Gabriella Bonino, or Tang Yun as she is called in Chinese, is an Italian sociologist who has been living in China for 36 years. [Photo/WeChat account: cctvzgxw]
Living in China for 36 years, Gabriella Bonino, or Tang Yun as she is called in Chinese, an Italian sociologist, is often called the "Marco Polo of a new era."
Bonino, 70, found her way into the study of the Chinese culture she loves just like Venetian merchant and explorer Marco Polo, who traveled his way to the East during the 13th century in the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) along the ancient Silk Road and settled in Yangzhou, East China's Jiangsu province, where he became a local official.
When she was still a student, Bonino went to Paris for a holiday. Visiting a local museum, she was completely captured by the beauty of the Chinese porcelains on display. From this encounter, her curiosity for China only increased, eventually leading her to apply to study in the country.
In 1987, Bonino went to Beijing to study Chinese. Her life in China started at that time. In 2017, she settled in Wenzhou in East China's Zhejiang province, which had been an important port city in the maritime Silk Road, where she became a teacher at the School of Media of Wenzhou Business College. She began to study Wenzhou from the perspective of the Maritime Silk Road.
In order to dispel prejudice and present the real China she saw with her own eyes every day, she compiled her experiences into the Chinese-Italian bilingual book The Chinese Journal of a Contemporary Female Marco Polo, which was published in 2010.
Earlier in 2016, Bonino published an Italian language book on the Belt and Road Initiative in which she detailed the impact the initiative has had on the development of China.
The small town she set foot in is in Rui'an, a county-level city of Wenzhou boasting more than 100 precious intangible cultural heritages. Bonino has visited dozens of intangible inheritors over the past two years. She published what she learned in Italy earlier in 2022 in the 100,000-word book 64 Rui'an Intangible Cultural Heritages.
