To celebrate this year’s Cultural and Natural Heritage Day, Xiangqiao District held an activity with the theme of inheriting intangible cultural heritage and living a healthy life in Yixi Central Primary School. Students were exposed to quite a lot of heritages and showed interest in native arts and crafts. The event aimed to promote the city’s fine traditional culture, allow pupils to know more about the local cultural treasures and increase their popularity, enabling protection, inheritance and development of local heritage.

Local authorities made display boards with pictures and texts of fifteen representative intangible heritages to publicize their charm and stories to staff and students. Also, inheritors and masters of local snacks, lotus lanterns, Kung Fu tea, handmade red clay teapot and storytelling came and gave talks. Such close interaction brought about appreciation, realization and contentment of the audience.  

Fang Shuguang, a provincial master and inheritor of Chaozhou gastronomy, gave a detailed introduction to local snacks and made spring rolls, glutinous rice dumplings and pork balls with kuci (a kind of vegetable) on site. Subsequently, students handmade the snacks under instruction and had a taste, finding them particularly delicious. Huang Tao, an inheritor of the Chaozhou lotus-shaped lantern, a national intangible cultural heritage, also came and explained everything of the lantern from materials to patterns to procedures. Under his guidance, students were very interested in making small-sized models. Those beautiful works lit up the dreams of the arts.

Supported by the district cultural center, the district library, and the town library, school staff and students received permission for the district’s digital library for free and applied for district library cards in the activity. They also got free books, brochures on relics, intangible cultural heritage, anti-pornography and anti-illegal schemes, and Green Bookmarks, special bookmarks designed for World Intellectual Property Day. In total, more than 100 library cards, 300 books and 500 brochures were distributed. Moreover, the cultural center invited the district photographer’s association to capture memorable moments to promote the appeal of intangible cultural heritage.