Book series opens conversations on culture

Chinese Intangible Cultural Heritage Readers: Key Terms and Their Stories is a well-presented, fascinating, educational and useful series.

It was published by Nanjing University Press this year and its chief editors are Wei Xiangqing and Liu Runze.

There are 10 small books, each focusing on a major aspect of Chinese culture. These include two concerned with Chinese musical theater, jingju (Peking Opera) and the more classical Kunqu Opera; and there is one on Chinese classical music, the wonderful seven-stringed zither-like guqin and its music. There are several books on brocade and sericulture, paper-cutting and engraved block printing, as well as architecture. The Duanwu Festival, or the Dragon Boat Festival, is an example of the main festivals in traditional Chinese culture covered in one of the books.

It is a reasonable balance of topics, but one can always complain about omissions. As one who loves traditional Chinese landscape painting, I wish one of the books covered this subject. It's a form of painting that seems more profound and more beautiful in Chinese culture than in any other. However, there are so many aspects of culture that it would be quite unfair to expect every field to be covered.