China Condensed. 5,000 Years of History & Culture

It seems that the author, Wang Fengzhou, had been wronged by an official and wanted to have his revenge. The official was known for his addiction to pornographic literature and, taking advantage of this, Wang Fengzhou wrote the book, coated the pages with arsenic, and had it presented to the official. At the time, it was usual for one reading a book to wet the fingertip with saliva to turn over the thin rice pages. The official was so enthralled by the book that he could not stop reading it. He died after reading the last page

The original, unabridged version is pornographic in nature, but the “cleansed” version is a literary masterpiece

Li Bai, dubbed “The God of Poetry”, was what we would call a Bohemian today. He was often drunk but produced the best works with flair in the intoxicated state. He drowned while trying to catch the moon in a lake

are mainly about men’s affairs, which the fairer sex may not find interesting

There are no tenses in Chinese verbs, and adverbs are used to indicate the time element. For instance, to the Chinese, “I go yesterday” is clear enough and there is no need to alter the verb

The least commonly used is the Khakas language with only ten fluent speakers in a small ethnic group in the Heilongjiang (黑龙江) province

Under Mao Zedong’s leadership, the nation was once again unified under an effective central authority. Unfortunately, on the bumpy road to progress, mistakes such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution practically erased a generation of people and created a moral vacuum in a once culture-conscious nation

Nevertheless, Soviet forces refused to stop after Japan’s surrender and pushed the invasion beyond Manchuria in an attempt to link up with the Chinese Communists. Russia occupied Manchuria until May 1946 and during that period looted Japanese industrial plants, moving all the heavy equipment to Russia

the welfare of the people was paramount if the country was to grow and prosper

The Qing dynasty marked the second time China was ruled by non-Hans, the first being the Yuan dynasty. Many Hans were unhappy, especially when they were forced to shave the front part of their heads and grow pigtails