The Terracotta Warriors represent only a small portion of the eight thousand strong underground army buried in front of the Emperor Qinshihuang’s tomb (r. 221-207 BC) to defend him in the afterlife. The craftsmanship attested by each of the statues is as stupendous as the scale of the project. So who was the Emperor Qinshihuang […]
(Imperial Tours is grateful to Amir for permission to publish this excerpt from his Phd research. ) China -today the nation with the largest fleet of bicycles in the world- is surprisingly underrepresented in cycle history: we know nearly nothing about Chinese cycle history, cycle production, cycling habits or other aspects of the bicycle in China. […]
Prophesied by the historic Buddha approximately about 2,000 years before his birth, Tsongkhapa (1357-1419) was a child prodigy who went on to establish and inspire Tibet’s most powerful monastic sect. Dissatisfied by the ill discipline – intellectual, religious and monastic – of contemporary orders, he reined his disciples and followers into a strict new order. […]
The first contacts between adherents of Buddhism and the Chinese people took place along the Silk and Fur roads during the Eastern Han dynasty (8-220AD). Over subsequent centuries these central caravan routes, with Chang’an (near Xi’an) at their eastern terminus continued to serve as the principle avenue by which Buddhism entered China. So significant did […]
The history of Chinese ceramics began some eight thousand years ago with the crafting of hand-molded earthenware vessels. Soon after, in the late neolithic period, the potter’s wheel was invented facilitating the production of more uniform vessels. The sophistication of these early Chinese potters is best exemplified by the legion of terracotta warriors found in the tomb […]
