China

The Min runs through Sichuan.

The campaign ran across China.

The river's shifts of course have redrawn the map of the north China plain repeatedly within recorded history.

The Zhuangzi butterfly dream is the source of the image in East Asia, and the butterfly reads as transformation and as conjugal love.

Classical Chinese is documented in use as a written language in China. The claim is where the language is documented in use as a written, literary or liturgical language. It is not a claim about the full extent of its speakers, and it is not a claim about where the language originated.

The long is a bringer of rain and an emblem of the emperor, and is not the adversary of the European figure.

The manuscripts and the commentarial tradition are Chinese throughout.

The huli jing, the fox spirit that takes human form, older than its Japanese descendant.

Sun Wukong, the monkey who storms heaven and is put under a mountain for it.

The ox of the spring ceremony, and the ox-herding pictures of Chan Buddhism.

The twelfth of the zodiac animals, and pork as the ordinary sacrifice of the household.

The qilin is a Chinese omen animal whose appearance announces the arrival or the passing of a sage or a just ruler. It is described as a composite, hooved and scaled, with the horns of a deer and a body wreathed in flame.

The hare in the moon, pounding the elixir of immortality.

First of the twelve, which it reached by riding the ox and jumping off at the finish.

In Chinese custom red is the colour of celebration and good fortune, used for wedding dress, New Year couplets and the money envelope. This is a separate strand from the five-phase attribution of red to Fire and the south, and the two are often run together in Western summaries.

Tenth of the twelve, and a bird whose five virtues are listed as a moral lesson.

The name is written with characters borrowed from a Chinese celestial dog, so the writing travelled to Japan ahead of the being. The Japanese mountain tengu is not the Chinese creature.

The Dragon Gate legend of the carp that swims upstream and, on leaping the falls, transforms into a dragon.

Chinese folk religion holds the three-legged moon toad, Chan Chu, later the benevolent "money toad" of folk practice.

The white tiger of the west, and the tiger as the yang animal set against the dragon.

The black tortoise of the north, and the shell that carried the first divination cracks.

White is the colour of mourning dress in China and across much of East Asia, where European convention uses black. Neither is a corruption of the other: white follows from the Metal phase, the west and autumn, and the European black from an entirely separate history.

The plain is the northern heartland of China.

China is the Han homeland, from the Yellow River plain outward.

The Shang kings ruled the Yellow River valley in northern China, with their best known and last capital at Anyang in modern Henan province.

The Warring States saw seven rival Chinese states, Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei, contest control of the former Zhou realm.

The wild chrysanthemums are native to eastern Asia and north-eastern Europe, with China as the centre of the genus and of its breeding.

The eastern part of the range of Lagerstroemia takes in China, where the tree was planted by palaces, temples and halls of learning.

Prunus persica is native to north-western China, notwithstanding the Latin name that made it Persian.

China is the source of the written language and the state ritual tradition that define the East Asian sphere.

The Bushel of the northern Chinese sky.

The third enclosure of the traditional Chinese sky.

The circumpolar enclosure of the traditional Chinese sky.

The second enclosure of the traditional Chinese sky.