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In 629 a Buddhist monk left the Tang capital without a permit, crossed a desert on foot, and walked to India. Sixteen years later he came back with six hundred and fifty-seven Sanskrit manuscripts. He spent the rest of his life translating them. This is the story of Xuanzang, the real monk behind the Monkey King.

In 218 BC a young nobleman spent his whole fortune on one blow of a hammer, and missed. He spent the rest of his life making sure that miss did not matter. This is the story of Zhang Liang, who went into hiding as a wanted man, learned strategy from an old man on a bridge, and became the adviser Liu Bang said he could not do without.

In 757 a poet sat in a prison at Xunyang waiting to hear whether he would be executed. He was Li Bai, the most famous poet of the Tang dynasty. He had spent his whole life asking to be given great office, and had never been given any. This is his story, from a sword and a farewell at twenty-five to a pardon on the road to exile.

In 196 BC a man was led into a palace room called the Bell Chamber with his hands tied. He was Han Xin, one of the finest commanders China has ever produced. He began as a poor nobody in a small town who crawled between a stranger’s legs to stay alive. This is his story, from a bowl of rice by the river to the last trap set for him by the chancellor who once chased him back through the night.

Every weekend, in parks across China, parents gather with laminated pages listing their grown children’s age, height, degree, income and property. They call it the matchmaking corner; foreigners call it the marriage market. This is how it works, why it exists, and why the young people it is meant to serve often stay away.

In 237 BCE a water engineer from the small state of Han stood bound in the Qin court, accused of being a spy sent to ruin the country with an enormous canal. He admitted it, and then pointed out that when the canal was finished it would belong to Qin. King Zheng let him go on digging. Ten years of earthworks turned forty thousand qing of salt flat between the Jing and the Luo into the granary that fed the conquest of the other six states.

In February 1279 the last fleet of the Song dynasty lay chained together in a bay in Guangdong with the water cut off behind it. When the line broke, the chancellor went into the sea with an eight-year-old emperor on his back. Wen Tianxiang, first scholar of his year, watched from a Yuan ship and refused to write the letter that would have ended it earlier.

For ten years Zhang Juzheng ran the Ming empire for a boy emperor, auditing every office with three ledgers and rebuilding the tax on a single payment in silver. When he died in 1582 the granaries held ten years of grain. Two years later soldiers sealed his house and let the family starve inside.

In 383 the ruler of Former Qin marched south with an army his own proclamations called a million. On the far side of the Feishui stood eighty thousand men of the Jin. One order to fall back, one shout from a captured officer standing in the rear, and the largest army in China came apart on the bank of a shallow river.

In 206 BC, with the Qin empire broken and forty thousand men camped behind the hills, Xiang Yu invited his rival to dinner. Through one long meal a sword dancer kept aiming at the guest, a bodyguard pushed past two halberds with a shield, and the host said almost nothing. This is what the historian Sima Qian recorded, down to where every man sat.