✦ 每日英语晨读 · 第二辑 ✦

China's Chang'e Five mission brought back 1.7 kilograms of moon rocks in 2020. Six years later, scientists are still finding surprises inside them. This week at China's Space Day in Chengdu, researchers announced that the samples contain evidence of volcanic activity just 1.2 billion years ago — far more recent than expected. The moon was once thought to have gone cold long before that. These tiny rocks are rewriting the history of our solar system. What else might the moon be hiding? Sometimes the greatest answers come from the smallest pieces.

Seventy years ago, China had no rockets, no satellites, and no space program. Today, it has all three, plus a space station circling the Earth every ninety minutes. The journey from nothing to the stars took courage, patience, and generations of quiet work. Engineers who started as young graduates are now grandparents, watching their grandchildren grow up under a sky that China helped explore. This April, China celebrates seventy years of looking up. The message to the world is simple: a nation that dares to dream, and works hard enough, will one day touch the sky.

Long before air conditioning existed, Chinese scholars found an elegant solution to summer heat — the folding fan. But a fan in ancient China was never just for cooling down. The finest fans were made of split bamboo and raw silk, painted with mountains, poems, or flowers. A scholar might wave a fan to show calm thinking. A gentleman might gift one to express admiration. Today, craftsmen in Suzhou and Hangzhou still spend weeks making a single fan by hand. Each fold, each brushstroke, carries the weight of centuries. In China, even a breath of wind can be a work of art.

In Chengdu, nobody is in a hurry. Even on a weekday morning, the teahouses along the river fill up early with people who have nowhere urgent to be. They crack sunflower seeds, read newspapers, and argue cheerfully about last night's mahjong. Cats sleep on warm stone steps. Street vendors set up their carts with practised ease. The smell of spicy hot pot drifts out from kitchens that never fully close. Chengdu has one of the highest happiness ratings in China, and the reason is simple: people here have decided that slowing down is not laziness. It is wisdom.

Most people have never heard her name, but she has seen parts of the Earth that almost no one else has. Dr. Wang Min is a marine geologist who has spent more than twenty years studying the deep-sea floor around China. She has descended in submersibles to depths where sunlight never reaches, mapping underwater mountains and ancient volcanic vents. Her data helps scientists understand how the ocean floor was formed and where mineral resources may lie. She says the deep sea is like another planet — cold, dark, and full of wonders no textbook has described yet.

China's courts handled over nine hundred AI-related lawsuits last year — cases about who owns a painting made by artificial intelligence, or whether a chatbot can be held responsible for bad advice. Judges are writing new rules almost faster than the technology moves. One court in Beijing has begun using an AI assistant to sort through millions of documents and flag key evidence. The AI never makes the final decision — a human judge always does. But the speed has doubled. As machines grow smarter, the question of who is responsible for what they do grows more urgent.

The guqin has seven strings and a history of three thousand years. It is one of the quietest instruments in the world — not meant for crowds, but for one person listening alone in a quiet room. Ancient poets played it to calm their minds, not to impress an audience. The music is full of space and silence. Notes fade slowly, like smoke rising from incense. A skilled player does not just press the strings; they breathe with the music. UNESCO recognised the guqin as a masterpiece of intangible cultural heritage. Some sounds are too deep for a concert hall.

Before the sun rises over the Hani terraces in Yunnan, the farmers are already in the water. They move slowly through the flooded fields, planting rice seedlings one by one, row by row. This is how their ancestors worked for over a thousand years, cutting these steps into the mountainside by hand. The terraces hold water like a series of mirrors, each one reflecting a different shade of sky. There are no shortcuts. The rice must be planted before the summer rains arrive. In this corner of China, time still moves at the speed of growth.

This Labour Day, think about the people who built the bridges you drive over, the tunnels you pass through, and the high-speed rail that carries you home. In China, there are over sixty million construction workers — one of the largest labour forces in the world. Many left their villages as teenagers and have spent decades building cities they cannot afford to live in. Their hands shaped the skylines of Shanghai, Shenzhen, and hundreds of smaller cities whose names you may not know. Hard work deserves to be seen. Labour Day is a reminder that the world runs on the effort of ordinary people.

She stopped hundreds of shots in her career, but the save she is most proud of happened off the pitch. After retiring from professional football, Liu Ying returned to her home village in Sichuan and started a girls' football programme for children who had never owned a pair of boots. She raised money from former teammates, painted the pitch herself, and trained the first group of twelve girls every evening after school. Three of those girls have since joined provincial youth teams. She says the best thing about football is that it teaches you to get up when you fall down.

Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found that trees communicate more than anyone expected. When one tree is attacked by insects, it releases chemical signals into the air and soil. Nearby trees pick up these signals and begin producing bitter compounds in their leaves — a chemical warning system that works without words or wires. The forest is not a collection of separate trees; it is a network. Researchers believe this discovery could change how we manage forests and even how we fight crop diseases. In nature, cooperation is not a human invention. It is the oldest strategy of all.

