Festival Blog

I started taking calligraphy classes in 1997 at a local museum in Nanjing dedicated to a renowned modern calligrapher Lin Sanzhi (1898–1989).

The food should be placed in order on a ritual table by the law of ancestral rite.

Shiyu Wang began interning at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage last summer. Originally from Yunnan Province, China, she moved to the United States to earn an MFA in film media from American University.

As part of background research for a possible future Smithsonian Folklife Festival themed around medical traditions, we visited Dr. James Duke at his garden in Fulton, Maryland.

Gao Fenglian, deeply affected by her family traditions, has loved paper cutting since she was a little girl. She feels most comfortable with scissors and paper in hand.

What is ethnic media and why is it relevant today? In this podcast, several figures active in ethnic media discuss its fundamental importance to societies across the world.

Dancing in the park is a fairly new phenomenon, and its development is related to other things such as urbanization across the country and changing demographics and family structure in China.

Bicycles in China have long been perceived as a widely used form of cheap transportation. However, this tradition has decreased drastically in recent years with regard to air pollution, new subway lines, and gentrification of cities.

By the 1950s, there were around 4,300 Chinese restaurants in the United States. Currently there are around 50,000—outnumbering U.S. McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and Pizza Huts combined.