The China course
Facts about China, for your next trip
Ten topics, two timed rounds each, played straight down this page. Finish a round and the next one starts itself, carrying you from the Tibetan Plateau and the Silk Road to characters, tones, dumplings, pandas and the largest annual migration on Earth.
Capital Beijing · Asia · 10 topics · 20 rounds · 80 questions · 20 seconds each
China is the world’s second most populous country and its largest manufacturer, with a continuous written civilisation reaching back more than three thousand years. The economic transformation since 1978 moved several hundred million people out of poverty in a single generation, the fastest such shift ever recorded.
China divides into 23 provinces, five autonomous regions and four municipalities reporting straight to Beijing. Population and wealth concentrate overwhelmingly in the east, where the North China Plain around Beijing, the Yangtze delta around Shanghai and the Pearl River delta behind Hong Kong together produce a large share of national output on a small fraction of the land. Head west and density collapses, through the loess plateaus and the Sichuan basin to the deserts of Xinjiang and the Tibetan Plateau, where whole provinces hold fewer people than a single eastern city.
Beijing is the imperial and political capital, Shanghai the financial one, and Shenzhen went from a cluster of fishing towns to a manufacturing metropolis inside forty years. Xi’an anchors the historic northwest as the eastern end of the Silk Road, Chengdu is the way into Sichuan and its pandas, and Guangzhou has traded with the outside world for over a thousand years. Visitors usually build a trip around some combination of the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Terracotta Army and the karst peaks along the Li River.
- Population
- 1.4 billion
- Area
- 9,596,961 km²
- Currency
- Renminbi (¥)
- Official language
- Standard Chinese
- Divisions
- 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions
- Highest point
- Mount Everest, 8,849 m
China · Geography
Geography of China
The land falls in three great steps from the Tibetan Plateau to the eastern plains, where almost everyone lives. Two rivers organize the rest: the Yangtze splits north from south, and the Yellow River built the northern plain it keeps flooding.
Commonly asked
- How big is China, and how many countries does it border?
- About 9,596,961 km², making it one of the largest countries on Earth, and it borders 14 others, more than almost any other state. The mainland is divided into 23 provinces, five autonomous regions and four municipalities.
- What are the main rivers of China?
- The Yangtze, at around 6,300 kilometers the longest in Asia, divides the country north from south. The Yellow River carries so much silt across the northern plain that its historic floods earned it the name China’s Sorrow.
- Why do so few people live in western China?
- The west is the high step of the country: the Tibetan Plateau, the Gobi and the Taklamakan. Population and industry concentrate on the eastern plains, so whole western provinces hold fewer people than a single eastern city.
China · History
History of China
Dynastic rule ran from the Shang to the Qing, through the unification of 221 BC, the Silk Road and four inventions that reached Europe centuries later. The republic came in 1911, the People’s Republic in 1949, and the reforms in 1978.
Commonly asked
- Who was the first emperor of China?
- Qin Shi Huang, who unified the warring states in 221 BC and standardised script, currency and measurement across them. The Terracotta Army near Xi’an was buried to guard his tomb.
- What did China invent?
- Paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass are the four usually named together, all well before Europe had them. Silk, porcelain, cast iron and the seismoscope also came out of the dynastic centuries.
- What changed in China in 1978?
- Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and opening period after Mao Zedong’s death, allowing private enterprise, foreign investment and market pricing. The growth that followed moved several hundred million people out of poverty in a generation.
China · Language
The Chinese language
Mandarin has more native speakers than any language on Earth, and pitch changes the word rather than the mood. The characters are what hold the rest together, readable across varieties that sound nothing alike in speech.
Commonly asked
- What language do they speak in China?
- Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, is the official spoken form, and Mandarin has around 940 million native speakers. Cantonese, Hokkien, Shanghainese and others are mutually unintelligible with it in speech.
- What are tones in Mandarin?
- Mandarin uses four tones plus a neutral one, and the pitch pattern is part of the word rather than a matter of emphasis or emotion. The same syllable said on different tones is a different word.
- What is the difference between simplified and traditional characters?
- Simplified characters were introduced on the mainland in the 1950s to raise literacy by reducing the number of strokes. Taiwan and Hong Kong kept the traditional forms, and pinyin is the standard romanisation used to teach pronunciation.
China · Culture
Culture of China
Confucian obligation, Daoism and Buddhism side by side rather than in competition, an examination system that ran for 1,300 years, and calligraphy treated as a fine art on a level with painting.
Commonly asked
- What is Chinese New Year?
- The lunar new year holiday, and the occasion for the largest annual human migration on the planet as hundreds of millions of people travel home for it. Celebrations run about 15 days and end with the Lantern Festival.
- How did Confucianism shape China?
- It organized social life around family obligation, education and respect for hierarchy, and supplied the ethics of government for two millennia. It coexisted with Daoism and Buddhism rather than displacing them.
- What was the imperial examination system?
