Since a single ship left New York harbour in 1784, Americans and Chinese have funded one another's revolutions, built one another's railroads, educated one another's students, and died flying one another's supplies over the Himalayas. This is the record of what was actually done, with dates, with names, and with the debts running in both directions.
Not a record of American perfection. A record of consistent partnership with Chinese people seeking sovereignty, self-government and a decent living, across fifteen documented episodes from the wartime alliance to the present.
Every entry carries a date, a named act, and a figure a reader can check.
A converted privateer loaded with ginseng and furs, sent to Canton by merchants locked out of British markets. Chinese traders extended credit to American captains they had never met.
The first Chinese graduate of an American university spent the rest of his life arguing that his countrymen should study the sciences abroad. In 1872 he got his way.
Sixty-four airmen moved west to safety by people who owed them nothing. The reprisal campaign that followed across Zhejiang and Jiangxi killed Chinese civilians in the hundreds of thousands.
She spoke to the Senate and then the House, in English, without notes, and made the case for Asia's war to a country thinking mostly about Europe.
Single dated acts with identifiable victims on both sides of the Pacific, and public numbers behind each one.
The double reduction policy closed a twenty-seven-year-old company the day before school started, and took roughly three quarters off positions sitting in American retirement accounts. One act, two shores, and neither side knew about the other.
The domestic app runs restricted for minors. The export version carries none of it, and American parents were never told there were two products.
Coerced labour at one end, a destroyed domestic industry at the other, and buyers on both ends who were told nothing.
Three thousand years of philosophy, verse and record, read as the work of the people who wrote it.
Confucius, Zhuangzi, Du Fu, Su Shi, Cao Xueqin. Public-domain texts, with the translations named and dated.
Chinese characters are engineered rather than arbitrary. Two thousand five hundred and sixty-two of them resolve to 1,110 irreducible parts, in a sequence now worked out in full.
Chennault's pilots, the Hump crews, the Burma Road engineers, and the Chinese armies that held a continental front for fourteen years.
Common law, a free port, hard money, and a press that printed what it found. Built in two generations by families who arrived with nothing.
A civilization is one thing. Whoever currently rules it is another.
Everything on this site was done by individuals and by the institutions they built with their own money and their own hands: sailors, engineers, schoolteachers, shopkeepers, missionaries, pilots, villagers. States come and go, and they inherit no credit for work they did not do. The friendship recorded here is older than any of the governments now claiming to speak for either side of it, and it will outlast them.
A record earns nothing on assertion. Every claim here carries its source, every figure is given as reported at the time, and anything we infer is labelled as inference.
Full citations for every entry, with links to the archives, filings, statutes and contemporaneous reporting behind each figure.
Read the source listWhat this site will publish, what it will not, and the six tests a case must pass before it goes up.
Read the positionEntries grouped by period with the primary documents attached, free to use in any classroom on either side of the Pacific.
Open the teaching set