On the morning of March 10, 2023, a donation ceremony for the construction of the Yongning Orange Garden was held along the Cherry River bank beside the SFL Building on the ECNU’s Minhang campus. Wang Hui, Party Secretary of the Political Consultative Conference of Huangyan District, Taizhou City, Lei Qili, Vice President of ECNU, and heads of relevant faculties and departments including the School of Foreign Languages attended the event. Mr. Zhao Lihong, the famous writer and ECNU alumnus, inscribed the title of the Yongning Orange Garden.

Yongning Orange Garden is donated by Huangyan District, Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, covering an area of 1,700 square metres, with a total of 70 orange trees, aged 10-15 years. It is the first time that Huangyan donated to the university to co-build a cultural orange garden, which is a new form of school-local cooperation as a carrier of culture and education. With the foundation of Yongning Orange Garden, the historical town’s thousand-year-old charm of Song dynasty will flow along with the fragrance of oranges and yellow books on the banks of the Cherry River, becoming a creative impetus to stimulate the development of campus culture and a vivid teaching material to cultivate the new generation of the times.

The ceremony was preceded by a series of multi-cultural activities, such as a lecture on Song dynasty culture, a performance of the Kun Opera from The Peony Pavilion, and a song performed in Spanish. China has a long history of tree planting and often uses trees as a metaphor for people, which has profoundly influenced the character and ethos of the nation. The emphasis on the harmonious coexistence of man and nature is also widely explored in the literature and art works of various countries, which fully reflects the commonality of cultures around the world. Vice President Lei Qili hopes that ECNU’s teachers and students will both actively innovate the excellent Chinese traditional culture represented by Huangyan’s Orange Culture and Song Culture, and become practitioners and promoters of the world’s ecological civilization.

This event coincides with SFL’s 30th anniversary. The School of Foreign Languages was established in October 1993 and has been steadfastly setting the course for pursuing excellence in academic research and cultivation. As SFL’s Secretary of the Party Committee Yan Lu introduced that the Yongning Orange Garden will carry the School’s mission of “nurturing people through literature”, ECNU’s students and teachers will contribute to building a credible, lovely and respectful image of China and to promoting the exchange and mutual appreciation of world civilizations.