文化 | Hello China 英文版《你好中国》（31-32）

2019暑假已至！本号试图利用假期时间，每天分享Hello China 英文版《你好，中国》，每期2集，从不同角度用英语阐释中华文化。为英语，尤其是高中英语学习中华文化铺路。

需要说明的是Hello China 英文版《你好，中国》是由中国国家广电总局主办、中国国际广播电台、高等教育出版社联合策划实施的大型多媒体系列文化项目。本分享视频来自腾讯视频，版权归原作者所有。本分享旨在学生英语学习。

《你好，中国》选取了100个代表中国传统文化精髓的汉语词汇，从不同侧面反映中国文化的博大精深，加深国外民众对中国和中华文化的了解。

31 Spring Festival and its colourful traditions

Chinese New Year, usually known as the Spring Festival in modern China, is an important Chinese festival celebrated at the turn of the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar. It is one of several Lunar New Years in Asia. 

Celebrations traditionally run from the evening preceding the first day, to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first calendar month. The first day of the New Year falls on the new moon between January 21 and February 20. In 2018, the first day of the Lunar New Year was on Friday, 16 February, initiating the year of the Dog.

It is one of the world's most prominent and celebrated festivals, and involves the largest annual mass human migration in the world. It is a major holiday in Greater China and has strongly influenced the lunar new year celebrations of China's neighbouring cultures, including the Korean New Year (seol), the Tết of Vietnam, and the Losar of Tibet. It is also celebrated worldwide in countries with significant Overseas Chinese populations, including Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Australia, the Philippines and Mauritius, as well as many countries in North America and Europe.

The New Year festival is centuries old and associated with several myths and customs. Traditionally, the festival was a time to honour deities as well as ancestors. Within China, regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the Lunar New Year vary widely. Often, the evening preceding Lunar New Year's Day is an occasion for Chinese families to gather for the annual reunion dinner. It is also traditional for every family to thoroughly clean the house, in order to sweep away any ill-fortune and to make way for incoming good luck. Windows and doors are decorated with red colour paper-cuts and couplets with popular themes of "good fortune" or "happiness", "wealth", and "longevity". Other activities include lighting firecrackers and giving money in red paper envelopes. In about one third of the Mainland population, or 500 million Northerners, dumplings (especially those of vegetarian fillings) feature prominently in the meals celebrating the festival.

32 Qingming Festival

The Qingming or Ching Ming Festival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day in English, is atraditional Chinese festival on the first day of the fifth solar term of the traditional Chineselunisolar calendar. This makes it the 15th day after the Spring Equinox, either 4 or 5 April in a given year. Other common translations include Chinese Memorial Day and Ancestors' Day.

Qingming Festival (also known as Pure Brightness Festival or Tomb-sweeping Day), which falls on either April 4th or 5th of the gregorian calendar, is one of the Chinese Twenty-four Solar Terms. From that date temperatures begin to rise and rainfall increases, indicating that it is the crucial time for plowing and sowing in the spring. The festival therefore has a close relationship with agriculture. However, it is not only a seasonal symbol; it is also a day of paying respect to the dead, a spring outing, and other activities.

Qingming has been regularly observed as a statutory public holiday in China. In Taiwan, the public holiday was in the past always observed on 5 April to honor the death of Chiang Kai-shek on that day in 1975, but with Chiang's party currently out of power, this convention is not being observed. It became a public holiday in mainland China in 2008.

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