chinese Archives – The Oxford Student

All in my family: when your identity clashes with your culture

12th June 201915th November 2020Ray Cheung

Image description: Three generations of a Chinese family “I couldn’t make any sense of it. I couldn’t get over it. That precious son of mine, what happened to him?” These were the confused words of Hao’s mother, fat teardrops sliding down her face. “When I had my son, I loved and treasured him. Plus I […]

Tasting the new dynasty of Chinese wine

8th February 20193rd February 2019Louis Thomas

Image credit: Louis Thomas As the renowned Chinese poet and Tang dynasty government official Bai Juyi quipped, “the grand household snorts at syrupy wine, the exalted scholar laughs at petty poetry”. The first of this sentence was stolen from Wikipedia, the latter half from Janet Z Wang’s presentation to Bacchus, the University’s wine society (of […]

Professor of Chinese honoured with blue plaque

20th May 2018Max Jenner

A nineteenth-century professor of Chinese has been honoured with the unveiling of a blue plaque on the wall of his former residence in North Oxford. James Legge, a prominent Scottish sinologist and missionary, lived at 3 Keble Road from 1875 until his death in 1897. In 1876, a year after his arrival in Oxford, Legge […]

Oxford: a culinary Odyssey

27th January 2016Sam Sykes

Unbeknownst to most students, there are other places to eat in Oxford besides the glorious kebab vans dotted around the city, those hallowed places of drunken pilgrimage. In the unlikely scenario that you have some money spare, and are not deep-sea diving into your overdraft, Oxford offers an embarrassment of culinary riches, for anyone anywhere […]

Liu Bolin: the invisible man?

10th June 201510th June 2015Ellen Ffrench

Photo: dennis crowley If you google Liu Bolin, the results will largely celebrate the playful colour and amusement of his work. Bolin’s recent international success has centred explicitly on just that, ignoring or failing to realise the darker socio-political implications of his creative assertion of erased identity. In fact, Bolin’s first use of the ‘invisible […]

My first time with kung-po, chow mein, and foo yung

6th June 201415th November 2020Elizabeth Freeman

Boarding school: hardly something synonymous with cultural diversity, horizon-broadening or wildly new experiences. Nonetheless, it was in my year nine dorm at the establishment I called “home” for five years that my eyes were opened to a ritual that has come to shape my culinary outlook ever since: the Chinese takeaway. Growing up on the […]