On an evening when flowers bloom
A spring breeze blows.
I wonder what's on the breeze.

On Jan. 7, a group of young students were busy writing poems and other short literary works at the Sangsang Madang art center in Chuncheon. One of them soon held up her paper. Two poems had been written, side by side, one in Korean and one in simplified Chinese. Both of them were written by Li Zihwa, a fifth grader from China. Li, whose mother tongue is Mandarin, won a writing competition last October in China for her written Korean.

Li and fifteen other Chinese students who all won the 10th Korean Writing Competition for Mandarin Speaking Students arrived in Korea on Jan. 4 to learn more about the Korean language and to visit the country first-hand. The Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST), along with the Korea Tobacco & Ginseng Corporation (KT&G), hosts a Korean writing competition for Mandarin speaking students every year. The winners of the competition are offered an opportunity to learn more about Korea by visiting the country.

Over recent years, more and more Chinese have been studying Korean, as there is growing interest in the Korean language and in Korean pop culture among people in China. Especially in Yanbian, where ethnic Koreans make up nearly half of the population, many young ethnic Han Chinese are learning Korean at Korean schools, too. The YUST, building on these trends, has hosted its yearly writing competition for Mandarin speaking students for a decade now.

Finally, the winners of this 10th competition who were in Korea this January spent some enjoyable days looking around Seoul's old palaces and museums and also attended some performances.

By Chang Iou-chung
Korea.net Staff Writer
Photos: International Foundation for Education and Culture
icchang@korea.kr