Cities
How people built places to live together.
A noodle dish whose name has 58 strokes
Xi’an’s wide, hand-pulled biangbiang noodles are written with one of the most complex Chinese characters in use. It wasn’t in any dictionary, and only entered Unicode in 2020.
A slime mould designed the Tokyo rail network
Scientists put oat flakes where Tokyo’s cities are. A brainless single-celled organism grew a network remarkably like the real railway.
Brutalism isn’t named after being brutal
The architectural style people love to hate takes its name from the French for “raw concrete”.
Caesar salad was invented in Mexico
It has nothing to do with Julius Caesar. It was improvised in Tijuana in the 1920s by an Italian-American restaurateur named Caesar Cardini.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire
Teaching at Oxford was under way by 1096. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was founded in 1325.
The city in Kazakhstan that provoked Genghis Khan
In 1218 the governor of Otrar, a Silk Road city in today’s southern Kazakhstan, executed a Mongol trade caravan. The insult launched one of the most destructive invasions in history.
The cobra effect: when rewards backfire
Pay people to kill pests and some of them will start breeding pests. The famous cobra version may be a legend, but the rat version in Hanoi really happened.
The croissant is Austrian (sort of)
France’s most famous breakfast pastry descends from the Viennese kipferl, brought to Paris by an Austrian entrepreneur around 1839.
The Terracotta Army was found by farmers digging a well
In 1974 farmers near Xi’an dug into an army of more than 8,000 clay soldiers. The emperor’s tomb next to it has never been opened, and the soil around it contains unusually high levels of mercury.
Venice stands on an upside-down forest
Under the palaces of Venice are millions of wooden stakes driven into the mud of the lagoon, some of them for more than a thousand years.
Who lives in Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter
In the heart of an ancient Chinese capital is a mosque that looks like a Buddhist temple, run by a Muslim people descended partly from Silk Road traders.
Xi’an was once one of the largest cities on Earth
Around 750, the city now called Xi’an was Chang’an: a “million-man city” at the eastern end of the Silk Road, home to Persians, Sogdians, Arabs and Christian monks.