People visit the 50th Cairo International Book Fair in the New Cairo suburb of the Egyptian capital in 2019. Photo: AFP

 
Egyptian book lovers treated themselves with hundreds of titles on China during the 53rd Cairo International Book Fair (CIBF), a major cultural event in the Egyptian capital that ran from January 26 to Monday.

More than 600 Arabic books translated from Chinese were on display in the pavilions of the Bayt Al-Hekma Cultural Group, a local publishing house mainly devoted to the Arabic translation of Chinese books. 

"Our main goal is to be a cultural bridge between the Arab and the Chinese cultures," said Ahmed al-Saeed, CEO of Bayt Al-Hekma, during the two-week cultural feast.

Featured publications include various books on China's history, literature, culture, geography and economy, dictionaries and lexicons, as well as bestseller Chinese children's books in Arabic.

"We also have a pavilion for children's books, with about 300 book titles, in partnership with China's renowned Jieli Publishing House," Saeed told the Xinhua News Agency.

The language books were published by Egypt's Bayt Al-Hekma Cultural Group with its Chinese partner Peking University Press and Sinolingua, he noted.

Bayt Al-Hekma won the Best-translated Book award at the fair for its Arabic edition of Belt and Road Initiative: A Comparative Study of Regional and National Economies.

Saeed said the rising number of Egyptian students of the Chinese language and the close political, social, economic ties between Egypt and China are behind the rising attention to China among local readers.

Yasmine Ahmed, a student of the Chinese language at Ain Shams University in Cairo, came to visit the Bayt Al-Hekma pavilions because of its "rich and diversified" books on China.

"These books, whether in Chinese or translated into Arabic, help me a lot with my studies," she told Xinhua.

Youssef Baghdady, a senior engineering student at the Egyptian Chinese University in Cairo, said he came to buy Chinese-learning books.

 The senior engineering student  plans to work for one of the Chinese companies operating in Egypt after graduation.

"Many people who work there are Chinese," the young man explained.

 "We can communicate in English but being able to speak Chinese with them can better boost your career."

The book fair in 2022 is held at the Egypt International Exhibitions Center in the country's capital with the participation of a total of 1,063 publishers from 51 countries.

It has received 1 million visits during the first nine days.

The number is expected to reach 2 million by the end of the fair, up by 20 percent from edition in 2021, said Haytham al-Hajj Aly, head of the General Egyptian Book Organization and chief organizer of the CIBF.

The reason behind Egyptian readers' growing interest in China-related books is that the Chinese culture is one of the closest to the Arab culture, and China's development success has made Egyptians curious about its experience, he told Xinhua. 

The 53rd edition increased its number of days in order to provide the public with the opportunity to delve into the exhibition and support the book and publishing industry in Egypt. New technological advancements and Artificial Intelligence were also a focus at the book fair. 

Xinhua