There is a rich vein to mine when searching for patterns and precedents that might help explain gyrations in western markets. Those searching for plausible parallels for this year's bounce have travelled back as far as the Panic of 1907.
History, alas, is not much help when it comes to making sense of market movements in one of the world's most ancient civilisations. China's stock exchange – launched by communist rulers as a grudging experiment in the early 1990s – is a mere teenager, and often acts like one. It is a confused creature, prone to hormonal highs and lows, and occasionally frustrated by parental (read government) supervision that is too permissive one month, too strict the next.
China had a stock market before “liberation”, as the Chinese Communist party likes to call its triumph in 1949, but don't look to that chaotic era for comparisons to explain the 20 per cent fall in Shanghai's Composite index in the fortnight to August 19, after more than doubling over the previous nine months.