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Across Chinese cities, cats and dogs have moved from the yard into the centre of family life, with names, diets and birthdays of their own. The change has created a market worth hundreds of billions of yuan. An explainer on China’s pet boom and the households behind it.

In Chinese cities, hot food arrives at the door in about thirty minutes, ordered with three taps and paid before it moves. Behind the habit is a network of more than ten million riders. An explainer on waimai, the food delivery boom, and the people who carry it.

Across rural China, millions of children are raised by grandparents while their parents work in distant cities. The family earns more and lives apart. An explainer on left-behind children, the phone calls that hold families together, and the once-a-year journey home.

In Chinese cities, a cramped old flat next to a famous school can cost more than a luxury home twice its size. Families buy it not to live in but to secure a school place. An explainer on xuequfang, school district housing, and the market it creates.

At New Year and at weddings, Chinese families hand over small red paper packets of money. The hongbao is not a simple gift: it carries lucky numbers, unwritten rules and a long chain of giving between generations. An explainer on what the red envelope is and why it works the way it does.

Lin Qiuping runs a stationery shop across from a middle school and has been on her own since her divorce twelve years ago. At a thirty-year class reunion she meets Lu Mingyuan, her old deskmate. Weeks later a stack of old books topples in her shop and she opens the class keepsake album again, and under the curled plastic cover, pressed into the binding, she finds a line of pencil writing she never lifted the corner to see.

After seven years running a breakfast stall in a city in the south, Ma Changshun and He Xiuying close it down and go back to their county town, because their son cannot get a school place without a local household registration. The new shop is quiet and the street runs a tab. Then He Xiuying finds a pencil drawing under her son’s pillow, and the two characters he pressed into the back of it.

Chen Yulan lends her younger brother the savings she put aside before she was married, so he can put down a deposit on a flat in the provincial capital. She keeps it from her husband, who is on the road with a truck most of the month. Two years later, looking for his laundry in the cab, she finds a notebook under the bunk, and a line in his handwriting that tells her he has known all along.

She escaped a locked shed as a girl, reached the far south of Hainan, and spent thirty years learning cotton weaving from the Li women of the island. When she came home she rebuilt the tools, taught the whole district, and made cotton cloth cheap enough for ordinary people. This is the story of Huang Daopo.

When an emperor was captured and half a million men were destroyed, the court wanted to run south. Yu Qian stopped them with one sentence, put a different emperor on the throne, and held the walls of Beijing with a patched together army. Eight years later the man he had brought home from captivity had him killed. This is his story.