History and Riga, the capital of Latvia

For centuries, Riga has been a center in the Baltic area and an entrance-gate for travellers. Its oversea port on the shores of the river Daugava was a crossing point for goods from Western and Eastern Europe. Attracting those goods, it attracted also those, who, for versatile reasons, went with them: merchants, warriors, clerics, landowners. Their foreign languages became less foreign in Riga compared to many other places in the world. The facades of Rigas narrow lanes and wide squares resounded with the multifacetted sounds of European languages.

However, also for centuries, Riga has been the stronghold of ruling minorities: the german Livonian Order (Livländischer Orden), the Swedish Crown, the Russian Emperor and, later, the Soviets.German maires ruled the city from the 13^th to the 19^th century and in the Latvian folk-songs (dainas) – the rich documentation of the life of a nation without its proper state – Riga makes the appearance of a strange beauty outstanding from the plains and rolling hills of rural Latvia and admired for almost bursting with unfamiliar colours, new sounds and strangers. Thus, it may have belonged to the people of the countryside like a precious stone kept in a casket in a common household: different from the rest of things, but appropriated by being so.

The 19^th century brought innumerable changes for the Baltics and in such a way Latvians, for the first time, took a major part in writing the history of the city and shaping its new face, and found the way to national sovereignity. Simular to the southern and northern neighbors, Lithuania and Estonia, during the first Latvian republic of the 1920's and 30's  the establishment of a new political and social order entailed an enlivenment of cultural life based on the general recognition of the national language and on an openness towards the great cultural centers in Western Europe and in Russia. Interrupted by the war and suffocated throughout more than 40 years of suppression by the Soviets, these general charactristics of cultural life in Riga and Latvia remained and were revived since the beginnings of the 1990's. However, a major difference to the earlier episodes take shape in public consciousness – Europe (with Russia as its geographical part) is still the closest but not the only political and cultural dimension influencing the main discourses of society. Asia – and China as one of its dominant cultures – claims to be better known. For those who directly face this fact, the task is enormous taking into account the long intellectual isolation under the soviet regime and the abruptly increasing amount of commercial, cultural and political activities which require a solid fundament of knowledge to sustain and stimulate necessary and desirable public communication on various issues related to China. Nevertheless, working on this field means to be engaged not only in an “exotic” field of academic studies, but also directly in the cultural and social transformations of a nation just about to introduce itself to the world.