People in Sandu Shui Autonomous County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, gathered on Thursday for a grand daylong celebration of the Duan Festival which included folk-custom rituals, horse racing and antiphonal chorus performances.

The Duan Festival, the Shui ethnic minority group's most important event of the year, starts in the twelfth month and ends in next year's second month of the Shui calendar (around September to the end of October in the Gregorian calendar), making it the longest festival in China. It celebrates the harvest and the coming the new year.

Sandu Shui Autonomous County, located in the southeast of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, is the largest habitation of Shui people in China. More than a half of Shui population live there. From September the villagers began to prepare for the Duan, and this year's principal celebration fell on October 17.

This Thursday, a series of traditional rituals were held to worship Shui gods and placate the villagers' ancestors. Attired in traditional Shui clothes and sparkling silver accessories, the performers danced to the classical melodies played by a local Shui-style orchestra, with traditional instruments such as reed pipes, bronze drums and suonas.

The elders brought sacrifices to the altar and distributed the newly brewed wine to the young. While people indulged in local delicacies, the choir took the stage.

Next, it was the time for the breathtaking horse races. In the past two months, the county's race course had already witnessed several rounds of horse races that had qualified 150 horses and more than 100 jockeys in the final match.

The final was full of excitement. On the muddy course, the horses galloped at top speed and the hunks on the saddles skillfully reined their equine partners to force other competitors to tumble and fall. In deafening clamor and laughter, spectators also jostled for space and cheered on the jockeys.

Horses bear great significance in Shui culture due to the ethnicity's own history of frequent migrations as well as the mountainous geography of their contemporary settlements. Horse racing during the festival becomes a special occasion where Shui people display their gratitude to the stock.

Another highlight of this year's Duan Festival is that 100 embroiders with their own threads and tools lined up at the local square to give the onlookers a spectacular show of an ancient craftmanship called horsetail embroidery.

This handicraft's raw materials include horsetail hair and silk thread. The two are intertwined to present another unique, resilient, durable, and colorful thread for the horsetail embroidery. Natural oils in the horsetail hairs serve as a lasting maintenance for the luster of the surrounding silk threads, fixing the color of the embroidery in a primitive but clever way.

Video by Song Shen, Bai Linyong
Video edited by Yu Yingtian

(Cover Image: A grand gathering of Shui ethnic group's Duan Festival celebration in Sandu Shui Autonomous County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, October 17, 2019. / CGTN Photo)