Course Description

This course will cultivate your understanding and appreciation of the diverse local and vernacular elements found in communities across the Chinese world, inspiring you to develop a heightened, critical curiosity about China’s vast cultural landscape and variant local manifestations. Your knowledge of cultural difference and regional variation will deepen through rigorous transdisciplinary approaches to exploring traditions and cultural practices, and sharing your penetrating analyses and discoveries with others. We will examine Chinese culture from personal and local perspectives and see how tradition varies across society. We will scrutinize the findings of our observations using the tools of critical comparative analysis to more deeply clarify, assess, and appreciate cultural practices that may be overlooked or taken for granted. You will document your research findings and present captivating narratives and analyses exploring the cultural and social aspects you investigate, through presentations, videos, posters, and reports. The course will furnish you with examples of vernacular and regional culture to stimulate and motivate your independent research, focusing on your hometown or other places you are interested in.  We will encourage you to make comparisons between different places—such as hometown practices in contrast with those of Hong Kong—to uncover more profound connections that you might discover.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Understand and analyse the depth and nuances of Chinese culture from diverse local viewpoints and more intimate and personal perspectives and in order to articulate those perspectives in nuanced engagement with others.
2. Better navigate through, and keenly observe, cultural heterogeneity & homogeneity and regional differences & similarities from a variety of perspectives and with multifaceted understanding.
3. Understand the colorful variety of local manifestations of culture and tradition and be better prepared to situate differences and similarities in broader regional and global frames of reference.
4. Apply rigorous approaches and penetrating perspectives to collaborating with others in exploring and explaining the traditions and cultural elements that fascinate them.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

Second semester (Wed)

• Cao, Z., & Mustafa, M. B. (2023). A Study of Ornamental Craftsmanship in Doors and Windows of Hui-Style Architecture: The Huizhou Three Carvings (Brick, Stone, and Wood Carvings). Buildings (Basel), 13(2), 351-. From https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings13020351
• Gu, Y. (2023). Contrast and Fusion: The Role of Regional Culture in Shaping Jiangsu Paper-Cut Art. Journal of Contemporary Educational Research. From https://doi.org/10.26689/jcer.v7i6.5065
• Hung, C. F. S. (2021). A historical comparative analysis of the community transformation of Tin Hau temples in Sai Kung and Shaukiwan. Asian Education and Development Studies, 10(3), 481–491. From https://doi.org/10.1108/AEDS-06-2019-0092
• Li, J., & Yu, W. (2023). Ethnic Clothing, the Exercises of Self-Representation, and Fashioning Ethnicity in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China. Fashion Theory, 27, 797–832. From https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2023.2189999
• Mak, B. M. (2024). Aquilaria and the Origin of Hong Kong. The ISF Academy Journal of Education and Research, 2, 1-11.
• Pang, A. (2023). Entertainment, Chinese Culture, and Late Colonialism in Hong Kong. The Historical Journal, 67, 124-147. From https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000304
• Shangxin, C., & Yang, Y. (2021). Chinese Residents’ Cultural Value and Health: Lifestyle and General Trust As Mediators. From https://doi.org/10.21203/RS.3.RS-336375/V1
• Taylor, J. (2009). “Our native place — our cinema”: Nation, State and Colony in the Amoy-Dialect Film Industry of the 1950s. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 5, 235–256. From https://doi.org/10.1163/179303909X12489373182939
• Watson, J. (2021). Guarding the Shoreline: Oyster Farming, Salt Production, and Fishing Along the South China Coast (1667–1978). Journal of Chinese History, 6, 93-121. From https://doi.org/10.1017/jch.2021.8
• Watson, J. L. (1987). From the Common Pot: Feasting with Equals in Chinese Society. Anthropos, 82(4/6), 389-401.

Course Co-ordinator and Teacher(s)