China

The Analects, the book most people mean when they cite something Confucius said, was assembled by his students' students long after his death, which means most quotations attributed to him rest on someone else's memory of someone else's memory.

Kublai Khan tried to build an invasion fleet for Japan in about a year, a job specialists say needed closer to five, and the resulting hastily built ships, not just the storms later legend credited, likely doomed both his attempts to conquer it.

The peasant strategy Mao's own party first rejected won him a country, and the archives that later opened show how much the resulting record was built to fit him.

The historian who wrote the definitive account of China's first emperor was working roughly a century after his death for the dynasty that had just overthrown his, which is worth remembering every time that account calls him a tyrant.

The revolution he spent decades preparing succeeded without him in the room, yet both governments that later split China still claim him as their founder.

Roosevelt returned part of an indemnity extracted after a rebellion, and called it friendship while telling Congress it was also the surest way to keep China out of Japan's orbit.

A Qing general secretly sabotaged the siege his own government had ordered, withholding artillery and shielding foreigners because he judged a simultaneous war against eight nations unwinnable, a quiet act of self-preservation that likely saved the legations from being overrun.

The Chinese character Sima Qian used to describe how Qin Shi Huang killed his critics originally just meant pit or moat, and only came to mean burying someone alive in later centuries, which is a fairly large amount of weight to hang on one word's drift in meaning.