The Chinese New Year is conventionally known as Spring Festival (春节 chūnjié) in China, which welcomes the arrival of spring despite of the cold weather that remains. People are full of hope for a new start in their life when the world comes back to life.
With thanks to our talented graduate Tang LI, we hope that you will be able to enjoy this melody and beautiful Chinese sign language dance.
Song: Early Spring (《春三月》)
Performer: Tang LI, graduate from Queen’s University Management School
For better effect, you may watch it from Youtube. For audience from mainland China, you may watch this performance by click this link.
The meaning and translation of the Chinese sign language dance:
niǎo’r rào zhǐyuān shēngshēng sù 鸟儿 绕 纸鸢 声声 诉 The birds dance with the paper kite, cooing and wooing. sānyuè lái bǎi cǎo kāi 三 月 来 百 草 开 The grass blooms in March yíng xiāng mǎn xiù wàn wù sū 盈 香 满 袖 万 物 苏 The air is full of fragrance as the earth comes back to life. chóng míng hé zhe huānxiào xīnshì shū 虫 鸣 和 着 欢笑 心事 舒 The insects sing cheerfully, with no worries in mind. sānyuè lái nuǎn yáng fù 三 月 来 暖 阳 复 The world has warmed since March xiāng xié qù tàqīng chù 相 携 去 踏青 处 as the people venture out, a new green world to find mò shàng huā kāi mǎn lù xiāng rù tǔ 陌 上 花 开 满 路 香 入 土 Flowers bloom everywhere alongside the paths and the soil was soaked with incense. sānyuè lái yǒu guī rén 三 月 来 有 归 人 As people return in March mǎ tà qiǎn cǎo shēng cuīcù 马 踏 浅 草 声 催促 with horses treading the shallow grass, chūn yǒu qī guī yǒu rì 春 有 期 归 有 日 Spring has its term and people know to expect it. jīn guī tú 今 归 途 As people return again sānyuè lái shēng qíngsù 三 月 来 生 情愫 They plant their sentiment in March chūn gāng fù 春 刚 复 As Spring arrives again qíng rù gǔ 情 入 骨 The sentiment is so profound that it has been rooted to the people’s bones jiè lǚ dōng fēng hù sù 借 缕 东 风 互 诉 whispering to one another through the spring breeze xiāng ài mù 相 爱 慕 their love and affection for each other.
There is no celebration without singing and dancing.
Yangge dance (秧歌 yāngge) has a long history dating back to Han Dynasty and has become an essential part of festival celebrations in China. Every year, in the first month of the Chinese lunar calendar, Yangge will be performed to mark a prosperous new year.
In this short video presentation, we invited the Yangge Dance Team of Chinese Welfare Association Northern Ireland to send their CNY greetings with some folk dance clips for appreciation. Hope you will enjoy it.
For better effect, you may watch it fromYoutube. For audience from mainland China, you can access the video via this link
We are also grateful to Sharon Fan, one of our Chinese tutors, to perform her singing for your appreciation.
For better effect, you may watch it fromYoutube. For audience from mainland China, you may access via this link.
The Year of the Tiger is not solely celebrated by the Chinese communities worldwide. Other nationalities also celebrate their lunar New Year concurrently.
At Queen’s as we are proud of being a multicultural campus, we would like to thank our QUB KPOP Society for joining us in the celebration with their dedicated performance for the Year of The Tiger.
For audience from mainland China, please click this link for access.
With thanks to Queen’s students DENG Wei (邓维), and QIAO Zexuan (乔泽轩) for coming together to produce this Celtic/Chinese inspired performance to welcome the arrival of the Spring Festival.
For audience from mainland China, you can access the video via this link.
We would also like to share our President and Vice-Chancellor’s New Year greeting with you all. In his message, Prof Ian Greer points out that Tiger loves adventure and challenge – the two characteristics will take you afar here at Queen’s. It’s not that you have to be always the strongest – life is that using all skills you have and those you’ve learned to take you further.
For audience from mainland China, you can access the video via this link.
We hope you enjoy a happy and healthy year ahead and look forward to welcoming you to our CNY celebrations launch event on Wednesday 02/02 and the culture talks that follow.
The Language Centre at Queen’s and the BAME&I Staff Network invite staff, students, as well as members of the public, to join in welcoming the Year of The Tiger, which falls on Tuesday 1 February, with a variety of online cultural celebrations that explore the theme of Connectedness and Inclusion.
The launch event is scheduled between 13:00 and 14:15 on Wed 2 February featuring welcomes, cultural performances and a guest talk, followed by a variety of culture talks in the following weeks, as part of the Chinese Culture Forum 2022. All welcome!
