The 16th episode of
China Untold is now available to download or stream online.
Certain places on this planet seem to have a personality of their own: Landscapes that can instill a sense of sadness, misery, or horror in anyone who visits them.
There is Nahanni National Park in Canada, a vast and beautiful landscape where early explorers quite literally lost their heads and where strange lights and monsters have been spotted. Ukraine has the abandoned, nuclear-cursed city of Pripyat, and the United States has the settlement of Sleepy Hollow, which has been embedded in modern folklore thanks to the fictional scribblings of writer Washington Irving.
The 15th episode of
China Untold is now available to download or stream online.
In May of 2014, a group of people from a Chinese doomsday cult known as the Church of the Almighty God walked into a McDonald’s restaurant in China’s eastern Shandong province and tried to recruit a 35-year-old woman named Wu Shuoyan to join their ranks. When the woman refused to provide the cult members with her personal contact information, they beat her to death in broad daylight inside the fast-food joint.
The Church of Almighty God is a relatively new cult in China, though, and fringe religious beliefs have existed in the country for a very, very long time. In this episode of the podcast, host Matt Bossons will introduce you to two Chinese cults – one new and the other old (ancient, in fact).
The 14th episode of
China Untold is now available to download or stream online.
Parts of the North American continent are littered with ghost towns, abandoned settlements left to weather and decay and be reclaimed by nature. The western United States and Canada enjoy a notable abundance of such forgotten settlements, thanks mainly to the boom-and-bust cycle of resource towns in the 19th and 20th centuries.
You are probably wondering what abandoned pioneering and mining towns in western North America have to do with China. It’s a fair question – although the answer may surprise you: It turns out Chinese people share a long and complicated history with many of North America’s ghost towns, a history that stretches right up to the present day.
The 13th episode of
China Untold is now available to download or stream online.
Did you know that the local Yao people living in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region’s Du’an county believe that mysterious and godly ‘white rhinos’ inhabit the area’s underwater caves? Or that primitive human species may have survived in South China’s Yunnan province until as recently as 11,500 years ago – long after the Neanderthals and more primitive humans had gone extinct?
From Maludong Cave in Yunnan province, the home of the Red Deer Cave people, to the mysterious human-made Longyou Caves of East China’s Zhejiang province, China is home to an incredible collection of underground geological structures.
The 11th episode of
is now available to download or stream online.
Mass disappearances conjure up an extreme set of emotions, and they genuinely are terrifying. The most recent and arguably most notorious mass vanishing in Chinese history is the March 2014 disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 – which vanished en route to Beijing with 227 people on board, 153 of which were Chinese citizens.
While MH370 may be the first China-related mass disappearance to come to mind, it might not be the earliest – or biggest.
According to various print and online sources, in 1939, during the horrors of Japanese aggression against the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), almost 3,000 soldiers stationed in the rolling hills around Nanjing allegedly disappeared without leaving a single clue about their fate…