למד סינית בסין עם בית הספר קיטס

The Tu people mainly feed on highland barley, wheat and potato and make a dozen kinds of vegetables like radish, Chinese cabbage and lettuce. In their daily life, they have Chinese sauerkraut, with meat as supplement. They like milk tea and parched buttered flour. On happy occasions they make varieties of fried foods and handpicked […]

The Nadun Festival is a time of socialization and entertainment for the Tu people to celebrate a good harvest. Starting at the end of summer harvest, the festival lasts for about two months till the arrival of autumn. It is considered as “the longest carnival in the world”. The annual festival consists of collective activities […]

The Hezhe nationality mainly lives in Heilongjiang Province. The Hezhe people speak Hezhe, a language with no written form, which belongs to the Altaic language family. According to the historical record, the Hezhe minority may date back to more than 6,000 years ago, when it was called “Sushen” in the pre-Qin period, “Heishui” in the […]

Hezhes, with Shamanism as their belief, believe that everything has its mystical powers and that the world and the heavenly bodies, though controlled by gods, each have its soul. Hezhes make sacrificial offerings to varieties of gods for their blessing. Shamanism, as a kind of culture, has played an important role in many aspects of […]

Hezhes take fish as their staple food and have many cooking methods. They can fry or stew fish, and they like to make fish floss for storage, such as stir-fried fish, raw fish, sashimi and fish shavings, etc. Quite unique are Hezhe traditional clothing, which include long fish leather gowns, fish leather leggings, and fish […]

People had other ways of choosing a wedding day. For example, in the old times, people preferred to hold weddings in the spring. There are explanations for this in “Comprehensive Discussion in the White Tiger Hall” (complied in the 1st century), “spring is the time for plants to grow and for animals and humans to […]

There seems to have been more taboos about the year of a wedding than about the auspicious days. In the Chinese lunar calendar, the 1st day of spring may fall before or after the Spring Festival. If the 1st day of spring is before the Spring Festival of a year and the next first day […]

Even after the wedding day had been chosen, it might still undergo unexpected changes. For example, if a family member died during the engagement period. The wedding would be postponed. One reason was to show respect for the dead; the other was to avoid being affected by this unlucky event. There were occasions when the […]

As to the origin of “méi pó”, a Chinese term for matchmakers, there is a popular folktale in Shaanxi Province. Long time ago, people from the two banks of the Wei River seldom communicated with each other, lat alone forming marriage alliances. One year, a young man coming from the north of the Wei River […]

A matchmaker is important in three ways. Firstly, as Confucianism gradually attained a dominant position in social ideology, people began to impose heavy instructions on the contacts between unmarried men and women. Since parents wished to arrange their children’s marriages based on comparable conditions in social status, physical appearance and betrothal gifts/dowry, a matchmaker would […]