Eating Dumpling, Celebrating the Spring Festival, and Watching Winter Olympics at the Foot of the Great Wall

By Wang Ruoxin

On 5 February, the fifth day of the Chinese Lunar New Year, 63 journalists from 32 Chinese and foreign media went to Yanqing District of Beijing to participate in the event of "Eating Dumpling, Celebrating the Spring Festival, and Watching Winter Olympics at the Foot of the Great Wall".

The journalists first came to the Yao Guanling homestay neighbourhood to watch folklore performances such as drums, row-boat dance and lion dances, and visited a homestay neighbourhood represented by Scandinavian style homestay, where the craftsmen in Yanqing demonstrated paper-cutting, hand-made hairy monkeys, pecan carving and other folklore culture and intangible cultural heritage skills. The journalists also experienced the process of making hairy monkeys. The body of the monkey was made from the bud of magnolia, the head and limbs of the monkey were made from the limbs and head of the cicada, and after gluing the monkey to the base and pasting the fortune characters on it, an anthropomorphic monkey was finally made up. At the same time, there were also craftsmen cutting the paper image of Shuey Rhon Rhon (the mascot of 2022 Paralympic Winter Games in Beijing), creating an atmosphere of the Spring Festival and the Winter Olympics. The journalists all interviewed and took photos with pleasure.

Afterwards, the journalists visited the Great Wall Landscape homestay in Shifosi Village, Badaling Town, from the terrace they could take a panoramic view of the Shuiguan Great Wall. As noon approached, the host of the homestay prepared materials and utensils for the journalists to make dumplings. A media reporter from Jordan made dumplings skillfully and introduced dumplings dipped in yogurt, the traditional food from her country.

In the afternoon, the Chinese and foreign media reporters climbed the Badaling Great Wall, the most outstanding representative of the Great Wall of China. From there they could also oversee the small Haituo Mountain not far away, one of the snow sports competition areas for the 2022 Winter Olympics. The reporters all cheered for the Olympic athletes.