Root of the Chinese

In 2009, the family of four returned to China, where the couple took 8-year-old Link and 6-year-old Viviana to many cities. They went into the Forbidden City, climbed up the Great Wall, and reached the Gobi Desert and the Mongolian prairie.

China is one of the countries with an ancient civilization and long history and Chinese civilization, one of the most ancient civilizations, lasts a longest time. As some scholars point out, Chinese civilization has the root of the nation for 300 thousand years, civilization history for 10 thousand and national history for 5 thousand years. Chinese civilization has two direct sources, which are Yellow River civilization and Yangtze River Civilization, and is the outcome of such two exchanged, merged and sublimated regional civilizations. It has made profound impact on the surrounding areas of China and formed an independent circle of Chinese culture and Confucian-inspired culture. ese areas not only include China but also Japan, Korea, South Korea and Vietnam, etc.. Additionally, Chinese civilization has also made an important impact on other regions of the world. With Confucian ideology as the core, Chinese culture, together with the imperial exami- nation system, the four great inventions of ancient China, navigation and shipbuilding, etc. has served as the crucial source of ideas of the modern European Enlightenment.

The Root of China takes the Photographer, Yanjun Zhang’s photography travel in China as the main line, the regional humanities of Chinese culture as the background and the identifying culture as the main part to depict the root of the Chinese nation with perceptual images.

As the continuation of the documentary film Charm of Culture, this part is a cultural project involving a number of agencies in China and Brazil. It will track the value of life of Link and Viviana, the ethnic Chinese siblings. In addition, it will record their growth in Brazil as new immigrants as well as the cultural travel in China in search of things related to their ancestors.