Last Thursday, 7pm at the Artesis College for translators and interpreters, an honouring celebration was held for Annemie Bonneux.

Many people owe her a great deal of gratitude for all the work she has done, whether it is in helping them as a teacher, providing connections as a curator or guiding officials in the wonderful East. She will be missed by everyone who has enjoyed her company.

She gave a lot of students like me the energy and passion for China. I was so excited and motivated to study Chinese back in 1999-2003 at college that I decided to write my thesis about Chinese historic-scientific translations concerning ancient astronomy. In my third year, she was absent, due to illness, but I was lucky she returned during my thesis year, where she kept motivating to finish the task successfully as my promoter.

Thanks to her, a lot of students got lobbied into an internship in Xi’an. This opportunity I took with both hands, and after a half year of internship, Deborah and I decided to stay in China for years to come.

She is the embodiment of promoting Chinese culture (as curator and guide) and Chinese language (as teacher) to Antwerp. Her greatest long-term and yet unfinished project is the development of the interpreter and translator course as one of the main foreign languages at Artesis (before called HIVT, and even earlier, from RUCA).

However, as always, she was a master in giving people the key and the energy to complete on their own what she had started. Her passion was like a tree, from which people's fascinations grew into individual projects. Her colleagues and former students are eager to keep that tree alive with many years to come, so we can keep growing new branches and leaves to portray the energy, kindness and passion she radiated towards an intercultural society.

"Het omhelzen van de maan" (VRT)
"Tentoonstelling Tang-dynastie in provinciehuis Antwerpen" (ATV)
"Tang Dynastie: Chinees Nieuwjaar" (ATV)
"In memoriam" (Rudy)