Imre Galambos, professor emeritus of Chinese at the University of Cambridge, who specializes in medieval Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang in Gansu province, said the study of ancient manuscripts offers important lessons for today's world, revealing that civilizations were far more interconnected in the past than many people realize.

Since 2023, Galambos has served as a Qiushi chair professor at Zhejiang University, and he attended the inaugural World Conference of Classics in Beijing in 2024. Recalling his experience of the conference, Galambos said he truly believes that intercultural dialogue is the way forward in research and education.

"Classical studies — and the field of humanities in general — will no doubt play an important role in providing the foundation for intercultural understanding," he said. "The way we understand the past has crucial ramifications for our own identity today."

Drawing on examples from his research, Galambos compared the use of Chinese by non-Chinese-speaking communities with the spread of Latin texts across medieval Europe, saying such interactions generated "new texts, commentaries, and even entire written traditions in vernacular languages".

"Much of the innovation that happened in pre-modern societies resulted from cultural contacts, from the adoption of foreign texts, objects, or ideas into new environments," he explained. "Typically, this was not passive borrowing but rather creative adaptation, leading to entirely new developments. We can learn from such past examples and embrace the idea of dialogue."