China: Confucius, the great Chinese thinker, philosopher, statesman and educator, may have lived over 2,500 years ago but he is undergoing a major revival at home and abroad these days.
And now the Chinese government is hoping to build on the reputation of the venerable philosopher to spread Chinese culture around the world, including Ireland, and teach Confucian philosophy at home.
The central message of Confucianism is achieving harmony through self-refinement in manners and taste and the philosophy dominated Chinese society for centuries, spreading to Europe in the late 16th century.
In China, Kongqiuhe, as he is better known, is famous for revolutionising the education system and has given his name to 80 educational and cultural institutes in 39 countries, which will function as the equivalent of the Goethe Institute or the Alliance Francaise around the globe. University College Dublin was awarded Ireland's only Confucius institute in April this year.
"The new priority and intensification of effort around Chinese studies bespeaks a recognition that Ireland's relationship with China will be much more significant in the decades ahead," said Padraic Conway, vice-president of university relations at UCD, attending a Confucius institute conference in the capital.
"While great advances have been made in the commercial sphere in the past decade, these too need to be bedded down in much greater levels of mutual understanding if said commercial relationships are to prove of lasting benefit to Ireland and its economy. In Confucian terms, we at UCD are about respecting the youth so that the plant flowers and produces fruit," he said.
With 30 million people already learning Chinese around the world, including two million in Japan, the Confucius institutes will hope to meet the huge demand for learning Mandarin overseas, State Councillor Chen Zhili told 400 delegates at the conference.
The number learning Chinese abroad is forecast to rise to 100 million people by 2010 and the plan is to set up 100 Confucius institutes by then. The US and Thailand already have 11 institutes each and 99 more from 38 countries have applied to set them up.
China is certainly becoming more international. Last year more than half a million foreign investment companies from 190-plus countries were launched in China, while over 30,000 Chinese companies branched out overseas. Up to 120 million overseas visitors came to China last year, while state figures show that 31 million Chinese people journeyed overseas.
The rise in interest in Chinese language learning is immense - rich couples in the West are hiring Chinese nannies to make sure their toddlers speak Mandarin from an early age.
There are also political reasons for the rise in popularity of Confucianism. Burgeoning wealth and the rise of consumerism in the world's fastest-growing economy has seen many traditional Confucian values of honour and decency slip away in favour of self-serving, money-grabbing behaviour, the leadership believes.
Scholars, and increasingly the Communist Party itself, believe following some Confucian principles would be conducive to the building of a "harmonious society", something which President Hu Jintao refers to constantly.
Earlier this year, the president decided that the only way to combat the eight pernicious "disgraces" creeping into society was for the masses to learn a "socialist sense of honour and shame" and analysts have noted the Confucian tone of his message.
The Beijing Institute of Genomics, part of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, has started compiling a database of descendents of the great philosopher - which should put paid to charlatans who claim to be a distant relative of the Wise One.
The problem is that Confucius, who lived from 551-479 BC, has more than three million descendants, with many of them concentrated around his birthplace of Qufu in Shandong Province, but with many located in other parts of China, Korea and further afield.
All they need to do is offer a hair for DNA testing; the institute began offering the service after DNA research identified Florida accountant Tom Robinson as a descendant of Genghis Khan.
In order to settle the debate about what the ancient philosopher looked like, the China Confucius Foundation recently announced it would publish a standard image of him in September - as an old man with a long beard, broad mouth and big ears, wearing a robe with his hands crossed on his chest.
As the man known as the Master said in the Analects of Confucius: "A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?"