Arts and crafts

A Lego artist has used thousands of bricks to re-create some of China’s most famous landmarks. From the Great Wall to the Forbidden City to the terracotta warriors, the works were created by Andy Hung, China’s first so-called Lego Certified Professional, and his team, for the “Dynasty of Brick – Lego Chinese Culture Exhibition.” “We want to showcase Chinese culture through the exhibition,” says Hung, chief designer of the touring show, which will run in Beijing until mid-October. “While some works have shown before in other exhibitions, there are 18 new designs including Beijing courtyard houses, Fujian tulou or earth roundhouses, and the Tangyue Memorial Archway in Anhui province,” he says

Almost five years ago on a local TV show in New York, the host was taken aback when the Jamaican reggae artist Gyptian was introduced by a diminutive, elderly Asian woman. “He was not expecting to see a Chinese woman talking about reggae,” Patricia Chin, now 82, recalls with a laugh, during a telephone interview from New York. But the half-Chinese, half-Indian Chin, who was born in Jamaica, knows just about everything there is to know about reggae.  She and her late husband, Vincent “Randy” Chin, helped build the nascent reggae music scene in the late 1950s from their home in Kingston, Jamaica, along with the likes of the legendary Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. In 1975, the Chins emigrated to t

Shadow puppets flitting across screens and bringing ancient legends to life have fascinated Chinese people for some 2,000 years, but falling audiences mean troupes are having to be creative to stay on the stage. Check out our gallery, above, for more.

Decades before superstars such as Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi made their first forays into Hollywood, Chinese actress Tsai Chin played a Bond girl in the 007 spy film You Only Live Twice (1967). To shoot the scenes where her Chinese double agent character traps the debonair British spy in an assassination attempt, Tsai, also known as Irene Chow, was in bed with Sean Connery for three days. Before that, Tsai had been the first Chinese star to perform in London’s West End, earning rave reviews in the star role of Suzie in The World of Suzie Wong in the late 1950s. Yet Tsai is far from being a household name in China, where audiences pay scant attention to her roles in American film and television p