“My kids roamed all over ... dates back 2,000 years in China’s history. Ting has played the pipa since childhood and won first prize in China’s national pipa competition in 1996.

In Liaoning Province, located in the rolling farm country of northeastern China, peasant farmers make only a few hundred dollars a year. They know they can make many times that amount by selling ...

This story appears in the June 2009 issue of National Geographic magazine. The world economy in the ninth century had two powerful engines. One was Tang dynasty China, an empire stretching from ...