Foreign students celebrate Lantern Festival at worker's community
Shot by Jiang Xiaowei. Edited by Jiang Xiaowei. Subtitles by Jiang Xiaowei.
A traditional Lantern Festival celebration at Siping Community in Yangpu on Saturday.
Downtown residents, including expatriates, attended a traditional celebration of the Lantern Festival on Saturday featuring lantern shows and cultural heritage.
More than a dozen of local heritage skills were displayed along a pedestrian street in Siping Community in Yangpu District, one of the city's worker's communities that was established in the 1950s.
They include district and city-level listed skills, such as cloth painting, paper cutting and lantern making, as well as nation-level heritages, including the delicate jewelry making of Laofengxiang and ink-stick making of Cao Sugong.
Visitors, including many overseas students from the nearby Tongji University, were invited to take part in folk activities such as lantern making, guessing riddles and spring couplet writing.
Awan Ahmed Zamir, from Pakistan, paints over a key ring at the event.
Awan Ahmed Zamir, from Pakistan, an industrial design major freshman at the university, said he felt honored to celebrate the traditional festival with Chinese friends and teachers.
Sofia Giraldo, a preparatory student from Columbia, said she was thrilled because the cultures and even the taste of dumplings were quite different from that of her hometown.
The Siping community in Yangpu has celebrated Lantern Festival with cultural heritage since 2005.
These traditional skills were brought to the region early last century by migrant workers from neighboring provinces who came to work in the factories, textile companies and docks along the riverside area of Yangpu.
Expats make Peking Opera dolls at the event.
