Chinatown is a great way to begin looking for Chinese characters in your home country. You’ll find useful characters or bigrams (2-character combinations) repeated frequently, which is handy if you’re a beginner studying Written Chinese! Most of these common Chinese symbols are found as traditional Chinese characters, but it’s often helpful to look at the… Read More
At the end of each year, a list of the ‘hottest’ words and phrases from the year are posted on Chinese social media. Just like trending memes on Twitter, Chinese social media has its own version of scathing cultural remarks and self-mockery. Here are some 5 of the hottest Chinese slang of 2017 with an… Read More
Chinese opera 中国戏剧 (zhōng guó xì jù) has existed for hundreds of years, and has its own conventions and individual style. Whilst there are various different types of Chinese opera, in the modern-day, Beijing or Peking Opera is the most common type of opera and is said to be an amalgamation of the different opera… Read More
In China, there is an old saying: 药补不如食补 (yào bǔ bù rúshí bǔ) ‘the benefits of medicine as not as good as nutrition.’ Consuming an appropriate amount of certain foods is often found to have health benefits and this is strongly connected with Traditional Chinese Medicine. Whilst the word ‘superfood’ seems contemporary and faddy, food… Read More
Image Source The introduction of dance into Chinese opera at the beginning of the last century massively changed how the Chinese people experienced opera. Previously, it was only listened to, but now strong aesthetic standards were being established and allowed people to express and experience the beauty of Opera in a different way. The person… Read More
What is ‘Chinese civilization’ 华夏文明 (huá xià wén míng)? Chinese civilization 华夏文明 (huá xià wén míng) begins, according to records, with the creation of the Xia dynasty 夏朝 (xià cháo) in 2070 BC. Although the Xia dynasty was the first ‘civilization’ in China, there were people who lived on the land well before Yu the Great… Read More