- A civil service exam on the classical texts that ran for over 1,300 years and tied advancement to scholarship rather than birth. Its weight is still visible in the cultural seriousness around academic achievement.
China · Economy
Economy of China
Roughly a third of global industrial output, and the supply chains behind electronics, batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles. The state steers far more of it than in other large market economies.
Commonly asked
- How big is China’s economy?
- The largest in the world measured at purchasing power parity and the second largest at market exchange rates. It manufactures roughly a third of global industrial output.
- How does the Chinese state direct the economy?
- Through state-owned enterprises, industrial policy targeting chosen sectors and control of the banking system. The Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013 extended that reach abroad by financing infrastructure across dozens of countries.
- Why has Chinese growth slowed?
- The double-digit rates of the 2000s gave way under a property sector downturn, high local government debt and a workforce that has begun to shrink. Growth continues, but at a fraction of the earlier pace.
China · Politics
Politics of China
One party since 1949, with its structures running parallel to the state at every level. The National People’s Congress is formally the highest state body, and largely ratifies what the party has already decided.
Commonly asked
- How is China governed?
- The Chinese Communist Party has held a monopoly on power since 1949, and party bodies shadow state ones at every level. The party general secretary, currently Xi Jinping, is the paramount leader, and a 2018 change removed the two-term limit on the presidency.
- What is one country, two systems?
- The framework under which Hong Kong and Macau are special administrative regions with their own legal and economic systems. Hong Kong returned from British rule in 1997 and Macau from Portuguese rule in 1999.
- What is China’s position on Taiwan?
- Beijing claims Taiwan as a province of the People’s Republic. Taiwan has governed itself separately since 1949, when the losing side of the civil war withdrew there, and holds its own elections.
China · Nature & Wildlife
Nature and wildlife of China
Habitats run from tropical rainforest in Yunnan to alpine desert on the Tibetan Plateau, with more than 30,000 plant species between them and a long list of animals found nowhere else.
Commonly asked
- Where do giant pandas live?
- In bamboo forests in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. Decades of habitat protection were enough to move the species from endangered to vulnerable in 2016.
- What other animals are unique to China?
- The golden snub-nosed monkey and the Chinese alligator are both endemic, and the South China tiger, which has not been seen in the wild for decades, is likely extinct there.
- Is air pollution still bad in China?
- Air quality in northern cities improved substantially after the aggressive pollution controls of the 2010s, though it remains worse than in most wealthy countries. China is also by some distance the largest installer of solar and wind capacity.
China · Food & Cuisine
Food of China
Eight regional traditions rather than one cuisine, split along the oldest dividing line in the country: wheat in the north, giving noodles and dumplings, and rice in the south.
Commonly asked
- What are the regions of Chinese cooking?
- Eight traditions are usually named, of which Cantonese, Sichuan, Shandong and Jiangsu are the most influential. What is served as Chinese food abroad is mostly a narrow slice of Cantonese cooking.
- What is málà?
- The signature sensation of Sichuan cooking: chilli heat paired with the numbing tingle of Sichuan pepper. The two together are what makes a Sichuan dish taste of the region rather than simply hot.
- Where does tea come from?
- Tea was first cultivated in China, and the country is still the largest producer in the world. Chopsticks, soy sauce and the wok all spread from here across East and Southeast Asia.
China · Landmarks
Landmarks of China
The Great Wall is a network rather than a wall, the Forbidden City is the largest palace complex in the world, and 8,000 clay soldiers stand in formation outside Xi’an.
Commonly asked
- How long is the Great Wall of China?
- The surviving Ming sections run more than 8,800 kilometers, and it is a network of fortifications built and rebuilt over two thousand years rather than a single wall. Contrary to a persistent myth, it cannot be seen from space with the naked eye.
- What is the Forbidden City?
- The imperial palace in Beijing, home to emperors for nearly 500 years, with around 980 surviving buildings. It is the largest complex of its kind in the world and is now the Palace Museum.
- What is the Terracotta Army?
- Over 8,000 individually modelled soldiers buried near Xi’an to guard the tomb of the first emperor, found by farmers digging a well in 1974. Excavation of the site is still under way.
China · People & Society
People and society of China
Roughly 1.4 billion people, shrinking since 2022 for the first time since the early 1960s. Han Chinese are about 91 percent of the population, with 55 recognized minority groups mostly in the border regions.
Commonly asked
- How many people live in China?
- Roughly 1.4 billion, and the population began shrinking in 2022 for the first time since the famine years of the early 1960s. India passed China as the most populous country in 2023.
- What was the one-child policy?
- A birth limit in force from 1980 to 2015 that accelerated a fertility decline already under way. Later moves to a two-child and then a three-child limit have done little to reverse it.
- What is the hukou system?
- Household registration, which ties access to schooling, healthcare and other services to a person’s registered home. It still limits what migrants can claim in the cities they work in, after the largest rural-to-urban migration in history took urbanisation past 65 percent.