A fascinating description of a global language, A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof combines broad perspectives with illuminating depth.

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) recently participated in the Pagode-Europeana-China project as an associated partner. As a result, almost two hundred items related to China from the UBL Special Collections are now available via the Europeana website. The UBL was the only library to participate in…

During his two-day visit to the Netherlands, the Chinese Prime Minister paid an unexpected visit to Leiden on 16 October. Li Keqiang spoke with Rector Carel Stolker, Chinese PhD candidates and students of China Studies.

Personalised healthcare could be the answer to insufficient treatment of chronically ill people. Therefore, PhD Junzeng Fu tries to predict the response of a patient to a drug. Strikingly, she combines western medicine with Chinese medicine diagnosis. Promotion Tuesday 21 February.

Three Leiden students have been selected for the Yenching Academy, a prestigious master’s programme offered by Peking University. The students will receive a full scholarship (tuition fees, housing and allowance), and will be following various interdisciplinary courses together with students from all…

This study will investigate the role of Henri Jean Francois Borel (1869-1933) as an ‘interpreter of China'.

Leiden University Libraries has made a large number of unofficial poetry journals from China accessible online in its Digital Collections. This opens up thousands of pages from an internationally unique collection of unofficial Chinese poetry for teaching, research, and the general public, including…

In the coming years, Hilde De Weerdt gets to spend over three million euros. She received grants from both the European Research Council (ERC) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for research on Chinese infrastructure. ‘It is great that it is also possible to develop large projects in the social sciences…

How were ideas about politics and society distributed in ancient China? Hilde De Weerdt, Professor of Chinese History, investigates this using new digital methods. We speak with her about networks, big data and digital humanities.

Following the success of The Middle Period Chinese Studies Conference held in 2014 at Harvard University, we welcome paper proposals for the second conference of this kind to be held at Leiden University, September 14-17, 2017.

On Friday 15 November 2024 Chunli Song successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated.

Learning about the newest communication technology in China and solving a business case at telecom giant Huawei. Four Leiden science students get to know China's Silicon Valley.

Three enormous maps of China, created during the reign of three different emperors of the Qing dynasty, have now been made available in open access and are downloadable via Leiden University Libraries’ (UBL) Digital Collections. The rich maps are an early example of academic collaboration between the…

Contrary to what one might expect, societal actors influence China’s foreign policy. PhD candidate Sabine Mokry investigated how Chinese academics and think tanks impact the authoritarian leadership’s views on what constitutes the country’s national interest in the international arena. On 14 November…

From 26 August until 5 September 2019, a group of 20 Chinese government officials, industry representatives and academics attended an intensive course on space law and policy at the International Institute of Air and Space Law, organized in cooperation with Avans+ in Breda.

‘Visibility and secrecy are both valuable tactics and should not be antagonized in LGBT movements, ’ says Jingshu Zhu. Zhu will defend her dissertation on Wednesday 21 February. Time for a short interview with the PhD candidate.

The Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) is devoted to the study of places in the human world from antiquity to the present time in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.

As long as we humans have existed, we have told each other stories. But how does a story change each time it is told? Which elements stick and which ones are forgotten? This is what Max van Duijn and Tessa Verhoef will research in their Lowlands Whispers experiment at Lowlands Festival.

Two professors from China joining the research and education in Leiden, two Leiden professors going to China to share their knowledge and experiences in return. This is the exchange professorship between the Faculty of Science and Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU). This week, all four professors got…

‘There is often a strong emphasis on the differences with Asia when actually there are so many similarities on all sorts of levels. Parents in Asia deliberate just as much about which school they should send their child to,’ says Frank Pieke, Professor of Modern China Studies. The opening conference…

Dutch radio corporation ‘BNR’ contacted Willemijn Aerdts, a lecturer at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, for her opinion on the arrest. ‘It seldom happens that someone gets caught. What is interesting is that he was both caught and is being prosecuted in the USA.’

How new media shape the communication strategies of the PRC’s official news agency Xinhua?

How does the Chinese government communicate with its citizens? Yuxi Nie obtained her PhD with her thesis on communication strategies of the Chinese state media agency Xinhua. She discovered that on social media, Xinhua communicated in different ways, depending on the target group.

