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In 1449 a Ming emperor rode north at the head of two hundred thousand men. A month later he was a prisoner, the army was gone, and enemy cavalry were riding on the capital. This is the story of the disaster at Tumu, and of the civil servant who refused to let a dynasty run.

On a November morning in 2019, police walked up to a watch counter in a Xiamen shopping mall. The woman behind the glass said her name was Hong Yejiao. There was no such person. This is the case of Lao Rongzhi: four cities, seven deaths, and the twenty-year argument over whether she was a victim or a partner.

A scholar brings a beautiful stranger home and hides her in his study. A Daoist priest sees evil on him and is waved away. Then one night the scholar looks through a hole in the window paper, and the most famous horror scene in Chinese literature begins.

The four pillars of the sky broke, fire and flood came up together, and the one who had made human beings went to work alone. She smelted five-coloured stone, cut the legs off a giant turtle, and patched the sky. Then she left it permanently tilted, and every river in China still follows that tilt.

Ten suns rose at once and the fields burned. Six man-eating monsters came up out of the water. Heaven sent down one archer with a red bow. What happened to him afterwards is the part nobody warns you about.

On a freezing night in 207 BC, a young general ordered his own army to smash its cooking pots and sink its boats – then marched them into the ice-cold river. This is the Chinese idiom 破釜沉舟, and the battle that made it.

An old painter has painted four dragons on a temple wall, but he will not paint their eyes. If they have eyes, he says, they will fly away. One night he finally touches his brush to the wall. A gentle Chinese bedtime story about a small lamp, a quiet temple, and two dragons curling up to sleep in the clouds.

Every evening Mother Carp tells the little fish about the dragon gate at the top of the river: any carp that jumps over it becomes a dragon. One bright night the smallest golden carp swims all the way there. A gentle Chinese bedtime story about a long swim upstream, one high jump beside the moon, and a soft cloud to sleep on.

An old ox says the river is shallow. A little squirrel says it is very deep. The little horse has a sack of wheat to carry across before dark, and only one way to find out. A gentle Chinese bedtime story about a small trip to the mill, a moonlit road home, and a river that was just right.

Something says Gudong in the pond at night, and the little rabbit runs. Then the fox runs, and the monkey, the deer, the goat and the duck. Only the big old water buffalo is calm enough to walk back and look – and it turns out to be a ripe papaya dropping into the water. A gentle Chinese bedtime story about a small night noise.