Broadcasting Time: 2006-06-04

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Cuca: Beijing University Holds India Festival
 
This year has been designated China-India Friendship Year. As part of the year's bilateral exchanges, many cultural activities have already been underway in both India and China. For instance, last week a festival featuring almost every aspect of India was launched on the campus of Beijing University, or Beida, one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in China. Beida's India Festival presents a lively and vivid picture of this other great Asian nation to Chinese students in Beijing. Manli has the details.

What you're listening to now is the music that accompanied an Indian dance that was unveiled during the ten-day India Festival recently held at Beijing University. Jointly sponsored by the university's India Studies Center and the Embassy of India in China, the festival features Indian film screenings and various performances of Indian song and dance, as well as exhibitions, lectures and symposiums, not to mention the many parties sponsored jointly by Chinese and Indian students throughout the 10-day event.

On opening day, the festival's Indian photo exhibit was the first thing to attract many Chinese students. The students lingered on photos of the country's beautiful landscape, places of historical interest, and traditional customs, as well as those featuring its historical figures alongside pictures of regular people in the country. Cai Yulin was among those admiring photos of Mahatma Gandhi, India's Father of the Nation. She's happy that the campus has gathered so many things about India.

"I think holding this India Festival is a great thing. It unveiled so many previously unknown things to us, as it provided us with different aspects of India. China and India are both important developing countries and there should be more such cultural exchange activities between them."

Actually, both boasting great ancient civilizations, China and India's recorded cultural exchanges date back to some 2000 years ago. Ever since the 2nd century BC, ancient Chinese diplomats and merchants had been traveling along the famous "silk road." However, more than the road's final European destination, India was also an important route through which Chinese goods could be transported west.

Even more than trade, Buddhism, which originated in India, spread to China in the first Century BC, thereafter becoming an important part of Chinese culture. Even today, the story of 7th Century Chinese monk Xuan Zang traveling to India to study Buddhism is still very well known in the Indian city of Naranda—Xuan Zang's ancient host.