The First Emperor of China

The story of Franco’s rise to power and the painful, repressive regime he oversaw is fundamentally interlinked with that of the Spanish Civil War. A brutal three-year conflict that laid bare the ideological divisions of interwar Europe, it drew support from fascist governments ac ...  Show more

Sir Francis Drake is most famous for his role in defeating the Armada of 1588 and saving England from a Spanish invasion. By that point in his life, he was already a wealthy and famous seafarer: the first Englishman to sail around the world, knighted by Queen Elizabeth I in recog ...  Show more

After its initial discovery in 1974, the Terracotta Army became the unofficial eighth wonder of the world. Comprising an estimated 8,000 statue warriors buried as part of the First Emperor of China’s tomb complex, experts are still unearthing its secrets. But what was the purpose ...  Show more

As both the Qianlong Emperor's extensive reign and the Eighteenth Century itself comes to a close, the Qing Empire faces - in spite of its outward posturing of timeless grandeur and invulnerability - an ever more uncertain future. By this time his successor, the Jiaqing Emperor, ...  Show more

“To wander from mountain to mountain, hopeless and homeless, has nothing to recommend it” - Babur Before he became the father of the Mughal dynasty, and the author of one of the most important memoirs in world history, Babur was a provincial young prince in modern-day Uzbekista ...  Show more

Genghis Khan may have built a formidable land empire, but his grandson Kublai Khan mastered the seas. So how did a nomadic leader come to have such a formidable navy – and conquer China in the process? Emily Briffett spoke to Jack Weatherford about his new book on the subject, Em ...  Show more