佛教：苦难的诊断与超越之路 English The story begins with four encounters. A young prince named Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563-483 BCE), raised in sheltered luxury in the Shakya republic (in present-day southern Nepal), sees outside his palace walls: an old man, a sick man,…
基督教：文化与历史导论 English Christianity began in first-century Palestine with the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, and spread from that single point across two millennia to become the world’s largest religion, with approximately 2.3 billion adherents across every continent. Its…
伊斯兰教：文化与历史导论 English Islam was founded in seventh-century Arabia through the prophethood of Muhammad, and spread within a century of its founding across the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, and into Central Asia and the Iberian Peninsula. Today it is practiced…
印度教：世界上最古老的现存宗教 English Hinduism is the world’s oldest living religion — its roots in the Vedic tradition date to approximately 1500 BCE or earlier — and among the most philosophically complex. Unlike Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism, it has no single founder,…
四象与四元素：东西方如何阅读宇宙 English Somewhere in the fifth century BCE, two civilizations — one in China, one in the Greek world — were independently developing frameworks for understanding the fundamental structure of the cosmos. In China, the system of four directional guardians…
中医四诊与西方四体液：两个医学世界 English Traditional Chinese Medicine and the ancient Western tradition of humoral medicine were developed independently, in different parts of the world, without any knowledge of each other. Yet both organized their understanding of the body around the number four.…
四时·八节·二十四节气 English The Twenty-Four Solar Terms — ershisi jieqi — is one of the most refined systems for reading the rhythms of the natural world ever developed by any civilization. Inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016,…
儒家四书：大学、中庸、论语、孟子 English The Four Books of the Confucian tradition — The Great Learning (Daxue), The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), The Analects (Lunyu), and The Book of Mencius (Mengzi) — were systematized as a curriculum by the philosopher Zhu Xi…
世界四大博物馆：大英博物馆、卢浮宫、大都会、故宫博物院 English The museum — a public institution collecting and displaying material evidence of human civilization for general audiences — is an Enlightenment invention with a radical premise: that the accumulated creations of human history belong not to monarchs or…
中国四大古都：西安、洛阳、南京、北京 English The choice of a capital city is never purely administrative. It is a declaration about where power comes from, what the civilization identifies as its center, and where its strategic priorities lie. When a dynasty moves its capital,…
四大名桥：赵州桥、卢沟桥、广济桥、洛阳桥 English The bridge is among the most philosophically loaded of all human constructions. It transforms a barrier into a passage, makes the impossible crossing possible, and connects what geography has separated. In virtually every culture, “bridge” functions simultaneously as…
楷书四大家：欧阳询、颜真卿、柳公权、赵孟頫 English Calligraphy holds a position in Chinese civilization that has no precise equivalent in any other tradition. It is not merely beautiful handwriting. In China, calligraphy is simultaneously a discipline of character cultivation, a temporal art form whose process…
卓文君——选择爱的女子 English Zhuo Wenjun is the earliest of China’s four great talented women (四大才女), and in some ways the most dramatic. Her significance rests not primarily on the volume of her writing but on a choice — in an era…
上官婉儿——诗人、官员、幕后者 English Shangguan Wan’er occupies a unique position in Chinese literary and political history: she was simultaneously one of the most accomplished poets of the Tang dynasty and one of its most influential political figures — a woman who shaped…
蔡文姬——诗人、囚徒、幸存者 English Cai Wenji is one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Chinese literature — not only because of the quality of her poetry, which is exceptional, but because of the circumstances under which it was written.…