FOLLOW OUR STORIES → WHERE CURIOSITY TOOK US
Sometimes you don’t know which travel souvenir will matter until many years later.
When Elaine was eight years old, Dad took her to China for the first time.
It was 2013.
Beijing (北京, Běijīng) was our family’s starting point.
Like many family trips, we came home with souvenirs.
Some were probably forgotten.
One wasn’t.
It was a little set of cards:
中国历代帝王 (Zhōngguó Lìdài Dìwáng) — Chinese Emperors Through the Dynasties.
Nothing expensive.
Nothing rare.
Just a small souvenir Dad bought for an eight-year-old girl.
Dad had no idea what he’d started.
😂🐇
👧 Elaine Started Asking About the People on the Cards
The cards turned China’s long history into something an eight-year-old could see:
people.
Emperors.
Faces.
Names.
Different dynasties.
And Elaine became curious.
Who was this emperor?
Why was he famous?
What did he do?
Who came before him?
Who came afterward?
There was Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇, Qín Shǐhuáng) — China’s First Emperor.
Then emperors from dynasties such as the Han (汉), Tang (唐), Song (宋), Ming (明) and Qing (清).
At eight years old, Elaine didn’t need Dad to give her a lecture on 3,000 years of Chinese history.
The cards did something much more important.
They made her ask questions.
🐇 One Emperor Leads to Another
And questions are dangerous things in our family.
😂
Once you start asking about Chinese emperors, another question appears:
What’s a dynasty?
Then:
Why did one dynasty replace another?
Why did China sometimes break apart?
Why did it come together again?
Who ruled before Qin Shi Huang?
What exactly did Qin unify?
And suddenly a little pack of cards isn’t quite so little anymore.
Years later, those questions would begin taking Dad & Elaine to actual places.
Xi’an (西安) naturally led us toward Qin Shi Huang.
But Qin eventually made us curious about what came before Qin.
That took us farther.
We eventually traveled beyond Xi’an to Qishan (岐山) and Zhouyuan (周原), where we walked through the homeland of the Zhou.
We also began looking differently at places such as Xianyang (咸阳), the ancient Qin capital associated with Qin Shi Huang.
One question kept producing another.
And gradually our China trips changed.
We weren’t only asking:
“What should we see?”
We were increasingly asking:
“Why is this here?”
and:
“What happened here?”
🇨🇳 Beijing Was Where Something Started
Looking back, Dad increasingly thinks of Beijing as more than simply the first Chinese city Elaine visited.
It was where some of the questions began.
We’ve written separately about why Beijing eventually became the place where China started to make more sense to Dad & Elaine.
But in 2013?
Dad wasn’t thinking about any of that.
He was simply traveling with his eight-year-old daughter.
And he bought her some emperor cards.
That’s all.
❤️ Then, More Than a Decade Later, Dad Saw Them Again
Fast-forward many years.
Dad and a now-grown-up Elaine were back in Beijing.
Again.
😂
This time we were spending a deliberately slow day around Qianmen (前门), wandering without trying to complete a huge sightseeing checklist.
We went into bookstores.
Looked at souvenirs.
Stopped whenever something caught our attention.
Then Dad saw this.
[PHOTO]
More than a decade later, Dad unexpectedly found the same Chinese Emperors card set he remembers buying for eight-year-old Elaine on our first family trip to China.
Dad recognized the box.
中国历代帝王
The same emperor cards.
Dad stopped.
For a moment, this wasn’t really a souvenir shop in Qianmen anymore.
Dad remembered a little girl.
Eight years old.
Looking at these emperors and becoming curious about who they were.
And now that little girl was standing somewhere nearby as an adult…
back in Beijing with Dad.
❤️
🧳 The Cards Hadn’t Traveled Very Far
They were still just sitting there in a shop.
😂
But Dad and Elaine had traveled a very long way since the first set.
Back to Beijing.
Then back again.
To Xi’an.
Beyond Xi’an.
To cities and historical places Dad hadn’t even known about when that first family journey began.
Sometimes we followed famous emperors.
Sometimes dynasties.
Sometimes an old building.
Sometimes a museum object.
Sometimes something Dad photographed because:
“Eh… what’s that?”
🐇
The cards didn’t cause every one of those journeys.
Of course not.
But looking at that familiar little box again, Dad could see one of the early sparks.
🐇 Where Curiosity Took Us
This is exactly why we created WHERE CURIOSITY TOOK US.
Not every China journey begins with:
“We must visit this place.”
Sometimes it begins with:
“What’s that?”
A little object.
A name.
A photograph.
A story somebody tells us.
One emperor.
Then another.
One question.
Then another.
And eventually curiosity starts changing the map.
That’s what happened to Dad & Elaine.
The famous places brought us to China.
Curiosity kept taking us farther.
❤️ A Small Souvenir Can Open a Very Big Door
Travel souvenirs are funny things.
We normally judge them by what they are.
A magnet.
A postcard.
A stuffed panda.
A little box of emperor cards.
But perhaps there’s another way to judge them:
What did this make me curious about?
Those cards didn’t teach eight-year-old Elaine Chinese history.
They did something better.
They made her want to know.
And more than a decade later, Dad was standing in Qianmen looking at the same little box and realizing just how far that curiosity had traveled.
Our ChinaTravelBUG story began with a family journey to Beijing in 2013, when Elaine was eight.
We certainly didn’t know then where it would lead.
Dad just bought his daughter a souvenir.
😂
Sometimes the most important thing you bring home from a journey isn’t the souvenir.
It’s the question the souvenir leaves behind.
🐇❤️
Real Journeys. Real Stories. Real China.
See China. Understand It Better.
