On June 13, 2026 — Cultural and Natural Heritage Day — the National Library of China in Beijing launched its 2026 ICH lecture and film screening series, anchored by the 100th session of its flagship “ICH Protection Lecture Month” program. The milestone lecture was delivered by Liu Kuili, a renowned Chinese folklorist and honorary academician of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who spoke on “The Dietary Traditions of the Chinese People.”
The lecture series, which runs from June 13 to July 11, is organized around the theme “The Taste of China in ICH” — a framing that uses food as a lens through which to examine broader questions of civilization, social structure, and cultural identity. Liu’s opening lecture traced the philosophical foundations of Chinese food culture, from the ancient maxim “the people regard food as heaven” (min yi shi wei tian) through the seasonal food traditions that mark the lunar calendar: New Year’s Eve reunion dinners, Duanwu zongzi, Mid-Autumn mooncakes, and the countless regional variations that make Chinese cuisine the most internally diverse food system on earth.
Four Lectures, Four Lenses on Food and Civilization
The lecture series continues with three additional speakers. Chen Shengqian, professor of history at Renmin University of China, covers the archaeological origins of Chinese food civilization. Qiao Jie, vice president of the China Cuisine Association, examines the techniques and philosophies behind Chinese cooking — a system that UNESCO recognized by inscribing Chinese traditional culinary skills on its ICH list. Peng Lin, professor of history at Tsinghua University, concludes the series with a lecture on the ritual and social dimensions of food, exploring how dining customs encode hierarchies, express gratitude, and maintain kinship bonds.
Together, the four lectures form a curriculum that moves from deep history to living practice to social meaning — an approach that reflects the National Library’s long-standing commitment to public humanities education. Since its founding in 2013, the ICH Lecture Month has held over 100 sessions, serving more than 25,000 in-person attendees. The program has become one of China’s most sustained institutional efforts to bridge academic scholarship and public understanding of intangible heritage.
49 Films, 299 Libraries, One National Screening Network
Running concurrently with the lectures is the eighth edition of “Years Age the Body, Skills Endure in Memory” — the National Library’s annual screening program of documentary films about national-level ICH inheritors. This year’s program features 49 newly completed documentary summaries covering all ten ICH categories recognized by China’s national system, from folk literature and traditional music to traditional dance, opera, crafts, and medicine.
A special thematic unit within the screening program focuses on Chinese culinary heritage, with 13 films dedicated to cooking techniques and food traditions. The screenings are not confined to Beijing: 299 libraries across China are participating in the joint screening network, making this one of the largest coordinated cultural-film events in the country. Since its inception, the program’s online screenings have accumulated over 70 million views, with more than 3 million in-person attendees at physical venues.
The Strategic Choice Behind the Theme
The decision to center the 2026 program on food is strategically astute. Food is the most democratic entry point into heritage — everyone eats, and everyone has food memories. Unlike specialized crafts such as Kesi silk tapestry or yunjin brocade, which require technical knowledge to fully appreciate, food traditions are immediately legible to any audience. A lecture on zongzi-making techniques in Jiaxing versus Chaoshan requires no prerequisite coursework; it only requires that the listener has eaten a zongzi.
But the series is not merely populist. By framing food through the lenses of archaeology, technique, and ritual, the National Library is making a serious argument: that culinary heritage is not a lesser form of ICH, subordinate to “high” arts like opera or painting, but a central domain in which Chinese civilization has achieved its most distinctive and enduring expressions. Liu Kuili’s opening lecture made this point explicitly: the Chinese dietary system, he argued, is not just a collection of recipes but a complete philosophy of how humans should relate to nature, to time, and to each other.
The 2026 ICH Lecture Month and screening program run through mid-July. All events are free and open to the public, with selected lectures available via live stream on the National Library’s digital platforms.