On May 15th, from 15.15 to 17.00 in the Vossiusroom, Leiden University Libraries will host a program on web-archiving and digital archives of Chinese communities in the Netherlands and Indonesia.

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) has been able to acquire an extraordinary Chinese manuscript at auction in Hong Kong. It concerns an Imperial Edict (dated 1582) from the Ming dynasty period, at one time part of the former collection of well-known sinologist and author of detective-novels Robert van…

Did you know that Arabic was for centuries the lingua franca in an area stretching from the south of Spain to the Chinese border? And that the Middle East under Muslim rule was the world’s beating heart of trade, but also of science and scholarship?

Promotor: J. van der Greef, T. Hankemeier; Co-promotor: H.A. van Wietmarschen

Going to school during the summer holidays? Some of our students accepted the challenge. And they didn’t do that just around the corner. During their holidays, students bio pharmaceutical sciences and computer science visited special summer schools in China. ‘China is a global player that we should…

Chinese athletes must perform this Olympics. Anything less than a gold is being seen as athletes being unpatriotic by furious nationalists online. Florian Schneider, director of the Leiden Asia Centre, explains the situation on BBC News.

From 21 August to 24 August, a Chinese delegation together with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) conducted a study visit to Leiden Law School at Leiden University. Leiden Law School’s Child Law Department organized the study trip.

Teachers of English as a foreign language in China and the Netherlands have different notions of themselves as teachers in relation to cultures associated with the English language. This is stated in the doctoral thesis of Dadi Chen, who graduates from the Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching…

China-watchers are still grappling with the wide-ranging implications of the Hong Kong national security law. Has Beijing really abrogated the legally-binding Sino-British Joint Declaration after just 23 of the agreed-upon 50 years?

When it comes to languages and cultures, Leiden University is the university. The global expertise present places our university at the top. In Leiden and The Hague, we study languages and cultures from all regions of the world and from prehistory to the present day. In this way we create a broad view…

Fungal infections pose a significant threat to individuals with compromised immune systems and despite advancements in diagnosis and treatment, they continue to jeopardize patient’s health.

In tracing the deeper historical roots of what Xi Jinping contemporarily frames as a “Chinese dream” of “wealth and power,” the article discerns key actors, events, and organizing principles in a long process toward restoring China’s deemed rightful place in the regional system.

This project examines how speakers store and process regular pitch variation.

Contactinformation about the Europa Institute

LUCIS works with Science ON AIR to put its researchers in the spotlight. For that purpose, several online videos of LUCIS members have been produced.

After a gap of five years, Leiden has a new Professor of Modern China. Florian Schneider started his position on 1 September.

Dating back more than 400 years, Leiden University has the oldest continuous chair of Arabic outside the Arabic-speaking world. Today the MENA region is studied at Leiden from before the coming of Islam up to today from a wide array of disciplines. And Arabic is studied within the diverse linguistic,…

This book contains the first three Leiden-Aramco Lectures on Arabic Language and Culture delivered by Petra Sijpesteijn, James E. Montgomery and Geert Jan van Gelder.

Audrey Heijns explored the mindset of alumnus Henri Borel. From 1894 to 1916 he was an interpreter of Chinese and later a government officer for Chinese affairs in the Dutch East Indies. Borel's way of 'translating' Chinese was both unique and inimitable. PhD defence on 28 June.

The Leiden | Islam interview series contains short documentary-style videos including interview flashes with leading scholars in the field of Islam and Muslim societies. With this series, LUCIS aims to show the value of unconventional insights related to Islam and Muslim societies, and to relate them…

Now and then we organise book launches to present the latest publications, both academic and popular, in our broad field.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese workers have moved from the countryside to the city. This social transformation has birthed a tradition of migrant worker poetry, professor Maghiel van Crevel states in Jacobin.

Islam at 250: Studies in Memory of G.H.A. Juynboll is a collection of original articles on the state of Islamic sciences and Arabic culture in the early phases of their crystallization.

LUCIS publishes two peer-reviewed book series, “Leiden Studies in Islam and Society” (Brill) and “Debates on Islam and Society” (Leiden University Press).

Authority and Control in the Countryside looks at the economic, religious, political and cultural instruments that local and regional powers in the late antique to early medieval Mediterranean and Near East used to manage their rural hinterlands.