Day: January 19, 2026

Chinese team restores legendary Tang dynasty ‘golden’ armour found in Tibetan tomb

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“We will not leave the desert till we beat the foe, although in war our golden armour be outworn 100 times.” Wang Changling’s famous poem from China’s Tang dynasty depicts soldiers in golden armour battling on the desert frontiers. However, for a long time, no Tang dynasty gold-plated armour was unearthed, leaving its appearance to the imagination. But on January 14, the Key Laboratory of Archaeological Sciences and Cultural Heritage at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) unveiled the only known physical example of Tang dynasty “golden” armour –…

China expected to get London embassy go-ahead this week after years of wrangling

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A decision on China’s proposed mega embassy in London is expected on Monday or Tuesday, with Chinese officials and British diplomats in Beijing holding their breath in anticipation of the planning application finally being approved. The saga, which has been running since 2018, is widely expected to end with the British government giving the green light for construction. If it does, one group likely to be grateful is those who work in the British embassy’s dilapidated building in Beijing. The UK’s plans to redevelop its outpost in China’s capital have…

Harbouring ambitions: China’s port giants make waves with record growth

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Even as global trade weathered extreme volatility in 2025, China is pressing ahead with port expansions, building bigger and more strategically positioned hubs to secure its trade future. In the first 11 months of 2025, China’s foreign trade container throughput jumped 9.5 per cent, year on year, to 320 million 20-foot equivalent units (TEU), contributing to a record US$1.19 trillion trade surplus for the full year, according to official data. Major ports helped drive the records. Shanghai, for instance, handled more than 50 million TEU in container throughput from January…

Trade Armageddon has failed to materialise

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Donald Trump spent decades professing faith in the power of tariffs, but still caught investors off guard when he unveiled his “liberation day” levies in the Rose Garden of the White House in April 2025. The shock of suddenly seeing manufacturing powerhouses, such as China, Vietnam and Cambodia, threatened with tariffs of 46 per cent or more rattled markets, sparking a multitrillion dollar sell-off. To borrow the US president’s term, people got “yippy”. And yet, despite economists such as Harvard University’s Kenneth Rogoff warning that Trump had “dropped a nuclear…

The dangerous triumph of neo-mercantilism

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In the first 11 months of 2025, China ran a customs trade surplus of over $1tn. According to Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2025 as a whole, its “overall goods surplus . . . should — if accurately measured — approach an astonishing $1.2tn dollars (6 per cent of China’s GDP, well over a percentage point of the GDP of all of China’s trading partners).” Over much the same period, Donald Trump, obsessed with US trade deficits — both overall and, even more, in manufactured goods…