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Hong Kong’s summer arts calendar has taken on a distinctly Chinese accent following the launch of the third Chinese Culture Festival, now underway across the city. Running from June to September, the festival brings more than 280 programs to theaters, public spaces and schools, all under the umbrella theme of “Legends.”
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Presented by the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau and organized by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department’s Chinese Culture Promotion Office, the festival aims to deepen public engagement with various forms of Chinese culture, offering everything from opera and orchestral concerts to film screenings, exhibitions, talks, and workshops.
For opera enthusiasts, the highlight will be the Chinese Opera Festival, now part of the broader Chinese Culture Festival. A special program featuring Peking Opera performers in full armor will bring together leading wusheng and other male-role specialists from four major troupes, including Xi Zhonglu, widely regarded as the foremost wusheng of his generation.
Across three performances at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre from June 26 to 28, they will tackle martial-arts set pieces such as The Battle at Changbanpo and The Incident at Hanjin Crossing among other classic martial-arts excerpts, highlighting the precision, stamina, and stagecraft that define the form.
Dance and drama fans have also had plenty to explore. The opening program, Shanghai Grand Theatre’s dance-drama Lady White Snake, launched the festival, while productions such as The Code of The Dynasty and the acrobatic drama Acrobatic Spectacle of Ancient Tang extend the festival’s fascination with dynastic history, theatrical legend, and reconstructed historical worlds.
The broader program also extends well beyond the main stage. Filmgoers can look to the Hong Kong Film Archive’s “Journeys to the West: Cinematic Dialogues Across Time,” while an exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of History, “Prosperity and Magnificence – Civilisation of the Sui and Tang Dynasties in Shaanxi Province,” showcases more than 165 artifacts from Shaanxi and Hong Kong.
As opera, dance, film, exhibitions, and Silk Road sounds spill into venues across the city, the scale of the third Chinese Culture Festival is hard to miss. Hong Kong’s packed summer diary has a centerpiece that feels generous, imaginative, and genuinely enjoyable.
Bernard Charnwut Chan is the chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District
