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Feature: Chinese team to attend Spain's traditional human towers competition

Xinhua, June 4, 2016 Adjust font size:

The Concurs de Castells, a biennial competition of Spain's best human tower teams held in Catalonia, will for the time have a participating time from abroad this year.

The Chinese team "Els Xiquets de Hangzhou", or the Children of Hangzhou, has been accepted by event organizer Tarragona City Council as an invited "colla", or the group of people who build a "castell", or human tower, in the "XXVI Concurs de Castells", set to be held in Tarragona in October.

Tarragona City Council gave consent only after assessing the team's performance.

Being the first colla founded in China, it was founded in 2010 in the textile factory Antex, in Deqing, east China, after Chinese businessman Qian Anhua was impressed by castellers' performance during a trip to Catalonia, east Spain and decided to introduce the activity to China.

Qian had the idea of participating in the biennial human tower competition after watching the event in 2012.

He told Xinhua recently in Barcelona that a 200-plus-strong team under his leadership will come to Tarragona to participate in the event later this year.

"Castellers represent balance, moderation, both pillars of the Chinese classical philosophy," Qian said, highlighting the importance of the spirit of unity.

Els Xiquets de Hangzhou trained a lot and showed great improvements in their performance.

Its journey towards being admitted to Tarragona's contest was even filmed and turned into a documentary entitled "The Garden of the Peach Tree Flowers -- Els Xiquets of Hangzhou" by Spanish media personnel.

The documentary was presented earlier this week in Barcelona and its executive producer Oriol Gispert described it as "a very important personal experience and an interesting cultural exchange, a luxury."

The documentary includes the small dreams of the team members, mostly migrant workers, as well as their collective dream of participating in the Castellers contest in Tarragona, according to Oriol Martinez, one of the writers of the documentary.

Qian said the documentary "has taken 4 years to be made and is wonderful," and that he felt honored.

Castells are part of the Catalan traditions that date back to over 200 years ago. They were declared Intangible Heritage by UNESCO in 2010. Endit