The Dragon Boat Festival (端午节/端午節 duān wǔ jié ), is one of the three most important festivals in traditional Chinese culture. It occurs on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in Chinese calendar and for this year it will be on 3 June, 2022.

In modern China, the festival is known to commemorate the death of the poet and patriotic minister Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BC) of the ancient state of Chu during the Zhou Dynasty. Qu was wrongly accused of treason after being set up by official from the rival Qin State and was sent to exile. Twenty-eight years later, Chu’s capital had been overtaken by the Qin. In despair, Qu Yuan committed suicide by drowning himself in the Miluo River in despair.

Qu was adored by people everywhere and the local people tried to protect him in the afterlife by paddling out in the river on boats to scare the fish away and dropping sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves into the water so that Qu would be well fed in the afterlife. That’s where the customs of rowing dragon boats and eating sticky rice wraps (粽子 – zòng zi) come from.

Watch the video below to learn the Five Interesting Facts about the Dragon Boat Festival.

Finally, check out food blogger Wei Guo‘s recipes on how to make sweet and savoury Zongzi HERE

The Confucius Institute for Scotland in the University of Edinburgh will be closed from Monday 20 December and reopen on Monday 10 January 2022.  We send best wishes for the festive season to all our students and friends and we look forward to seeing you in 2022.

Classes will start again from week beginning 24 January 2022 and booking for these classes is now open.

Speaker: Hsuan Hsu (Professor of English, University of California, Davis)

Title: Atmo-Orientalism and Olfactory Aesthetics

Chair/Discussant: Xuelei Huang, University of Edinburgh

Date and Time: Wednesday, 24 Nov. 5 – 6:30 pm (GMT)

Register HERE

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Abstract:

This talk will consider the long history of “atmo-orientalism,” a mode of racial thinking and racial sensing that apprehends Asian immigrants as deviant assemblages of bodies and air. Tracing atmo-orientalism back to nineteenth-century public health discourses and the persistence of miasma theory in popular imagination, I focus on accounts of Asiatic odor that frequently associated Asian bodies with the dehumanizing effects of capitalist modernity. I then consider a range of Asian diasporic works that challenge this pattern of olfactory racism, including fiction by Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Larissa Lai, as well as art installations by Anicka Yi and Beatrice Glow.

Speaker Bio:

Hsuan L. Hsu is a professor of English at UC Davis and author of The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (NYU, 2020), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), and Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010). He is currently writing a book about Air Conditioning for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

Key Information

Course: Chinese Brush Painting – Landscape (Daytime)

Date & Time:  Thursdays 18^th November – 16^th December, 10.00 – 11.30 am

Online teaching time: 7.5 hour

Homework: There will be additional homework after each session and the tutor will also provide individual email feedback, including technical support to deal with relevant queries.

Student level: This course is suitable for both beginners and advanced students. It could be a following up course for students who attended the Chinese landscape painting (mountain & water) class before. All practice materials will be refreshed from the previous class.

Class size: A minimum of five students are required to ensure the class goes ahead.

Location: This class will be delivered digitally using the online platform Zoom.

Why should I take this course?

‘The unique China landscape painting developed more than a thousand years ago, and brought to perfection by generations of master painters.’ Landscape, Shan Shui, literally translated as ‘mountain and water’, is one of the most popular subjects in Chinese brush painting.

What does it cover?

This course will mix online based demonstration and critiques.

About the teacher:

This course will be led by Chi Zhang – an experienced instructor, shortlisted for ‘Sky Art Landscape Artist of the year 2015’, whose work has been projected across Edinburgh castle during the 2015 Military Tattoo. For more information and to see Chi’s work please visit http://www.chizhangartist.com.

How much does it cost?

£85 (£75/concessions), concession is offered only to full time students and UoE staff.

Please also allow up to £35 if you don’t have your own art materials. The tutor will provide guidance on purchasing the materials after registration.

Booking & Further information:

To optimise the learning experience a maximum capacity has been set per group – so space is very limited! To secure one of the limited spaces on this course, please use the University’s ePay system.

