HSK 6 Reading Practice — 12 Free Chinese Stories
Literary and news-register Chinese, written for fluent readers. Every story below is free to read here in full, with pinyin above each word and an English translation on every line.
Graded against HSK 3.0
Measured against the official 3,000-character HSK 3.0 list, not estimated. Half the stories here are readable at HSK 5 or below — meaning you already know 95% of the characters, enough to follow the passage and infer the rest. The middle half of the shelf sits in HSK 5–6, and 79% of all characters across these 12 stories are HSK 1–2.
HSK 3.0 replaced the six-level standard on 1 July 2026 and regraded most of the vocabulary — what changed. You can run any text through the same grading with the HSK level checker.
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都市夜归人 City Nightcomers
A literary sketch of metropolitan life after dark.
19 sentences · 290 characters · 136 words -
一封写给故乡的信 A Letter to My Hometown
An emigrant writes back to a town that no longer exists.
19 sentences · 297 characters · 128 words -
算法时代的孤独 Loneliness in the Age of Algorithms
Reflections from inside the recommendation feed.
19 sentences · 288 characters · 121 words -
老北京的胡同 Old Beijing's Hutongs
What disappears with each demolished alley.
18 sentences · 297 characters · 130 words -
苏东坡与黄州 Su Dongpo and Huangzhou
How exile turned a politician into one of China's greatest writers.
18 sentences · 296 characters · 122 words -
故宫的红墙 The Red Walls of the Forbidden City
A morning at the Imperial Palace, considered through its color.
18 sentences · 294 characters · 138 words -
鲁迅的呐喊 Lu Xun's Call to Arms
Why a doctor put down his stethoscope and picked up a pen.
19 sentences · 299 characters · 127 words -
茶马古道 The Ancient Tea Horse Road
A trade route through clouds, between leaves and hooves.
19 sentences · 309 characters · 148 words -
三峡 The Three Gorges
Two hundred kilometres of cliff and current, from Li Bai's light boat to the great dam.
16 sentences · 327 characters · 129 words -
二十四节气 The Twenty-Four Solar Terms
Before clocks and calendars, a country told time by wind, rain and light.
16 sentences · 301 characters · 133 words -
李白与月亮 Li Bai and the Moon
The poet who wrote the moon three hundred times, and drank with his own shadow.
16 sentences · 280 characters · 113 words -
春运 The Spring Festival Travel Rush
The largest human migration on earth, and the single meal at the end of it.
16 sentences · 292 characters · 124 words