A 72-meter Confucius statue stands atop NiShan Sacredland Photo: Shan Jie/GT

The 2021 International Confucius Cultural Festival is set to be launched on September 27 in Qufu, East China's Shandong Province, the hometown of Confucius, - the famous ancient Chinese philosopher whose legacy of wisdom remains influential worldwide today.  

The 2021 festival will include both online and offline events aimed at embracing Confucian culture fans worldwide.

The online section will adopt the main theme of "commemorating Confucius in the cloud" as it brings more than 40 domestic and overseas Confucian culture related institutions together, including the Hong Kong Confucius institute and the China-Australian Cultural Communication Center, to hold digital-media supported activities such as live streams of book readings and encourage participants to create their own short videos on the topic "Confucius in my mind." 

"We chose digital platforms this year to promote traditional Chinese culture as a way to engage more participants and show how our new generations are inheriting ancient culture," Li, a staff member responsible for the online section of the festival, told the Global Times. 

In order to make Confucius's legacy more "commutable," the event team will also launch an online commemorative ceremony, which audiences can access using a provided QR code. 

The offline events will be held at the Confucius Temple in Qufu. It includes three sections - Music, Ode and Dance -which will see major ceremonies in the city and at the temple integrate diverse dance and symphony chorus performances.

The Ode section will be particularly special, because it will invite people from different walks of life such as construction workers, students and medical workers to read excerpts from the Confucian classic The Analects. 

Besides this, nearly 20 Confucian institutes will also collaboratively launch an initiative for Chinese culture and Confucianism lovers around the world to commemorate the ancient thinker on his 2,572th birthday. 

"Ancient Chinese philosophies such as Confucianism and Taoism have become more and more popular and praised in Western culture. The deep and metaphysical Confucian thinking has always been inspiring to me because wisdom is a universally shared value that crosses cultural barriers," Holly Ho, an East Asian philosophy lover in the UK, told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

The festival will also hold a forum to discuss cultural civilizations in the context of global cooperation. Specific topics such as cultural strength in the global fight against COVID-19, and cultural diversity and integrated development of the world will be introduced at the forum, which will be attended by more than 100 scholars from home and abroad. 

"Before, we talked about learning and inheriting the Confucian legacies, in the future, we need to find more innovative ways to pass it to our later generations." Li added. 

Founded in 1989, the International Confucius Cultural Festival is one of the largest nationally and internationally supported tourism festivals integrating culture, tourism and scholarly and scientific research with the aim of promoting ancient Chinese culture.