From oracle bones on the Yellow River to the world’s longest high-speed rail network — the story of a people who invented the bureaucracy, the examination, and the art of outlasting every conqueror.
No people on earth has been itself for longer. For five thousand years the Chinese have written in the same script, farmed the same river plains, and revived the same empire every time it fell — and they did it while inventing paper, printing, gunpowder, and the civil service examination.
