From Moon Cakes to Mao to Modern China

many countries use written phonetic alphabets

retained the basic property of the ideogram

Mount Heng produces Clouds and Mist Tea, from a famous type of leaf known to the Tang Dynasty as Tribute Tea

Five Sacred Mountains,” namely, Eastern Sacred Mount—Mount Tai in Shandong Province, rising five thousand feet above sea level; Southern Sacred Mount—Mount Heng in Hunan Province, with a summit at 4,230 feet; Western Sacred Mount—Mount Hua in Shaanxi Province, at 7,070 feet; Northern Sacred Mount—Mount Heng in Shanxi Province, with an elevation of 6,617 feet; and the Central Sacred Mount—Mount Song in Henan Province, rising 4,724 feet above sea level.

After unifying the Six States, the First Emperor Qin began building the Great Wall. The millions of people who were employed to build the wall accounted for one twentieth of the country’s population. The lack of machines during this period resulted in vast amounts of human power working under extremely arduous conditions. As a result, there were always people dying during the construction. This led to great resentment for the First Emperor’s building project, as exemplified in the traditional story “Meng Jiangnu Weeps Down the Great Wall.”

The Great Wall is an outstanding building achievement of the ancient Chinese and is included among the Seven Wonders of the World. Located in the northern part of China, the Great Wall reaches from Shanhai Pass in Hebei Province in the east to Jiayu Pass in Gansu Province in the west. It runs more than 4,100 miles (about 13,300 Chinese li) through seven provinces and several cities and autonomous regions, including Hebei, Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Ningxia and Gansu. It is called the Ten-Thousand-Li Great Wall, which winds like a dragon across lofty mountains and passes through boundless grasslands and vast deserts until it faces the horizon of the endless sea.

There has been, in general, a mutual national cultural exchange. As China bestowed exquisite and practical silk fabric on the Western world, each country in Europe returned the favor. According to ancient documents, the walnut, cucumber, shallot, coriander, pepper, poplar fruit, carrot and many other plant species went to China from Western regions. (These things in China begin with the word 胡 [hu], which refers to something coming from the north and the west minority groups. Later, the word was widely used to represent something brought in from abroad.) The

The term “Silk Road” originated in German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen’s book China—My Traveling Achievements, written in 1877. The Silk Road was built by Zhang Qian to open the doors to Western regions during the Western Han period (202–138 BCE). The starting point was in Chang’an (the modern city of Xi’an), and the road continued by way of Gansu and Xinjiang to central and southwest Asia, finally reaching the Mediterranean Sea

in addition to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty moving its capital to Luoyang, the Eastern Han, Wei, Sui, Tang, the later Liang and the later Zhou dynasties all had once established Luoyang as their capital, which is a history for this capital of over nine hundred years. And so it is known as the Ancient Capital of Nine Dynasties.

Xi’an (containing Xianyang) is a well-known ancient capital encompassing a thousand-year period of history, serving as such since the times of the Western Zhou and Qin, Han and continuing to the Sui and Tang, totaling thirteen dynasties altogether