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2022 marks the 50th anniversary of China-UK ambassadorial relations. People's Daily Online wishes to celebrate this occasion by releasing a series of 'Our China Stories' documentaries, highlighting some of the influential figures involved in facilitating cultural and academic exchanges between China and the UK. From June 23, the Second Season of the series will be released on People's Daily Online as well as through numerous local partners in the UK.

In this season, we invited five speakers to share with us their China Stories. Some of them are former exchange students who came to China in the 1980s and went on to devote their entire career to promoting Chinese culture in the UK, while others came to visit the country upon the dawn of 21st century and built up their scholarly reputation alongside the rapidly growing fields of archaeology, archaeological science and heritage management in China.

Jessica Harrison-Hall is Head of the China Section, Curator of the Sir Percival David Collections of Chinese Ceramics, and Decorative Arts at the British Museum. In her 30 years’ career at the British Museum, she has delivered a wide range of exhibitions, publications, and lectures to present China’s stories in a global context through visual and material culture. In 2014, Harrison-Hall curated the special exhibition Ming: 50 years that changed China, attracting over 140,000 visitors. She is also the author of China: A History in Objects (2017), which is now published in six languages, and various other books on Chinese history and fine arts.

Dorian Fuller is a professor of archaeobotany at University College London. He has published extensively on topics related to past subsistence cultures, the origins and evolution of agriculture and the process of plant domestication. Through scientific and systematic sampling, many of Dorian’s work have contributed directly to filling major gaps in our knowledge on past agriculture practices around the world. Published in 2009, his work at the site of Tianluoshan in Zhejiang Province is renowned for pushing the earliest date of rice domestication and cultivation to as early as 6,900 years ago.

Anke Hein is Peter Moores Associate Professor in Chinese Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Employing a wide range of research methods from petrography to ethnography, her research focuses on cultural contact and identity formation in early human societies, primarily with a focus on western China. Since 2006, Hein has participated in numerous excavations and surveys along the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau. Her book on prehistoric burials in the Liangshan region is one of the first English publications on the area, bringing the incredible cultural diversity of early China to the world’s attention.

John Moffet is a librarian and the longest-serving member of the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge. He has worked with Dr. Joseph Needham, a historian of science and author of Science and Technology of China, and three generations of Directors to create a lasting platform for academic visits and cultural exchanges from China and the rest of the world. Alongside Prof. Chen Zhenghong of Fudan University, Moffet co-authored An Illustrated Catalogue of a Selection of Rare Books Written in Chinese Stored in the East Asian History of Science Library, Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, UK (2020).

Tim Williams is Professor of Silk Roads Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. With over 40 years of experience in archaeology and heritage management, he is the author of multiple ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites) thematic studies along the Silk Roads. Williams has worked closely with China and other Asian countries for nearly two decades, culminating in the unprecedented transnational nomination of World Heritage Site ‘Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor’ between China, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan in 2014.