Fun and festivities as The Open University celebrates Chinese New Year of the Dragon 2024

Happy Chinese New Year of the Dragon! (龙年 lóng nián)

On Thursday 1^st February, 2024, the OU Online Confucius Institute hosted another fun and engaging celebration for the Chinese Lunar New Year on the Milton Keynes campus. Open to all OU staff and postgraduate students, we were delighted to welcome over 200 people including members of the OU senior team. Attendees joined in with the festivities creating a lovely, energising atmosphere and opportunity to catch up with one another face to face.

KAN Qian, Director of the OU Online CI said: “It is especially important now because many colleagues work from home and so events like this bring them to campus and gives people an opportunity to network and reconnect”.  Professor Mark Durkin, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Business and Law commented that he was 'honoured to visit the Chinese New year celebrations hosted by the OU Online CI. Qian and her team did a great job hosting guests and there was a wide range of activities and food celebrating Chinese culture. Tremendous!'.

Attendees had fun trying their hand at a range of activities from traditional paper cutting, ink calligraphy, taster Tai-Chi/Qigong sessions and joining in with lively silk flag and fan dancing performances. Traditional Chinese snacks and refreshments such as spring rolls and tea were enjoyed by many as well as an interactive quiz with prizes. 

You can see photos from the day here. If you attended the event and wish to share your own pictures, you can also upload these to the padlet. The competition to showcase your ink calligraphy and paper cutting creations will be running until Saturday 10^th February so please upload your pictures here and we will be announcing the winner on the padlet in the coming days!

We would like to express a special thanks to the following facilitators without whom the event would not have been possible!

• YU Feixia from the CI from University of Central Lancashire for her elegant Tai-chi/Qigong performance and taster sessions
• Jennifer Fung, Sandra Peng and Ly Voo from Milton Keynes Chinese Fusion Dance Group for their amazing artistic fan dance performance and interactive dancing afterwards
• CHEN Zhiqiong (Warwick University) and CHEN Ye (UCL IOE CI) for patiently illustrating and facilitating how to write Chinese calligraphy
• LIU Shuyi and LI Xiaoxi (Goldsmith University CI) for their skills in papercutting and helping participants with their own creations

A big thank you to you all! 

Dr Laura Paterson, Head of School of Languages and Applied Linguistics (LAL) remarked:

“This year's Chinese New Year Celebration was another huge hit. The event brought together people from all across the OU to celebrate and learn about Chinese culture. It was so nice to see just how many people were in attendance to join in the fun. This annual event has become a highlight in the calendar and is a great example of how we can promote intercultural understanding and encourage wellbeing across and beyond the university”.

If you’d like to learn more about Chinese Lunar New Year and the year of the Dragon, Dr KAN Qian has written a short article for OpenLearn with pictures and audio to teach a few useful phrases too.

To hear about future events and activities from the Online Confucius Institute, you can join our mailing list by emailing online-ci@open.ac.uk.

Please enjoy the video from the days' events below.  On behalf of the OU Online Confucius Institute team, we wish you all a very happy, healthy and prosperous year!