China

The Analects, the book most people mean when they cite something Confucius said, was assembled by his students' students long after his death, which means most quotations attributed to him rest on someone else's memory of someone else's memory.

Kublai Khan tried to build an invasion fleet for Japan in about a year, a job specialists say needed closer to five, and the resulting hastily built ships, not just the storms later legend credited, likely doomed both his attempts to conquer it.

The peasant strategy Mao's own party first rejected won him a country, and the archives that later opened show how much the resulting record was built to fit him.

The historian who wrote the definitive account of China's first emperor was working roughly a century after his death for the dynasty that had just overthrown his, which is worth remembering every time that account calls him a tyrant.

The revolution he spent decades preparing succeeded without him in the room, yet both governments that later split China still claim him as their founder.

Roosevelt returned part of an indemnity extracted after a rebellion, and called it friendship while telling Congress it was also the surest way to keep China out of Japan's orbit.

A Qing general secretly sabotaged the siege his own government had ordered, withholding artillery and shielding foreigners because he judged a simultaneous war against eight nations unwinnable, a quiet act of self-preservation that likely saved the legations from being overrun.

The Chinese character Sima Qian used to describe how Qin Shi Huang killed his critics originally just meant pit or moat, and only came to mean burying someone alive in later centuries, which is a fairly large amount of weight to hang on one word's drift in meaning.

A revolution historians cannot even agree on the start date of, because it was really two long wars, a famine of governance, and a peasantry that ran out of patience.

1966

1949

1911

1958

1997

1956

1934

China spent over a century trying to ban a drug its trading partners insisted on selling, and lost the legal argument twice before losing it by force.

Britain went to war in 1839 partly to force China to keep buying a drug its own commissioner had just burned twenty thousand chests of, and historians still argue over whether opium was really the cause or just the convenient pretext for a wider fight over market access.

China's own eighteenth-century tea and silk exports so far outstripped British demand for anything in return that Britain turned to selling a drug just to balance the books.

A name coined by a German geographer in 1877 for a network no ancient traveller, including Marco Polo, ever actually called by that word.

Fought mostly on Korean soil, this eight-month war was decided almost entirely by the two larger powers contesting it, and the surviving record still shows it.

1850

1976

1842

The ancient histories that describe Qin's conquest of six rival states report casualty figures running past a hundred thousand dead at a single siege, numbers the Wikipedia article itself flags as unsourced and that no independent record survives to confirm.

The claim that Wu Zetian murdered her own infant daughter to frame a rival first appears in the historical record roughly four centuries after her death, which is a strange amount of time for a damning eyewitness detail to wait before surfacing.

The claim that Zheng He's largest ships stretched over 400 feet traces to a 1597 novel that has the vessels built with help from an immortal carpenter god, and archaeological digs at the actual shipyard suggest something closer to half that length.