Featured Within the 3rd Annual Chinese Culture Festival

Participating in this year’s 3^rd Annual Chinese Culture Festival is Mr. Bill Porter who will present his talk, “Yellow River” on September 24^th at the UA Poetry Center. This lecture is free and open to the public and is part of the 3rd Annual Chinese Culture Festival hosted by the Confucius Institute at the University of Arizona (CIUA) and co-sponsored by the College of Humanities. Poems will be recited and Chinese music will be played by the Summer Thunder Ensemble as the background. Through a series of slides, Mr. Bill Porter, award-winning author and translator, will take attendees from the river’s mouth in the Bohai Sea to its source high on the Tibetan Plateau, a journey of more than 3,000 miles through nine Chinese provinces. As Porter traveled through the cradle of Chinese civilization, he visited the hometowns and graves of its key historical figures, men such as Confucius, Laozi and Bodhidharma, even Genghis Khan, as well as China’s most sacred mountains and its great repositories of Daoist and Buddhist art. Porter's talk will be based on his recently released Yellow River Odyssey, already a bestseller in China in its Chinese translation, which recounts his journey to the river's source in 1991, when " … his hair was thick and his belly was flat and the world was black and white."

This year is the tenth anniversary of the establishment of Confucius Institutes around the world. CIUA will join other Confucius Institutes to hold a Confucius Institute Day as the opening of the 2014 CIUA Chinese Culture Festival. Special lectures on Chinese concepts of time and on Confucius as an historical figure will be presented by faculty from the College of Humanities' Department of East Asian Studies. The theme of this year's festival is "Health Promotion and Wellness." In addition to the annual language competition, culture exhibition, concert, and Chinese martial arts demonstration, CIUA will present a special Chinese food therapy dinner lecture, a professional workshop on traditional Chinese medicine, and a lecture on acupuncture and health by faculty from leading universities of Chinese medicine in China. Tucsonans are guaranteed a rich cultural experience. Last year, more than 3,000 Arizonans participated in the CIUA Chinese Culture Festival.

Co-sponsors: UA College of Humanities, UA Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, UA School of Anthropology, UA School of Music, Tucson Sino Choir, Tucson Chinese Cultural Center, Han University of Traditional Medicine. The festival will be held on the University of Arizona campus and other venues across the Tucson metropolitan area. All events are open to the public and most are free. Please visit the CIUA website, http://confucius.arizona.edu, or call 520-626-5124 for additional information about the Chinese Culture Festival and the Institute.