Zhang Jun: The Chinese Dancer Who Brought Indian Culture to China Through Bharatanatyam and Kathak Dies

Zhang Jun, the Chinese dancer who became her country's most celebrated teacher of Indian classical dance, has passed away, leaving behind a legacy that formed one of the more unusual threads connecting two ancient civilizations.

Her journey began in the 1950s. Encouraged by Premier Zhou Enlai during the India-China bonhomie of that era, Zhang Jun first visited India in the early 1950s and was captivated by Indian dance and art forms. She returned to India repeatedly over the following decades — barring the Cultural Revolution years — studying under maestros like Birju Maharaj and at Kalakshetra in Chennai, and receiving intensive training at the Darpana Academy in 1980–81. She was widely described as the first Chinese dancer to study classical dance in India.

She helped form China's famed Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble and spent her life teaching Bharatanatyam, Kathak and Odissi to generations of Chinese students, including the acclaimed dancer Jin Shan Shan. Diagnosed with cancer in 1996, she passed away in 2012.

Her work was a small but genuine contribution to cultural diplomacy between India and China — two countries with a complex historical relationship and significant civilizational differences that often overshadow their ancient connections. Buddhism traveled from India to China more than two thousand years ago; trade and cultural exchange have flowed intermittently across the Himalayas and the Silk Road ever since.

Zhang Jun's students — Chinese dancers performing the gestures and expressions of Bharatanatyam and Kathak — were an embodiment of something that political declarations often promise but rarely deliver: genuine cultural understanding, learned through the discipline of the body.

Sources

• Chinese fans pay rich tributes to China's legendary Indian classical dancer Zhang Jun — WhyDance