As we mark the centenary of the literary transformation of written Chinese, we are reminded that the great vehicle for cultural expression in traditional China, poetry, has undergone one hundred years of experimentation, much of it stilted and risible.… Read

The following excerpt is from a lengthy essay on the hapless state of intellectual and academic life in China today. For readers of China Heritage, given the plangent state of affairs in international scholarship and academia, the intellectual and political landscape the author describes, and castigates, might not seem to be particular unfamiliar (see my 2006 meditation on this ‘harmonic convergence’: Shared Values).… Read

The Fifteenth Day of the First Month of the New Year 正月十五 marks the first full moon of the Lunar New Year. Generally called Yuanxiao 元宵, literally ‘First Evening’, it is also the height of the Lantern Festival 燈節 which was traditionally celebrated from the Hanging of Lanterns 上燈 on the Thirteenth Day to the Taking Down of Lanterns 落燈 on the Eighteenth Day of the First Month.… Read

This year, 2017, marks the beginning a momentous centenary for Chinese culture and the Sinophone world. Although the New Culture Movement 新文化運動 is conventionally dated from the founding by Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 in Shanghai of the journal La Jeunesse 青年 in May 1915 (renamed 新青年 the following year), for many January 1917 is an equally important watershed.… Read

The Ninth Day of the First Month 正月初九 of the Lunar New Year follows on from the Establishment of Spring 立春. It is regarded as a time when life returns to the myriad things 萬象回春. … Read