Asian Society & History

Need a shampoo? …You are on your way to the supermarket when you get splashed by a girl who is washing her hair on the sidewalk. Update: I’ve re-published this article with 18 new photos While I was exploring the maze represented by my external hard disk to find some photos for this article, I […]

Chinese culture is rich and boasts a very ancient history. A first step in getting to know this world better is to get into the narrative and discover the literary works. The theme of this article deals with the figure of fox spirits, of which you can also find a trace of in our time

Note: This article is a rant. And I wrote it in 2012. It was published in another website which, recently, went offline forever. Since the thoughts I shared are still (very) relevant to China and its society, we decided to publish it on SDC. Today I did something I’m not proud of. Fast backward to

This article was written by TutorMandarin, an online tutoring service that helps students to learn Mandarin, through its Chinese learning app and PC Software. Mid-Autumn Festival and Family Reunions There are three major Chinese Holidays in Chinese culture: Chinese New Year, Dragon Boat Festival, and Mid-Autumn Festival. Today, we’ll talk about Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, Zhōngqiū

“All the children of the Gaomi region have come into this world thanks to the care and wisdom of Wan Xin’s hands, the only midwife in the area. Hers is a natural talent that in a short period of time transformed her into the beloved keeper of the secrets of maternity. But when, halfway through

星OXXO by Ken Lee If you’ve been to China, you’ve probably taken a few photos of the hilarious Chinese signs and banners translated into English. In this article, we want to offer you a slideshow of blunders that seemed the most amusing to us. Some photos are ours while some have been chosen from the

Introduction One of the most important aspects that we can learn about the endless Chinese culture has to do with a fundamental part of everyone’s life: taking care of one’s health. The way that Asian populations, and especially the Chinese, have developed their approach to everything connected to the body’s well-being and curing sickness is

Disclaimer: This article is an opinion article based on contrasting information and personal experience. The comments section is open to discussion. However, just like with any article on SDC, any comments considered to be clearly offensive or insulting will be deleted. Lately, we received a wave of insulting comments against Chinese people, and strangely on

Boasting a continuous history of thousands of years, China has collected an extensive catalogue of rules – explicit and implicit – that govern social habits: the so-called Chinese etiquette (o 礼节). In the past, almost every aspect of Chinese life was regulated by what Master Confucius called 礼 (“li”, rites); failure to observe one of

In June, like every other year, throughout all of China the famous Gao Kao (高考) was held. As you may already know, it is an annual national exam that allows young high school students to be able to enroll in universities. I don’t want to bore you too much with the data, numbers or methods

Zhang Xi, a young man from Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, came to Beijing three years ago and since then has always lived inside a basement room on the periphery of the city. Young Xi, a theater and arts graduate, is forced to work as a traveling salesman and only rarely finds work in some