As a reviewer, I was invited to the official opening of Chinese Culture Week (CCW) 2026, taking place as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
And this was slightly different from my usual Fringe assignment.
Normally I arrive at a venue, find my seat, watch a performance and then disappear afterwards with a notebook full of thoughts.
This time, I was getting an introduction to something much bigger.
Chinese Culture Week runs from 5–18 August and brings together theatre, dance, magic, workshops, exhibitions, cultural heritage, family experiences and other activities, giving Edinburgh audiences an opportunity not simply to watch Chinese artists perform, but to engage with Chinese culture in different ways.
The opening gave me the opportunity to learn more about Chinese culture, speak to people about future plans, view beautifully crafted items and, importantly, see some live performances.
And what better place to do it than Edinburgh?
The Fringe is an international festival. Every August, performers and audiences travel from around the world and somehow squeeze themselves into one city for a few weeks.
You can walk out of one venue having watched a British comedian, enter another for an American musical and then find yourself experiencing Chinese dance and physical theatre.
That’s part of the magic of the Fringe.
Chinese Culture Week builds upon that international spirit by creating another opportunity for cultures to meet.
For me, events like this are important because cultural exchange isn’t simply about putting something unfamiliar in front of an audience and saying, “Here you go.”
It’s about curiosity.
It’s about conversation.
It’s about discovering similarities as well as differences and sometimes encountering an artistic tradition you previously knew very little about.
The opening itself was well planned and executed, with the performances giving us a taste of the wider programme taking place during the Fringe. Also the people I encountered were very friendly.
What particularly interested me was the mixture of traditional and contemporary influences.
So, what can you actually see?
There’s Eastern Illusions Reimagined, featuring Hong Kong magician and illusionist Keanu Ho Kirin. His work explores Gu Cai Xifa – Ancient Chinese Colour Illusions – while combining traditional Chinese illusion techniques with Western approaches to magic.
Ho is a Hong Kong Magic Champion and third-place winner at the Asian Magic Championships, and his performance style, known as “New Style Xifa”, has been developed as a way of bringing Chinese intangible cultural heritage magic to contemporary international audiences.
If dance and physical theatre are more your thing, The Bride sounds particularly intriguing.
Presented by Backbone Production, it follows Er’er, a young woman returning to her mother’s hidden ancestral home on Silkworm Island following her death. Through physical theatre, dance, ritual and cinematic storytelling, the production explores inheritance, identity and what it means to become ourselves.
Then there’s Echoes of Being from Meitong Dance Studio, a dance work exploring memory, identity and emotional tension through movement and colour psychology.
The production uses the contrast between red and blue to explore different internal states, including control and conflict, concealment and openness.
Unbounded Growth takes another approach entirely.
Performed by four dancers, the production uses the imagery of plants, roots and branches to explore relationships and personal growth. Inspired by the Wa people’s philosophy of respecting and living harmoniously with nature, it asks why there should be one “correct” way for a person to grow.
That’s actually quite a lovely thought.
Plants don’t look at the one growing next to them and complain that it’s doing life incorrectly.
Perhaps humans could learn something there.
Young performers are represented too.
1617: Our Tale of Two Planets takes audiences forward to 2080, where humanity has conquered sleep in the pursuit of maximum efficiency.
Which sounds absolutely horrendous.
When a group of young people accidentally falls asleep, however, they rediscover dreams, imagination, tenderness and the ability simply to be still.
Created and performed by 16 and 17-year-olds, the semi-autobiographical sci-fi production explores identity, loneliness, gender and cross-cultural belonging through spoken word, live music, physical theatre, puppetry and a BSL sequence. It’s been developed by ActLoud Theatre Shanghai in collaboration with London’s Chickenshed Theatre.
Chinese mythology also receives a contemporary makeover in Wukong and Kong.
Inspired by Journey to the West, the production reimagines Sun Wukong’s pilgrimage through the lens of family, identity and freedom.
Traditional Chinese shadow puppetry meets digital projection, electronic soundscapes and audience interaction as the company explores parental expectations, personal boundaries and what happens when love begins to feel like control.
Another East-meets-West encounter comes from The Silk Road (Kinda), and this one has a particularly unusual premise.
Peking Opera’s Yuji and Oscar Wilde’s Salome have apparently both died ten thousand times on stage.
Frankly, I’d be asking Equity some fairly serious questions by this point.
The pair suddenly find themselves together in a liminal space, where these women from different theatrical and cultural traditions begin exploring who they might actually be outside the roles they’ve repeatedly been required to play.
The musical combines elements of Peking Opera with Western musical theatre to explore how women across different cultures and periods interact.
Elsewhere, ASS ASS IN takes audiences considerably further back in time to fifth-century BCE China and Zhao Xiangzi, ruler of the State of Zhao.
Rather than concentrating solely on the assassin who attempted to kill him, the production considers the person who survived and returned to his seat of power, becoming a meditation on judgement, leadership and the way power itself can shape the person occupying it.
For families, A Magical Journey to Sichuan brings a children’s dance company from Tianfu No.7 School to the programme. The Xiaoyingxing Dance Ensemble combines arts education with an international outlook and uses dance as a means of developing both artistic expression and cultural confidence in its young performers.
There’s also Realm Beyond, Boundless Dance, which sounds enormous in its cultural scope.
Its central concept, The Scroll – A Mosaic of Chinese Civilization, draws upon thousands of years of mythology and history, from Pangu and Nüwa through Sun Wukong, Nezha and Mulan. The company specialises in combining Chinese mythology and traditional folk culture with contemporary street dance and immersive physical theatre.
And finally, there’s Backstage.
After a cruise ship cabaret performance, audience volunteer Lena is invited backstage for an exclusive visit.
Except she can’t get back out.
That’s inconvenient.
As the distinction between reality, rehearsal and deception begins to disappear, the production turns into an immersive theatrical experience inspired by the mechanisms of telecommunications fraud. It explores trust, obedience, manipulation, identity and what happens when we can no longer be entirely certain that what we’re experiencing is real.
Taken together, it’s quite an eclectic collection.
Magic sits alongside contemporary dance. Ancient Chinese mythology meets modern technology. Peking Opera encounters Western musical theatre. Young performers explore a futuristic world while other artists reach thousands of years into the past.
Chinese Culture Week itself only launched at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2023, but it has already grown considerably. In 2025, its Edinburgh programme welcomed thousands of visitors, while content surrounding the event generated more than 200 million views across Chinese digital platforms. It also supported more than 20 Chinese cultural brands and institutions and involved over 60 student participants and interns.
That’s quite some growth in a relatively short period.
The Edinburgh Fringe is at its best when it genuinely feels international, and initiatives like Chinese Culture Week contribute to that.
Yes, we come to Edinburgh to be entertained.
But festivals can do something else too.
They can introduce us to people we wouldn’t normally meet, stories we wouldn’t normally hear and cultures we might otherwise only ever experience from a distance.
The official opening of Chinese Culture Week gave me a small window into that, and I’m glad I attended.
And you never know.
Perhaps one day Theatre Village will make the journey in the opposite direction and I’ll find myself reviewing theatre in China.
Now that would be an interesting assignment.
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