Due to the outbreak of Covid-19, our administrative team is working from home. Please contact us by email info@confuciusinstitute.ac.uk.

One to one tutorials and small group workshops can also be arranged. Please email info@confuciusinstitute.ac.uk for more info.

Speaker: Professor James M. Hargett 何瞻 , Professor of Chinese Studies, The University at Albany, State University of New York

Title: Anchors of Stability: The Origins of Place Names in China

Chair/Discussant: Dr Julian Ward, University of Edinburgh

Date and Time: Wednesday, 13 Oct. 2 – 4 pm (UK time)

Location: Online via Zoom

Registration: 

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrf-qgrjorGdT-nJkxv1x5mB2WUgzqJK9u

Please register in advance for this lecture. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Abstract:

The use of place-names in China predates its written history, which extends back at least 3,500 years. While the basic principles of toponym formation in ancient China are similar to those in other cultures around the world, early in its history a process took place that led to a standardization of the practices by which place-names were formulated. The central argument in this essay is that the essential features of place-name nomenclature in China were already in place before the Qin unification in 221 BCE.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. James M. Hargett (何瞻) is Professor of Chinese Studies at The University at Albany, State University of New York. He received his PhD from Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Indiana University. His research interest focuses on the prose literature, travel diaries, historical-geography, and cultural history of traditional China, especially that of the Song dynasty (960-1279). His recent publications include Jade Mountains and Cinnabar Pools: The History of Travel Literature in Imperial China (University of Washington Press, 2018) and “Anchors of Stability: Place-Names in Early China” in Sino-Platonic Papers (2021).

You are warmly invited to the first Asian Studies seminar this autumn semester.

Professor David Cheng Chang 常成, Associate Professor of History, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology will give talk on The Forgotten War or the Hijacked War? How Chinese POWs and Taiwan Hijacked the Korean War

Chair/Discussant: Prof Aaron Moore, University of Edinburgh

Date and Time: Wednesday, 29 Sept. 3 – 5 pm (UK time)

Location: Online via Zoom

Zoom Link for Registration:

https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kdemqqzIqEtWofngGZixLg9mfEpiytWTE

Please register in advance for this lecture. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Abstract:

The Korean War was in reality two wars: the first half was a war over territory from June 1950 to November 1951; the second half was a war over POWs from late 1951 to July 1953. While the first war restored the territorial status quo ante, the second war’s only visible outcome was the “defection” of 14,220 Chinese prisoners to Taiwan and 7,574 North Korean prisoners to South Korea, the cost of which was a near doubling of the length of the war and numerous casualties on all sides. Contrary to the popular belief that an American conspiracy was to blame, Chang argues that two ill-conceived US policies—prisoner reindoctrination (“brainwashing”) and voluntary repatriation—enabled the rise of anti-Communist prisoners, who persuaded and coerced fellow POWs to renounce their homeland, thus effectively hijacking the war agenda. This surprising outcome was a major embarrassment to Washington, a total humiliation for Beijing, but a boon to Taipei. To cover up the true nature of the war over POWs, the three governments became co-conspirators of silence in making the war forgotten. Using multi-national archival documents and interviews with more than 90 POWs, Chang reveals the interplay between US policies, Chinese POWs, and Taiwan’s agents. In the talk, the author will also sketch the divergent trajectories of three prisoner leaders: a missionary school-educated pro-Communist interpreter; a Whampoa-educated Nationalist paratrooper-commando who became a Communist truck driver and later an agent of US special forces; and a former Nationalist policeman who eventually went to Argentina via India.

Speaker bio:

David Cheng Chang (常成) is Associate Professor of History at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In 2021–2022, he is the Radcliffe-Harvard Yenching Institute Joint Fellow at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of California, San Diego. He studies the Cold War, US-China relations, and the social history of war and revolution as experienced by the common people, such as China’s WWII interpreters and Korean War soldiers and prisoners. The Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War (Stanford University Press, 2020) is his first book.