Every year when the May Holiday arrives, China moves. More than two hundred million trips are made in five days — trains pack full, highways stretch into rivers of red taillights, and ancient towns that are quiet all year suddenly overflow with visitors. Some people rush to famous mountains. Others go back to the village where they grew up, eating their mother's dumplings and sleeping in the bedroom they left behind twenty years ago. The Golden Week is not just a holiday. It is a national exhale — a moment when the country stops running and remembers what it is running for.

For over a century, the two-hour marathon seemed impossible. On April 26, 2026, Kenya's Sabir crossed the London Marathon finish line in 1:59:30 and changed everything. Decades of high-altitude training and scientific progress made it happen. The human body has no final limit, Sabir said. His words reach far beyond the track. In every field, someone is running toward a barrier others call unbreakable. Sometimes, the wall exists only in our minds.

Two years ago, nobody wanted kale. Farmers could barely sell it. Then tea shops started adding it to their drinks. One brand sold three million cups in a single month. Suddenly kale was in smoothies, snacks, and hot pot. Prices jumped thirty times. Last week, a supermarket sold kale plants in pots for thirty yuan each — and sold out in hours. One vegetable, one viral moment, and everything changed. Sometimes the market does not follow logic. It follows fashion.

On April 21, a new AI tool was released that can make images look completely real. Within hours, social media filled with photos of things that never happened. A birthday cake with every candle casting a shadow. Rain on a window with perfect reflections. Text in Chinese, English, and Arabic — all correct. For years, AI struggled to write words in pictures. Now it cannot be stopped. We are entering a world where seeing is no longer believing.

On Earth Day, scientists in China announced something remarkable. A rock found in Guangdong is 4.48 billion years old — older than Earth itself. It formed before our planet existed, drifted through space for billions of years, and finally landed in southern China. Inside its tiny grains, researchers can read the early history of our solar system. Scientists call it a message from the beginning of time. The universe is very old. Sometimes, it sends us a letter.

Lin Fang was thirty-four when she decided to start over. She had no savings and no plan — just a sewing machine and a small room. She had worked in a clothing factory for ten years and knew fabrics well. She started making jackets from cloth that factories had thrown away. Within two years, she had a waiting list of three months. She never borrowed money. She never gave up. Doing it your own way is not the slow way.

After Sabir broke the two-hour marathon barrier, the offers came fast. Sports brands, drink companies, and streaming services all wanted his name. He said no to every one of them. Instead, he flew home to his village in Kenya and opened a free running school for children. Money comes and goes, he said at the airport. But if one of these kids breaks my record someday, that means more than any contract. Not all records are made on the track.

A bridge in Guizhou, China, has just set a world record. The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge stands 626 metres above the river — taller than most skyscrapers. It beat the old record of 565 metres, which was also held by a bridge in Guizhou. This huge suspension bridge carries a highway across a deep canyon. Workers spent over three years building it. The region has many mountains and gorges, so tall bridges are a way of life here. Now this bridge is not just a road. It is a symbol of what human skill can achieve.

Ten cloned yaks have been born naturally in Tibet — a first in history. Chinese scientists spent three years on this project. They tested nearly 9,000 yaks to find the best ones, then used cloning to copy their strong genes. All ten calves were born healthy between March and April. This matters because Tibetan yaks have been getting weaker over the years. Old breeding methods took decades. Now, cloning can help produce stronger yaks much faster. These ten little calves are not just cute. They carry the hope of herdsmen on the roof of the world.

While America's tourist numbers dropped last year, China's kept rising. Stricter border checks in the US made many visitors feel unwanted. Some cancelled trips. Others chose new destinations. China responded with open arms — more visa-free countries, easier entry, and friendlier services. In April 2026, the travel platform Trip.com announced a goal to bring 200 million foreign visitors to China in five years. Even Jackie Chan joined as an ambassador. The message was clear: China is open, welcoming, and ready. When one door closes, travelers find another. Right now, many are finding China.

In China, a humble craft has become a quiet revolution. Perler beads — tiny plastic squares pressed onto a grid and ironed flat — have taken over social media. Young people are spending hours building pixel-art designs: animals, characters, favourite words. They say it calms the mind, slows the breath, and pulls them away from their phones. In a time of high pressure and constant noise, the simple act of placing one small bead at a time feels almost like medicine. Nobody expected that the cure for modern stress might be a bag of coloured plastic. But here we are.

Most people plan a trip around places. A new kind of traveler plans around a color. The pale pink of a cherry blossom path. The sharp green of a rice terrace after rain. The deep orange of a canyon at golden hour. They call themselves color hunters, and they are growing in number. No rush, no checklist — just one perfect shade and the patience to wait for it. In a world full of itineraries and rankings, these travelers are asking a different question: not where should I go, but what do I want to feel? Color, it turns out, is a very good answer.