Explainers: Culture

The Portuguese egg tart is a must-eat for visitors to the city of Macau, located on China’s southern coast. The sweet, soft tart consists of a baked egg custard inside a flaky case, caramelized on top. They’re close cousins of the Hong Kong-style egg tarts found in dim sum restaurants and Chinatowns across the world. But the name is misleading. The Portuguese egg tart is actually a 100% Macanese creation, invented by a Brit in Macau. Eileen Stow, sister to Andrew Stow, who invented the treat in 1979, tells us about its origins and how it grew to become one of Macau’s most popular snacks.

This weekend, people in the US and Canada will be moving their clocks back an hour as Daylight Saving Time comes to an end. Most of Europe did it a week ago. China is one of several countries that doesn’t have DST, and its daily clock remains unchanged throughout the year. 32 years ago, China briefly followed DST: but it abandoned the practice just three years later. In fact, the whole of China has one single time zone: Beijing Standard Time. Watch our video above to find out why. Follow Inkstone on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and subscribe to the Inkstone Daily Brief.

A stunningly beautiful Mandarin duck has been seen roaming New York’s Central Park this past week. No one seems to know how this East Asia native ended up there, but this lone male bird has stunned locals with its colorful feathers. New Yorkers may have been getting their first glimpse of the gorgeous bird, but the Mandarin duck has been a ubiquitous and beloved creature in China for thousands of years. Gus Keri, whose viral video kicked off the MANDARIN DUCK mania, returned to the Central Park Pond and produced this stunning sequel pic.twitter.com/NkUfusltlI — Manhattan Bird Alert (@BirdCentralPark) November 1, 2018 Here are five things you should know about them, besides the fact that they

The inter-Korean summit kicked off on Tuesday with a warm embrace between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in. But despite the smiles and handshakes, North and South Korea remain officially at war. The citizens of the two nations cannot freely travel between the two. On the contrary, those who wish to defect from the North face an arduous journey via China, Laos and Cambodia. AFP photographer Ed Jones is one of the few journalists based in South Korea who regularly visits the North. He’s taken a series of matching portraits of the people from both nations, shot between 2016 and 2018. Jones layers his images one on top of each other – with North on top and South below, of

Only half an hour’s drive from the gleaming skyscrapers and hi-tech production centers at the heart of China’s Silicon Valley, lies a very different world. Welcome to Dafen, the world’s largest art factory. Located on the edge of the southern megacity of Shenzhen, it’s a village where thousands of resident artists work from a low-rise warren of narrow streets and alleyways packed with tiny galleries and studios. Here, thousands of artists work glued to their canvases, copying original images from iPad screens, in many cases reproducing by hand the same image over and over again. The storefronts display a bewildering selection of artwork, from Van Gogh replicas to portraits of figures as dive

Siyu Cao is a Beijing-born graphic designer, currently living in Paris. She's the mind behind “Tiny Eyes,” a series of comics comparing the cultures she has experienced in China, France and the US. Her work has been widely shared, racking up more than a million views online. It’s the type of work that makes her readers go: “That’s so true!” Inkstone talked to Siyu to find out more about celebrating cultural differences – and bringing empathy to how we interact. What's the story of your life? Standing at crossroads and making connections. What made you pick up a pen and start drawing? I've always been interested in visual language, because it allows me to express and share ideas freely and a