Tianjin Students' Performance Welcomed in Sweden

Students from China's Tianjin Experiment Middle School Thursday gave wonderful performances on Chinese folk music and won a lot of warm applauses in a concert in Stockholm.

Chen Xuefei was at the concert and filed this report.

Chen Ling, Party Secretary of Tianjin Experiment Middle School explained why they came to Sweden and gave the performances. Chen Ling said that the delegation came to attend the opening ceremony of the first Confucius Classroom in Sweden in Bolan High School in Uppsala near Stockholm.

He said that after nine years of mutual visits by students and teachers of the two schools, they decided to establish a Confucius Classroom here to meet the Swedish students' demand of learning Chinese language and culture.

To promote Chinese culture and art, the folk music troupe in Tianjin Experiment Middle School came together with the delegation to give a grand concert in Uppsala Tuesday night.

Two days later, they gave another performance in Stockholm at the invitation of the Nordic Confucius Institute in Stockholm and the Chinese Embassy in Sweden.

About 30 students played various kinds of folk musical instruments including erhu, guzheng, Sheng, Pipa, flute and drum.They began with a folk ensemble prelude, and then performed Guzheng, Sheng, Erhu, Yangqin and various dances including Mongolian dance, opera dance and group dance. The concert concluded with the ensemble of Tea-horse Road to express the mysterious landscape in southwestern China.

Greja was among the hundreds of audiences. She has just begun to study about China and the Chinese language. She said she enjoyed the performance very much.

"I like it, I think it was really interesting, and I like the clothes of the dancers."

Chinese education counselor Zhang Ning commented that the Chinese students not only study hard, they also have various recreational activities and art skills as these wonderful performances are good examples.

For CRI, this is Chen Xuefei reporting from Stockholm.