Month: January 2022

The Lantern Festival, also known as the “Little Lunar New Year,” falls on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar calendar and is the end of the New Year celebration. The ancients called the night “Xiao.” It is the night of the first full moon in the year, and it is also the night of the rejuvenation of the earth, symbolizing the coming of spring. On this day, people light up beautiful lanterns, set off fireworks, solve riddles on lanterns, and eat Yuanxiao or Tangyuan to celebrate this happy festival to express the continuation of the celebration of the New Year. How much do you know about the origin and customs of the Lantern Festival? Lantern Festival origins There are many beliefs about the origin of the Lantern Festival. Two likely origins are: the purpose of commemorating ...

Dongzhi, also known as Winter Solstice, Winter Festival, and Tunji (in Japanese), is the twenty-second solar term of the 24 solar terms. The ancients divided a year into 24 solar periods based on the annual motion of the sun. Each period was called a solar term. The winter solstice festival originated in the Zhou Dynasty, flourished in the Tang and Song dynasties, and is still one of the most significant solar terms today. The court and the people had always attached great importance to it, and emperors had held grand sacrificial ceremonies since the Zhou Dynasty. In the ancient Tang dynasty, the Winter Solstice was even as important as the Lunar New Year. The winter solstice generally falls on December 21 or December 22 in the Gregorian calendar. This year, the Winter Solstice is on Decem...

Earlier this academic year, CC launched its year-long series, “Forever Foreign: Asian America, Global Asia, and the Problem of Anti-Asian Racism,” to address the ongoing, racist violence the Asian and Asian American diasporas in the United States face. Anti-Asian violence is not new. During the pandemic, the increase of news coverage of anti-Asian violence, such as the assaults on the elderly and the Atlanta shooting on March 16th, 2021, brought more awareness to the types of traumas an Asian person could experience.  The purpose of the “Forever Foreign” series is, as Professor Yogesh Chandrani states, to invite the CC community to “unsettle popular understandings of Asia and Asian diaspora communities” by bringing awareness to the many different histories, narratives, and experien...

The high rate of economic growth has been an important element of the environmental debate in Asia. Meeting the desire for economic growth with long-term protection of the environment is one of the most fundamental challenges in attempting to achieve sustainable development into the next century in Asia as well as the rest of the world. Since the western model of industrial development is not viable for most Asian countries or for the world as a whole, learning about China and Bhutan is necessary for other developing countries as well as the rest of the world. Even though China and Bhutan are neighbours, their environmental policies are largely different from each other. The evolving environmental policies in China and Bhutan offer global perspectives on how domestic circumstances can affe...