International Symposium on Johann Strauss and Contemporary Music Culture Successfully Hosted by the School of Humanities in Shanghai Jiaotong University

2025 marked the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss II. The whole year, Vienna has been offering an impressive variety of Johann Strauss events under the title “Vienna goes Strauss”, including concerts, operettas, theater, films, dances, art exhibitions, cultural picknicks, and other forms of performances.  To commemorate this anniversary of Johann Strauss II’s, Shanghai Jiaotong University (Below as Jiaoda) organized a two-day international symposium this October on “Johann Strauss and Contemporary Music Culture”, a first-time and well-implemented cooperation between Jiaoda’s Institute of Humanities and Arts, and the Golden July Music Festival Vienna. Hosted by Jiaoda’s School of Humanities, the symposium saw a collection…

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YUFENG DESIGN, A New Return of Chinese Porcelain Art to Europe

Porcelain has been beloved in Europe for long. At the time when Johann Friedrich Böttger, the alchemist hired by Augustus II the Strong, finally discovered the recipe with a mixture of quartz, feldspar and kaolin from Meissen in 1709, hard-paste porcelain was exclusively made in China and was almost more precious than gold in Europe.  Fired at high temperatures of over 1300 Celsius, kaolin clay can produce very hard white porcelain, called “white gold” by the Europeans. The manufacturing process has been known to the Chinese for more than 1,500 years, presumably since the Han Dynasty around the year 206….