Following last year’s lecture Built in Characters – The Architecture of Chinese Script, this year’s International Chinese Language Day lecture of April 20th (starting at 11:00 AM)
invites you on a different sensory journey – one that explores Chinese culture through the culinary world embedded in its characters.
From the rice bowl that shapes daily greetings to the tea ceremony that encodes philosophical ideals, this lecture reveals how Chinese characters are not merely written symbols but recipes for cultural understanding. Participants will discover how components like 饣 (food), 米 (rice), and 艹 (plants) create a linguistic menu that has nourished Chinese civilization for millennia.
The lecture is divided into four parts:
The Flavor Palette – Key radicals in food characters
The Kitchen – Cooking methods encoded in characters (fire, water, and their transformations)
The Table – Food as social ritual: harmony, family, and the character for “home”
Modern Tables – From ancient kitchens to digital food culture
The speaker – Dr. Lu Xiaohong is an associate professor at the School of International Chinese Studies at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China. She is the supervisor for the master's program of International Chinese Education and the administrative director at the Institute of Global Chinese Language Teacher Education at the school. Her teaching and research interests include Teacher Professional Development, Teaching Chinese/English as a Second Language, Cross-cultural Communication, Chinese Language and Culture, etc.
She was a visiting scholar at New York University from 2006 to 2007, then at St. Olaf College in 2009. She taught Chinese language and culture in the U.S from 2012-2016 and in Belgium from 2018-2020.
We kindly invite you to join the online lecture on Microsoft Teams：
Microsoft Teams meeting
Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/319703202578311?p=FXrNaNrYYxtv7zoNPb
Meeting ID: 319 703 202 578 311
Passcode: GK2Tn3EL
Or watch LIVE on Youtube:
https://youtube.com/live/zAWPUPwyHaw?feature=share
The lecture will be held in English.