The online Art Exhibition, in collaboration with the ArtEast Club, is open for viewing now. You are very welcome to leave your thoughts and votes for the ones you like best from each other the artists.
Writing Spring Festival Couplets (春联 chūnlián) and characters such as Fu (福 fú, fortune) and the character of the due zodiac sign, is one of the most common and important customs when celebrating Chinese New Year among Chinese households both home and abroad.
We are grateful to our guest calligrapher, Mr Xiaodong Huang, Director of Tian Yingzhang Calligaphy Academy (Shenzhen), to demonstrate his calligraphy with the greeting message through Spring Festival Couplets and hope you enjoy it.
For audience from mainland China, you can click this link to watch the video.
[Script] A Spring Festival greeting from Shenzhen, China. [Sound] On the arrival of the New Year, I wish you all a year of power and forth, and that all your hopes become true.
0:17 [script] The arrival of the New Year brings the fortune to us. The character Fu means fortune and it’s coming.
0:37 [script] There are many ways of writing the character Fu (福 fú, fortune).
1:08 [script] The regular script of writing the character of Hu (虎 hǔ, tiger).
1:48 [script] The semi-cursive script of writing the character of Hu (虎 hǔ, tiger)
2:14 [script] The cursive script of writing the character of Hu (虎 hǔ, tiger)
2:27 [script] There is no Spring Festival without spring couplet. The first half reads ‘The golden tiger brings its power to powder the spring’ in meaning.
4:32 [script] The second half reads ‘The great fortune blesses peace at the transition between the old and new years’.
5:30 [sound] A Chinese folk song starts
6:30 [script] The title of spring couplet reads ‘Awe-inspiring grandeur remains forever’.
It is customary that Chinese households will do house decorations by putting paper crafts of folding or cutting on windows before the new year arrives. As the year to come is Tiger, we invited Zhuoya ZHANG, a master student majoring in Film from School of Arts, English and Languages to show and tell how to make paper tiger crafts.
The workshop is followed by a series of cultural events covering a wide range of topics.
The Laba Festival (腊八节 làbā jié), a traditional Chinese festival on the 8th day of the 12th month (called 腊月 là yuè) in the lunar calendar, falls on today 10th January. It is often seen as the signal of the arrival of the Chinese New Year (or Spring Festival).
On the day, in many places across China, mainly the north, northwest and southeast, people cook and eat Laba congee (腊八粥 làbāzhōu), typically made of rice, mixed beans, various nuts and dried fruits, etc., all of which are believed to be good for health. Having Laba congee can keep one feel warm and spirited in the cold and wet weather.
Here are some examples of what some local Chinese families prepared. If you have cooked your own Laba congee, you are welcome to share your photos with us.
Laba Congee in preparation | Image@ShaWang
Laba Congee in preparation | Image@LiangWang
Laba Congee | Image@LiangWang
Laba Congee | Image@SharonFan
2022CNY celebrations at Queen’s – calling for participation
This year the Chinese New Year falls on Tuesday 1st February, when the transition from Ox to Tiger takes place.
The Language Centre at Queen’s would like to take this opportunity to invite all our students, staff members, as well as members of the public, to join in our celebrations of the Year of the Tiger. As we have been continuously working hard to turn things around for a better future, we welcome mighty powers gathered by each and every one of you through the theme of Connectedness and Inclusion. The Chinese New Year is such an occasion we choose to celebrate cultural diversity, in which the Chinese community, together with the other ethnic groups, has done its best to embrace the challenges.
Image@JeanJing
To extend our reach to diverse communities and to ensure a more inclusive programme, we would like to invite you, students and staff, Chinese and non-Chinese, to share your passions through participation and to express your interest to help enrich our programme by considering contributing to one or more of the following options:
Cultural demo and performance – short recordings of various types of cultural demo and performances, including music, singing, dance, calligraphy, magic, martial arts, anticraft, and many more.
Culture forum and workshop/exhibition – live or recorded culture talks, workshops and exhibitions. The Chinese Culture Forum runs throughout the year and updates on a monthly basis.
Festival greetingand gratitude – send us textual, graphic, audio-visual messages that contain Chinese New Year greetings and gratitude on a personal or collective level.
For more information on culture talks, please click Chinese Culture Programme. To express your interest and discuss your potential form(s) of contribution, feel free to contact us by filling the Comment box below.
To share with us your intercultural experience and perspectives of a broader range of themes and topic, please consider joining our Chinese Language Interest Group as contributors.
Our previous article, My Journey to Henan Museum written by Yang LIANG, has been invitingly responded with a new but related article contributed by a current MA in Irish Studies postgraduate at QUB, Martin Duffy, who, with great interest, shared his experience and perspective of visiting the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors in his early years when visiting Xi’an, China.
