Celebrating diversity in the land of the Welsh

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April 30, 2015 by THE WELSH HORIZON

Wales has been a big plot of different cultures and religions from all over the world.

Some of them came from the Far East and the others hail from the Middle East, as part of the Welsh culture has been whisked away with the Welsh people to the Latin America more than one hundred years ago.

In this edition of the International Cardiff, we have focused on Eastern cultures which have thrived in this land of Wales.  Our writer Weiyeng Luo has dug deeply into Buddhism in Cardiff, where she reflected the daily life of a Buddhist practitioner at Cardiff Buddhism Centre. Luo also describes the atmosphere of the centre. One of many interesting things which we can discover in the piece is the art of breathing in meditation, which might sound easy yet is indeed an arduous task for non-practitioners, all in page six.

Our writer, Meng Gao also told the story of Buddhism in Cardiff from an artistic point of view, where she discovered that the delicate process of making a piece of Tibet Sand Mandala, which has been a secret since remote anquity. Until last year, the Jokhang Temple first unveiled the whole sacred steps to the world. Discover more about this in her story on page five.

Wales is also dubbed as a multi-cultural country, where we could easily discover people of different cultures living harmoniously in this region. Our writer, Xiaolei Zhao has visited a number of mosques, where Muslims gather to perform their prayers to enlighten the readers on the practice of the religion, which ranks as the second largest practitioners in the country after Christianity. You can learn more about this beautiful religion in the next page.

We then went far into the Far East to India in Wales by spotting the light on Runjhan Kulkarni, an artist who is also a second year student at the University of South Wales.  Our writer Jayati Bohla had a golden opportunity in meeting the lass in person,  where she wrote a comprehensive background about the artist and her passion in dancing in this edition.

While we discovered that some Welsh people have settled in Patagonia in Argentina after they fled the colonising greed of the British Empire, our writer Emily Gowdey-Backus went into history and served us with interesting facts about the tale, which you can see in page six.

In this edition, we also have a profile of Lily Wang, a Chinese teacher at Cardiff Confucius Institute, where she shared her interesting insight of the profession, and her experience in teaching the Chinese language in Wales; she was interviewed by our writer Wei Chen. Last but not least, our readers will discover a fundraising effort set up in Cardiff to help the Nepalese people who were affected by the recent large-scale earthquake, of which you can also do your bit by helping the victims, a story was written by our writer Yang Liu.