On July 26, 2026, in the Changchun area of Jilin Province, China. Thirty children from the Czech choir JITRO stood on stage alongside fifty Chinese teenagers. They were not singing the same song – but they were singing each other's songs. The Czech children sang Dvořák's Song. The Chinese youth responded with a zheng performance and a demonstration of Peking opera. At the conclusion, both groups sang together Ru Yuan (As We Wished) and Shining China – the Czech children were still struggling with the tones of Mandarin, but they sang with complete earnestness. More than a few people in the audience below the stage had moist eyes.
This was not merely a cultural encounter. This thread had been woven a hundred years ago. In 1893, Antonín Dvořák wrote the second movement of his New World Symphony in New York. Twenty years later, Chinese artist Li Shutong used this melody for his song Thinking of Home, which is still sung in China today. Generations of Chinese knew it from school benches – without ever suspecting it came from a Czech composer.
The year 2026 marks the tenth anniversary of the strategic partnership between the Czech Republic and China. In July of that year, the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament visited China, and both sides agreed on expanding cooperation in tourism, direct flights, and youth exchanges. It was in this context that the JITRO choir was invited to China.
The choir's director said: "We wanted to show the children that there is a country where their peers also sing Dvořák – just in a different language." Between two countries there sometimes lie thousands of mountains and rivers, yet sometimes a single melody is enough. A melody that Dvořák wrote one hundred and thirty years ago rang out today in Mandarin from the mouths of Czech children. The children have already met in song. For us adults, all that remains is to follow them.
Marie Liu