By Kuo Li
(This is the edited text of a public lecture delivered at the celebration of Chinese New Year and Spring Festival 2022 at the University of Guyana. Kuo Li is the Chinese Director of the Confucius Institute on the Turkeyen Campus of the university.)
Dear Audience,
This is Adam Kuo Li from the Confucius Institute at the University of Guyana. Now let me briefly introduce you to the Chinese New Year, Spring Festival, also known as Chunjie. It is called Spring Festival literally from Chinese word Chun（春）which means spring. Actually the spring season will come very soon after these festive celebration days and everything in nature will come back to life from the cold frozen winter environment in northern areas of the world. People celebrate Spring Festival on January 1st in the Chinese Lunar calendar. If you pay attention to the calendar used in China you will notice we have two number systems for days, one for the Gregorian calendar using numeric numbers and one for the Chinese Lunar calendar using Chinese numbers. 2022 is the Tiger Year from the Chinese Zodiac. This year the Spring Festival is February 1, on the Gregorian calendar, last year it was February 12, and next year it will be January 22. But it will always be the first day of the first month on the Chinese Lunar calendar.