Tag: People to People

St Cuthbert’s Silk – Connections, ancient and modern

Here in Beijing, a significant academic conference has just come to a close. From November 6th to November 8th, Beijing hosted the world’s first World Conference of Classics. The event was co-hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Ministry of Education of China, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China, the Ministry of Culture of Greece, and the Academy of Athens. An important outcome of the event was the establishment of a China Classical Civilisation Research Institute in Athens. The event gathered four hundred and eighty-five scholars from over 30 countries and regions. The event reminds us […]

SACU member Jan Johnson’s Chinese New Year

The SACU mission is to tell stories of people to people friendship between Britain and China. I am delighted to share the Chair’s Blog with our members so that we can hear a wider range of voices. In this Blog, it’s an honour to be able to bring you SACU member Jan Johnson’s article about her Chinese New Year experiences. “I’ve been interested in China for a long time and have been teaching myself Mandarin Chinese. I’m disabled and don’t get out very often or for very long but my friend/carer and I met a lovely Chinese lady called Rosita […]

Changing faces of Chengdu

For the last week I have travelled with Grade 9 and Grade 10 students from my school in the city of Chengdu, which is the capital of the south-westerly province of Sichuan. You’ll be familiar with the name from countless restaurants in England claiming to serve ‘Szechuan’ dishes. It is not my job to act as an advertising agent for ‘Travel China’ so I’ll get the publicity out of the way immediately. If you have the chance to visit this fascinating location, please do so! In this blog we are in the business of building bridges of understanding between the […]

China catches a cold

My phrase of the week in my rather limited Chinese has been ‘ni leng bu leng? which translates as ‘are you feeling the cold?’. Chinese has this wonderful way of using paired, balanced phrases like this way of asking questions which are not only elegant but wonderfully convenient for struggling foreigners to remember. The answer to the question can be given in another classic Chinese phrase – ‘leng si le’ – ‘cold enough to die, but reduced to three terse, emphatic characters. After an incredibly idyllic, balmy autumn which lingered deceptively on into late November, temperatures have taken their inevitable […]

Beijing – A Simple Life

The author outside his Beijing suburb home In this blog I will talk about the sheer, simple ordinariness of my life in China. If you haven’t been to China you might have all sorts of ideas about what it is like to live here, as I have done for ten years. Maybe you have some slightly negative views of a limited or restricted life here. Maybe you have romantic or exotic illusions of life in an ‘oriental’ country. The outstanding feature of my life for the last ten years has been its wonderful stability and everyday ordinariness. In the UK […]