China Culture & Language

Chinese culture is old enough and large enough that generalisations mostly fail, but a few threads run through all of it.

Writing and calligraphy

The script is the oldest writing system still in continuous use, and calligraphy has been the highest-status art form for two thousand years — ranked above painting, and judged on the movement of the brush rather than the words. Scholars were expected to practise it.

The regional kitchens

Eight great traditions — Sichuan, Cantonese, Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan, Fujian, Anhui — differ as much from one another as French cooking does from Turkish. Sichuan’s numbing pepper, Cantonese steaming and dim sum, the sweet braising of Jiangnan, the wheat noodles and dumplings of the north.

Tea, silk and porcelain

All three were Chinese monopolies for centuries and all three reshaped the economies that bought them. Porcelain is still called china in English for the obvious reason, and the kilns at Jingdezhen have fired for a thousand years.

Opera and festival

Chinese opera exists in hundreds of regional forms, of which Beijing opera is only the best known, combining song, mime, acrobatics and highly codified makeup. The lunar calendar governs the year: New Year, Qingming for sweeping ancestral graves, the Dragon Boat Festival, and Mid-Autumn with its mooncakes.

The garden and the courtyard house

The classical Chinese garden is a composition rather than a planting — rock, water, architecture and framed views arranged so that the whole is never visible at once, and the ones at Suzhou are UNESCO-listed. The siheyuan courtyard house, four wings around a central yard, organised family life by seniority for two thousand years and survives in the hutong lanes of Beijing.

Belief

Confucian ethics, Daoist cosmology and Buddhist practice have coexisted and blended for nearly two thousand years, and most Chinese have never regarded them as exclusive alternatives.

Mandarin is the official language, written in simplified characters on the mainland. It is tonal — four tones plus a neutral one — and the tone changes the meaning entirely, which is the main difficulty for learners.

Hundreds of other Chinese languages and dialects are spoken, several mutually unintelligible with Mandarin: Cantonese in the south, Wu around Shanghai, Hokkien in Fujian. Minority languages including Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang have official status in their regions.

English is not widely spoken outside international hotels, major tourist sites and among younger urban people. This is the single biggest practical challenge of independent travel here.

Translation apps with camera and voice functions work well and are what everybody uses, including Chinese people talking to you. Download the offline Chinese pack before arrival, since the app store may be inaccessible afterwards. Ni hao, xie xie and duo shao qian will still be appreciated.