Members of an international media tour focusing on a Belt and Road Initiative hub learn how to paint peonies. [Photo by CCTV]

After visiting the world's largest small commodities market in Yiwu and the world's busiest port in Ningbo on Dec 23 to 24, expats on a recent media tour to Zhejiang province about a prized Belt and Road Initiative hub learned to paint peonies.

Traditional Chinese painting uses watercolors and can be categorized as being either landscape, portrait, or bird-and-flower. It was this last category that caught the attention of a man who introduces himself as Mr. Jack. While it can be said of many expats in China that they "used to be an English teacher", it is not often you meet someone like Mr. Jack who gave up a long career teaching English to pursue painting peonies.

Members of the media tour began wetting their brushes and wagging the tip in a dab of red paint. Then came the scary part: invading the silk scroll's white square. As instructed, they started with the bottom petals first and worked up to the larger petals in the center. With time and a little help, peonies sprang to life.

Like a group of kids, the members of the media tour smiled as they held up their finished paintings bearing their Chinese names. This cultural connection only felt natural with the help of a teacher like Mr. Jack. His first career connected Chinese students with the world through English, and now he is connecting the world to China through painting. This is all part of his philosophy to "let the fragrance of friendship and peonies flow around the world".

While the media tour's main focus was to share how a vast shipping network links with the world, painting peonies – China's national flower – was just another side of the story.