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.
Chinese characters are assembled from a small set of parts. The Cascade sequences 2,562 traditional characters so each one arrives after the parts it contains, then counts every word that character makes readable. At any point you can see what you read now and which character adds the most next.
The left part marks water. The right part gives the sound. Learn both and 清 is no longer a new shape, only a new combination.
The Cascade teaches both parts first, in a primer, and brings 清 in campaign 18.
The return peaks in campaign 16, where 25 characters open 162 words. It then falls. The last 37 campaigns add 1,404 words, so the long tail buys coverage, not speed.
Every figure is computed from the character and word lists, not estimated.
Eight short lessons teach 196 recurring parts as shapes, before any vocabulary. That removes nearly two thirds of the cases where a character would appear ahead of its own components.
Each campaign drills 25 characters and ends with a 25-question checkpoint. Score 80 percent to clear it and move to the next.
The Cascade checks your known characters against all 7,187 words and ranks what to learn next. A learner who knows the first 312 characters gains 18 words from 心 alone.
The Cascade orders what to learn. It does not teach tones, grammar, listening or speaking, so use it beside a course that does. Progress saves in your browser.
A selection from the record: wartime partners, railroad crews, students and families who built things that outlasted the governments around them.
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.
Joint work in the field and in wartime, with the dates and the people named.
Chinese crews cut the Sierra grade for the Central Pacific, in snow and over granite, and finished the line in 1869.
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.
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.
Work through the characters in that sequence and watch the readable words add up.
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