Ming army swept through the Yunnan province, claiming the life of a Muslim man named Ma Hajji and forever altering the destiny of his young son, Ma He.

For nearly five centuries, a delicate maritime network in the East China Sea was anchored by a kingdom whose influence far outstripped its modest geography.

Born on the coast of Japan to a Chinese merchant father and a Japanese mother, the boy first named Fukumatsu would spend his short, tempestuous life navigating the violent collapse of one empire and the birth of a…

In 1616, a vassal of the Ming dynasty named Nurhaci unified the Jurchen clans, founded the Later Jin dynasty, and forged the Eight Banners military system that would soon redraw the map of East Asia.

Born into Beijing’s Pichai Hutong neighborhood as a member of the Manchu Yehe Nara clan, the woman who would become Empress Dowager Cixi entered the imperial palace of the Qing dynasty as a mere adolescent concubine to…

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a failed imperial candidate named Hong Xiuquan awoke from a series of feverish visions convinced he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ.

The collapse of a dynasty that had ruled for nearly three centuries began not in the grand palaces of Beijing, but in the mind of a peasant’s son from Guangdong who trained as a physician in British Hong Kong.