The First China-Europe Solar Physics Meeting will be held in Kunming, China, from May 15 to May 19, 2017. The meeting will be co-sponsored by Nanjing University, Yunnan Observatories, National Natural Science Foundation of China and Chinese academy of Sciences. It will be organized by Yunnan observatories. Professor Cheng Fang of Nanjing University and Prof. Sami K. Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research jointly serve as the chairmen of the scientific organizing committee. Professor Jun Lin of Yunnan Observatories will serve as the chairman of the local organizing committee.

Solar physics is an important branch of astrophysics and space sciences, and is tightly related to the deep-space exploration, space environment, as well as other related fields. Europehas been playing a very important role in solar physics during the past century. In recent decades, scientists in China have made remarkable progress in the studies of solar physics, and promoted solar physics to be a relatively superior discipline of astrophysics in China. Over the last three decades, solar physicists in both Europeand China have worked together on a large variety of topics in various ways, yielding fruitful achievements and success. As an example, many bilateral meetings have been successfully organized since 1999, includingfour China-France Solar Physics meetings and two China-Germany Solar Physics meetings. In order to broaden the collaborations and to exchange scientific results between Chinese and European solar physicists, after several rounds of communications,both sideshave reached an agreement on holding the serial China-Europe solar physics meetings every 2 or 3 years in China and European alternatively. It aims to strengthen the collaboration between European and Chinese scientists, in particular among young scientists. This will not only help development of solar physics in China and Europe, but will greatly contribute to the development of solar physics world-wide as well.

After intensive discussions among Chinese and European solar physicists, it is finally decided that the First China-Europe Solar Physics Meeting will be held in Kunming, China in May 2017, hosted by Yunnan Observatories. Kunming is a beautiful city, which is called The Spring City of China. In Yunnan Observatories, there are a group of observational, theoretical, and instrumental scientists working in solar physics. One important reason why the first meeting was chosen to be held in Kunming is that there are several new telescopes located near Kunming, including the 1 meter New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST), the Solar Decimeter Dynamic Spectrometer, the Solar Fine Structure Telescope, the full-disk Hα Chromosphere Telescope, the ONSET telescope developed by Nanjing University, and the Lijiang Coronagraph (the first coronagraph inChina) developed by the Japanese colleagues. Among them, NVST is the largest vacuum telescope in the world.