Participants try making dough figurines in Nantong. [Photo/Nantong Daily]

More than 100 overseas Chinese youths from nine countries, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany, have completed a weeklong cultural summer camp in Nantong, Jiangsu province.

They took part in a number of hands-on activities ranging from traditional Chinese medicine sachet making and rope-weaving to cake decorating and dough figurine sculpting.

At the Nantong Traditional Chinese Medicine Museum, participants learned to identify herbs and sew their own sachets. In Tongzhou district, they joined local students in a rope-weaving workshop, while a stop in Rugao allowed them to decorate fruit-filled cakes. At a film museum, an intangible heritage inheritor guided them in making dough figurines.

The camp also featured an international song and poetry competition that attracted 1,624 entries from nearly 100 Chinese-language schools worldwide. At the closing ceremony, students from schools in China, Spain and France gave a joint performance, while 10 schools formalized new sister-school agreements, expanding Nantong's existing network of 102 such partnerships.

"When children create something with their own hands, the culture truly takes root in their hearts," said Ge Shangshu, a teacher from Spain. "They become seeds of cultural transmission." Chen Miao, the principal of a UK-based Chinese school, said that for many overseas-born participants, the trip made their Chinese identity feel much more real.