The China Center celebrated the Year of the Horse with a Chinese New Year Reception on February 19. Guests were treated to delicious food and a beautiful musical performance by the Oriental Music Club, a student organization at the University of Minnesota.
Ziyue Tan, a Ph.D. student in Music Education, shared information about the traditional gourd flute, before a performance of four pieces with Yunong Xia, a Ph.D. student in Bioinformatics who played the Pipa, and Ningsheng Huang, Professor of Mathematics & Physics at Dunwoody College of Technology, who played the Chinese bamboo flute.
Attendees also heard from Rohit Patil, a Ph.D. candidate in Civil Engineering and a recipient of the China Center’s Hsiao Shaw-Lundquist Scholarship, which provides financial support to a UMN graduate student with a strong connection to or demonstrated interest in China and Chinese culture. His research group has an ongoing collaboration with Chinese researchers, which helped develop knowledge that took his research in a new direction.
“The Hsiao Shaw-Lundquist Fellowship came at exactly the right time. The work I developed during that semester has become the foundation for my doctoral thesis. That has now led to a peer-reviewed publication and several additional papers currently in progress,” he told the guests. “This fellowship does more than provide funding—it creates opportunities for growth, collaboration, and long-term academic relationships between the countries.”
The program ended with a trivia contest, with adorable stuffed horses as a prize, and a raffle where guests could win a calendar.
It was a joyous occasion as we gathered to mark the start of the new lunar year. We were thrilled to see so many of our friends and supporters in attendance.