Jun 30, 2026 · 17 min · 9 segments
*Today, we’ll talk about an American woman who devoted nearly a century building bridges between cultures and preserving the paper gods, folk beliefs, and everyday spiritual life of old Beijing before…
Scott PruittHost
On the evening of May 22, 2026, the first season of the I Can Do It at Tianqiao Outdoor Leisure Night Market opened at Tianqiao Citizen Square in Beijing.
The event was themed Intangible Cultural Heritage Wonder Night and organized by the Tianqiao Sub-District Office in Xicheng District.
It brought together traditional performances, folk crafts and creative cultural products from intangible cultural heritage-friendly cities and districts all across China.
As visitors browsed colorful displays and watched age-old traditions come to life, the event highlighted a growing effort to preserve and reintroduce China's rich folk culture to new generations.
In 2025, a new scholarly volume based on Columbia University's remarkable collection of Chinese paper gods brought another chapter of that preservation effort back into public view.
The Sacred Understanding, the research of the Chinese paper gods' collections at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University, examines hundreds of fragile ritual prints depicting door guardians, kitchen gods, fertility deities, and other divine figures once found in ordinary homes across northern China.
These colorful images, rooted in everyday religious life, might easily have disappeared amid the upheavals of the 20th century.
On the evening of May 22, 2026, the first season of the I Can Do It at Tianqiao Outdoor Leisure Night Market opened at Tianqiao Citizen Square in Beijing.
The event was themed Intangible Cultural Heritage Wonder Night and organized by the Tianqiao Sub-District Office in Xicheng District.
It brought together traditional performances, folk crafts and creative cultural products from intangible cultural heritage-friendly cities and districts all across China.
As visitors browsed colorful displays and watched age-old traditions come to life, the event highlighted a growing effort to preserve and reintroduce China's rich folk culture to new generations.
In 2025, a new scholarly volume based on Columbia University's remarkable collection of Chinese paper gods brought another chapter of that preservation effort back into public view.
The Sacred Understanding, the research of the Chinese paper gods' collections at the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University, examines hundreds of fragile ritual prints depicting door guardians, kitchen gods, fertility deities, and other divine figures once found in ordinary homes across northern China.
These colorful images, rooted in everyday religious life, might easily have disappeared amid the upheavals of the 20th century.
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