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He reached the place where the sun goes down, and then he found out what that meant. He drank the Yellow River and the Wei River dry and the two great rivers were not enough for one man. He died of thirst on the road north. The staff he let fall became a peach grove, and the grove stands to this day on the busiest road in the country.

The father dammed the flood for nine years and was killed for it. The son changed one word and spent thirteen years doing the opposite. He cut a gate through a mountain with fire and cold water, let a winged dragon draw the river courses with its tail, and chained the water demon Wuzhiqi under a hill. Three times he passed his own gate and never went inside.

Heaven and earth began as one thing, shaped like an egg, and someone was asleep inside it. He woke, opened up and down, and then stood in the gap holding them apart for eighteen thousand years. When he finally fell, nothing in him was kept back: his breath became wind, his eyes became the sun and the moon, his blood became the rivers, his sweat became rain.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about fireflies. On a summer night a child walks home along the field path with his grandmother, and the fireflies go ahead of them in a string of small lamps. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old rhyme: firefly, hang your lantern.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about the kitchen god. All year he sits beside the stove and watches the family. On the coldest day of winter they give him sticky sweets and a small paper horse, and at night he rides up to heaven. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old custom of Little New Year.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about the door gods. Long ago an emperor could not sleep, because the wind under his door sounded all night. Then two tall generals stood outside, one on the left and one on the right, and he slept. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old custom of new door gods every New Year.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about a very small mouse. He climbs up the table to see the lamp, licks one warm drop of oil, and then cannot get down. His mother calls up to him from the floor. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old children’s song from China: little mouse, up the lamp.

A gentle Chinese bedtime story about a big soft dog in the sky. One night he takes a small bite out of the moon, and the whole village comes outside with brass basins and wooden bowls. They tap and they tap, and the moon rolls back. Short sentences, a soft ending, and the old Chinese folktale behind the saying: the dog is eating the moon.

In November 1948 a hundred and ten thousand of Chiang Kai-shek’s best troops were sealed inside a pocket at Shuangduiji. The army that closed the ring had almost no artillery. It had oil drums, shovels, and twenty-three days. This is the story of the battle that decided the Huaihai campaign.

On the night of 20 April 1949, nine thousand wooden boats left the north bank of the Yangtze, and three days later the capital had fallen. On the same morning a British warship came up the river and was driven onto a shoal. This is the story of the crossing that ended a civil war, and of the last foreign gunboat on the Yangtze.