Jinghan Railway Strike Memorial

On a bitter winter morning in February 1923, the shriek of a locomotive whistle cut through the cold air along the banks of the Yangtze River. But this was no ordinary whistle. It was the sound of 20,000 railway workers laying down their tools, shutting their engines, and bringing one […]

If you ask any Zhengzhou local to name the one building that defines their city, the answer is almost always the same: the Erqi Memorial Tower (二七纪念塔, Èrqī Jìniàntǎ). Standing 63 meters tall in the heart of downtown, this distinctive twin-pentagonal tower is far more than a landmark. It is […]

Zhengzhou rarely tops the list of Chinese cities that Western travelers dream about. Beijing has its Forbidden City. Shanghai has the Bund. Chengdu has its pandas. But Zhengzhou — the capital of Henan Province and the geographic heart of China — holds something far older and, in many ways, far […]

On a bitter February night in 1923, a young railway worker named Lin Xiangqian stood bound to a wooden stake on the platform of the Jiang’an Railway Station in Hankou. Soldiers demanded he order his fellow workers back to their posts. He refused. He was thirty-one years old when the […]