Confucius is named Kong Qiu in Chinese. He was born in Zouyi, in the State of Lu which is now in Shandong Province, in the latter part of the Spring and Autumn Period, about 2557 years ago. He is know as the founder of Confucianism and as a great thinker, philosopher, and educator in ancient China.

The grand ceremony marking the 2557th birthday of Confucius was held in the Confucian temple in Qufu, east China's Shandong Province, on September 28, 2006. Other ceremonies were also held on the Chinese mainland and Taiwan. Yang Chaoming, a leading Confucius researcher at Qufu Normal University, said this about Confucius: "The thoughts of Confucius have influenced the minds of Chinese people for more than 2,000 years. They are embedded in our behavior and speech.  Confucius and his disciples advocated positive self-discipline, healthy living, maintaining harmony in family life, peace and order in the country, peace in the world, seeking great harmony in the world, self-improvement every day, and enjoying harmony while still keeping one's own characteristics. These ideals are important to not only Chinese people, but also people throughout the world.”  

In Qufu, the procession stopped at Dachengdian (Hall of Great Success), the main hall of the temple and site of the grand commemoration ceremony.  Mayor Jiang read out a eulogy in front of the Dachengdian: "People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, who are of the same cultural roots, jointly pay respect to our ancient teacher and remember his words and deeds with pious feelings. A family prospered because of internal harmony and people enjoyed stable and happy lives if a country was in harmony.We hope all nations live in harmony and the whole world enjoys peace."  Toward the end of the celebration, 80 college students attended a ceremony marking the attainment of adulthood, 100 primary school students read from teachings from the Analects of Confucius, and 100 Confucius-style businessmen declared their commitments to do business in an honest way.

In Taipei, city mayor Ma Ying-jeou chaired the commemoration in the local Confucian temple. Commemoration activities were held in many other Confucian temples on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan.    

China is a large country with 56 nationalities. Different nationalities have different marriage customs, but whatever the nationality is, the wedding ceremony is usually very complicated. The traditional Chinese marriage usually involves six necessary procedures: match-making, engagement, betrothal presents, meeting the bride, three bows, and drinking wedlock wine. When a new couple is engaged, they first choose the date of their marriage. Most people would favor a holiday or special Chinese festival for their relatives and friends to attend the wedding. However, quite a few others, especially those in the countryside, would probably ask a fortune-teller for a lucky date, usually an even number, so that their marriage would have "Double Happiness". The wedding ceremony very often ends with a very extravagant banquet. Toasts are made to wish the new couple long life, eternal love and happiness, early birth of a healthy baby and so on.
more: Explain old and current. Wedding party can be after the actual wedding, getting the wedding document, etc.

Beijing Opera--Performance Art That Has Enriched Itself with Merits of Other Forms of Art Peking opera is a purely Chinese opera form which dates back to the year 1790. That year four local opera troupes of AnhuiProvince came to Beijing on a performance tour on the order of the imperial court. The tour was a hit and the troupes stayed. The artists absorbed the tunes of the Hubei local opera and drew on the best of Kun Qu, Qin Qiang and Bang Zi and other local operas. Characters For the painted role, the different colors of the faces represent different characters and personality. Yellow and white represent cunning, red stands for uprightness and loyalty, black means valor and wisdom, blue and green indicate the vigorous and enterprising character of rebellious heroes and gold and silver represent mystic or super-natural power. Terminology "Sheng, dan, jing, chou," for instance, are just the terms for four different types of roles. "sheng" is the positive male role, "dan" is the positive female role, "jing" is a supporting male role with striking character and "chou" is the clown. Every type has its telltale facial makeup and decoration. But actually, "piao you" means Peking opera fans, "piao fang" means the place where fans meet to amuse themselves and "xia hai" means turning professional. When you come across with a small group of Peking opera fans singing in a street corner, that corner can be considered a "street piao fang." There is no lacking of social celebrities among Peking opera fans. Emperor Guang Xu of Qing Dynasty, for example, was not only a good amateur Peking opera singer, but was also a good drummer in the Peking opera orchestra (the drummer plays the role of the director of the orchestra). The Empress Dowager was an avid Peking opera fan, too. The huge three-storey theater in the SummerPalace is a proof of her love for Peking opera.

By Michael Dorgan
Knight Ridder News Service

BEIJING - When Andrea Goodman began studying Chinese at the University of California at Santa Cruz 16 years ago, it was on a whim. "I was not really interested in China," Goodman, 33, recalled. "I didn't know anything about its history, politics or culture. Then it took over my life."

Today, Goodman's obsession is helping to pay her rent. As a corporate lawyer for the Beijing office of the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, she negotiates and reads contracts in Chinese.

China's emergence as the world's fastest-growing large economy has meant that a lot of people around the world are following Goodman's lead. The Chinese "ni hao" is becoming a familiar "hello" in the global marketplace. "If you want a future in business, China is definitely the place to be," Marie Seton O'Brien, a certified public accountant from New York, said during a break from her studies one afternoon recently at the Beijing Language and Culture University.

Whether China can maintain its rapid economic growth is a question that keeps economists and political analysts hard at work. But it is beyond dispute that China's rise has shifted Asia's economic center of gravity, and, to a lesser degree, the worlds.
South Korea, which for decades was dependent on exports to the United States, now ships more goods to China and Hong Kong than to the United States. Within five years, the same will be true for Japan, experts say.

So it is not surprising that millions of Koreans and Japanese, as well as a lot of Americans and others, are learning Chinese. "For more than a dozen years, China's economy has been increasing by more than 7 percent per year," said Zhang Kai, an associate professor at Beijing Language and Culture University, China's leading school for teaching Chinese to foreigners and foreign languages to Chinese students. "Because of that, communication between China and the world is increasing, and language is the key." The university had more than 6,000 foreign students studying Chinese until two months ago, when the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome shut down classes. Most students fled to their home countries, but many will return.

O'Brien, 34, who did not leave China, came to Beijing in February, taking a break from her pursuit of a master's degree in business administration from Fordham University.
"I decided that Chinese may be more valuable to me than the M.B.A.," she said. "There's no great call for M.B.A.s now."

Although more Americans and other foreigners are studying the language in China, Chinese still lags behind most foreign languages, including Japanese, in schools in the United States. Claudia Ross, chairwoman of the modern languages department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and a teacher of Chinese, said the popularity of Chinese language courses was growing in the United States but still was out of sync with the realities of globalization. "It is frustrating how few people realize the pragmatic reasons for studying Chinese," she said in an interview in Beijing, where she is doing research. "The money is here. The growth is here."

Still, surveys show that, when high school students are asked which Asian language has the most practical benefits, they say Japanese, an answer 20 years out of date. A 1998 survey of foreign-language study at U.S. colleges and universities conducted by the Modern Language Association found that 28,456 students were enrolled in courses to learn the standard dialect of Chinese, up 7.5 percent from 1995. But 43,141 were enrolled in Japanese courses, and 656,590 were studying Spanish, the most popular foreign language for Americans.

One reason more American students don't study Chinese is that it is difficult and time-consuming to learn. Spoken Chinese is filled with similar sounds distinguished only by tones that can be tough for nonnative speakers to distinguish. And Chinese has no alphabet; instead, it has thousands of characters that must be memorized. But Goodman, the lawyer, said studying Chinese was particularly important for anyone who planned to do business in China, which attracts more than $50 billion a year in foreign investment.