Zhejiang University – located in Hangzhou, capital of East China's Zhejiang province – recently established a workstation in Qingyuan county in the province for its national language promotion center.

To further push forward the development of language in the new era, in 2020 the National Language Commission of China established a national language promotion base at Zhejiang University. The facility mainly carries out language promotion and traditional cultural inheritance work.

The dialect of Qingyuan county – administered by Lishui city in Zhejiang – is known as a living fossil of ancient language. It has preserved a large number of ancient Chinese features.

There are more than 2,000 ancient sounds, characters and words in the Qingyuan dialect, which completely retain the ancient rhyme rules. It is viewed as being of great value to the research of ancient Chinese, archaeology and the understanding of Chinese history.

The workstation will promote the popularization of the national standard language in Qingyuan county, while boosting the protection and inheritance of the Qingyuan dialect's culture, according to officials.