Hong Kong’s Chinese Culture Festival inspires sense of heritage and national pride

Last month marked the end of Hong Kong’s successful four-month inaugural annual Chinese Culture Festival. The flagship event, run by the Chinese Culture Promotion Office under the city’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD), was announced in April to promote Chinese culture and patriotic education, as well as enhance national identity among the people of Hong Kong.

The festival featured a diverse line-up of performances of Chinese stories and interpretations of classics in a range of genres, covering music, dance, Chinese opera and multi-arts, as well as film shows, exhibitions, talks and a carnival to highlight the heritage of traditional arts.

Ivy Ngai Suk-yee, chief manager of the department’s Cultural Presentations Section, which led the organisation of the festival, hailed the success of the event.

“We sold more than 80 per cent of our 65,000 tickets, which is a fantastic figure,” she said. “Feedback from our audience and artists has been very positive. If we look at our audience’s demographic, it’s quite evenly distributed among people aged under 30, 30 to 65 and over 65. It shows how diverse the audience is.”

The festival aims to enhance the public’s appreciation of Chinese culture, how it transcends time and can be accessible to all, and its synergy with the rest of the world.

In June, a free carnival named “Encountering Chinese Culture” was held at Sha Tin Town Hall and New Town Plaza, showcasing a range of stage performances and activities, including excerpt performances of dance, music and magic, inspiring cultural booths covering demonstrations of intangible cultural heritage of traditional craftsmanship such as Chinese paper-cutting, Hong Kong cheongsam making and Cantonese opera headdresses crafting, and a foyer concert of Chinese music, for all to experience the charm of Chinese culture and arts.