[The author happily acknowledges the copyright of all videos and pictures included in this article which are reproduced under fair use policy for educational purposes only.]
Frontispiece of the Museum site: Photo: China.org.cn
Statute of the First Qun Emperor on the Great Wall, Photo: China.org.cn
This is undoubtedly one of the “must see” sights of China. Tickets can be obtained by web, agent or at the admissions desk, and there are a variety of discounts. The Great Wall of China was augmented by the emperor to protect the newly founded Qin dynasty (221–206 BC.). In many ways this is Emperor Qin’s greatest legacy. However, the Emperor’s personal mausoleum and world-famous Terracotta Warriors are treasures to rival even the Great Wall.
What can you do on a rainy and wet winter day? Perhaps visiting a museum for an exhibition or event will be a good choice. In this post, we invite Yang LIANG (梁阳), a Queen’s graduate in TESOL from School of Social Science, Education and Social Work to share with you her recent experience of visiting Henan Museum (河南博物院Hénán Bówùyuàn).
About Henan Museum
Henan Museum, built in 1927, is one of the oldest and largest museums in China. Its site changed for several times and finally lies at Nongye Road, Jinshui District, Zhengzhou, Henan. It is a history and art museum with a collection of more than 130,000 pieces of cultural relics through the ages.
The Homepage of Henan Museum (English version). The light spot on the map of China shows you where Henan Province locates while the shape on the left displays the provincial geographical range.
After some ten years, I went to visit Henan Museum again. This time, I went there mainly for a show on ancient Chinese music performance, as well as re-visiting the relics.
– Yang Liang
The ticket is free, but one needs to book it, either online or on site. I did it via a mobile app for a slot of admission. Then I took a bus there, as the public transport system is very convenient nowadays and there is a bus station nearby.
E-ticket via a mobile app
The Nongye Road (农业路) | Image@YangLiang
The Bo Wu Yuan Station (The Museum Station) | Image@YangLiang
The outdoor self-service storage zone | Image@YangLiang
The collection of photos show what the main entrance looks like and the main exhibition halls from different angles.
Henan Museum, front | Image@YangLiang
Henan Museum, side | Image@YangLiang
Henan Museum, side | Image@YangLiang
This is what it looks like inside of the museum with some of the exhibits. For a full range of exhibition, you can return to the Museum’s website above.
Henan Museum, inside, the hallway | Image@YangLiang
An introduction to female clothing in Tang Dynasty | Image@YangLiang
An introduction to the palace lamp in Han Dynasty| Image@YangLiang
The exhibit of Changxin Palace Lamp | Image@YangLiang
The collage of the exhibit from different angles | Image@YangLiang
Fu Hao wine vessel exhibit | Image@YangLiang
As a layperson of architecture and archaeology, I’m not going to focus on these constructions and relics. However, I’d like to share with you what I felt about this visit from my personal experience of watching the show performance and some other observation.
I watched the music show before walking to the exhibition halls, as I was more interested in the new forms and functions museum nowadays promote – not only for educational purposes, but also to entertain visitors of all walks of life. I was totally impressed by the quality of ancient music performance, fully immersed in the show and the marvelous acoustic effects which allowed me to travel back to thousands of years ago. Here are a few clips of performances that I recorded:
Nowadays, more and more young people enjoy visiting museums, attending both exhibitions and relevant events like talks and shows which encourage more dynamics and interactive engagement, in contrast to the formulaic stereotypes that visitors just took photos around in museums and left without much understanding and appreciation of such exhibitions. I recall that decades ago I went there seeing the same kinds of lifeless objects without any interest in observing, discovering, and imagining how and why they were relevant to me in history and have impacted on my life, let alone a good level of appreciation. If one has no good knowledge about these exhibits, they would easily feel so bored and want to escape.
This time, when I got it in hand, I found the idea of blind boxes, or mystery boxes, really appealing as I never could have guessed what kind of things were inside until I opened it with a ‘Wow’.
(The added line of characters read ‘拆盲盒的快乐 ~’, meaning the happiness (快乐 kuàikè) of opening (拆 chāi) the blind box (盲盒 mánghé). The photo shows that there is a set of samples of palace maid band designed by Henan Museum.)
I also came across two boys who were giving a video call to their mum, making a live broadcast while walking around. They told their mum what they saw and how they were impressed, and their mum sounded really excited over the phone.
I would also like to attribute this wonderful experience to the advance of modern technology which makes these old objects alive. For example, the amazing lighting and acoustic effect made me feel as if I stood in a traditional Chinese ink painting, exploring a wonderland when I saw many white cranes fly in the sky and heard the stream flowing pleasantly. Wow! Who wouldn’t enjoy this kind of visiting experience?
