Every year, during the spring, our institute hosts the “Confucius Institute Open Days,” where visitors had the opportunity to experience Chinese culture live. This year, we introduced Chinese culture remotely on the Zoom platform.
We started the events with posts on social networks about Chinese folk instruments, comparing them with Lithuanian ones. We introduced perhaps the most common Chinese instrument, guzheng [gudzheng] 古筝, which stands out for its ability to reproduce the sounds of nature, like the impression of flowing water. Guzheng is a Chinese string instrument with a history of several thousand years, with 21 or even 26 strings. This instrument is a bit similar to our Lithuanian kankles, but has an obvious difference - it is even 1.6 m long. Guzheng is also special in that musicians put nail-shaped thimbles on the fingers of one or both hands, thus producing a purer and "sharper" sound. Whoever you were at our institute must have seen that we have this instrument.
May 27 we continued our acquaintance with Chinese culture and introduced Shaolin Monastery and martial arts with a long tradition - Shao Lin Wu Gong 少林 武功 - to sports lovers. This lecture - training was led by Deividas Vaškelis, an instructor of the Lithuanian traditional Ushu Association "Shaolin" club "Flow", who got acquainted with Chinese martial arts back in 1990 and has been deepening its philosophy for more than 20 years, further practices and passing on knowledge to others. Practicing these martial arts not only maintains physical form, but discovers harmony both within oneself and in relation to the environment. We hope that for a while we managed to feel the spirit of these martial arts.
At the end of May, we had the opportunity to greet us directly with China, where our tea master Dora Luo, who is also the founder of an English school, remotely presented us with a tea drinking ceremony in southern way. In this demonstrational lecture, we got acquainted with the tea drinking traditions of Shantou City (Guangdong Province, China). It was interesting to see the differences compared to the northern part. Southerners, for example, keep the elements of the tea drinking ceremony particularly strong, using round porcelain trays instead of the square ones we are used to. The people of this region are characterized by exceptional warmth and hospitality. Did you feel it from a distance? We hope you did and we look forward to our events in the new autumn season.