Sharing cultures, building connections

In a traditional courtyard, sunlight streamed through carved wooden windows, falling onto a table covered with bamboo strips and colorful paper. The courtyard belongs to a workshop in Hongcun, a historic village at the foot of Huangshan Mountain in East China's Anhui province.

At the workshop for the intangible cultural heritage, where experts impart skills for making fish lanterns, a mayor from Germany carefully inserted the final bamboo frame into the lantern's body.

When the lantern was completed, its maker, Alexander Badrow, mayor of Stralsund, was expected to write his name on it. But he did not sign his own name. Instead, he wrote two letters: "HS", the abbreviation for Huangshan.

The fish lantern has become a symbol of a much larger connection: a mayor from a European city had linked his hometown with Huangshan through China's traditional cultural artifacts.

Behind those two letters was a decade-old friendship. In 2015, Stralsund and Huangshan established a sister-city relationship.

Huangshan is a mountain city; Stralsund is a coastal city, while both rose through trade and cross-regional exchanges.

Stralsund was a major Baltic trading hub in the Middle Ages, while Huizhou — a historical region that roughly corresponds to Huangshan today — stood as a commercial center of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties in ancient China, with its merchants playing a prominent role in commerce for more than three centuries.

Their commercial past has left both cities with remarkable cultural heritages. Huangshan Mountain was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1990, while Xidi and Hongcun, two ancient villages at the foot of Huangshan Mountain, were added in 2000 as cultural heritage sites. Stralsund's historic old town, with its brick Gothic architecture, joined the World Heritage list in 2002 as part of the "Historic Centers of Stralsund and Wismar".

For Badrow, who first visited Huangshan in 2015 and returned for his fourth visit in May, the two old cities are not merely preserved historical sites — they are living communities, where past and present coexist in everyday life.

"Brick Gothic architecture (in Germany) and traditional Chinese architecture may be very different, but both are magnificent testaments to the craftsmanship of earlier generations and to the care taken in their restoration today," Badrow said.

"I was particularly struck by the detailed restoration and preservation of the wonderful buildings in Huangshan — something we have also attempted in Stralsund. I was also deeply impressed by the fact that these are not museums; people actually live and sell goods there."

His impression is echoed by the people who make these old buildings their home. For the residents, heritage is not a relic behind glass.

Li Shengtao, who runs a homestay out of his ancestral house in Xidi, said: "Our houses, which are hundreds of years old, are alive here."

He said that every hall displays inscribed plaques and couplets, through which ancestors passed down their life wisdom.