Three reasons to visit China’s longest festival

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With Christmas and New Year’s just around the corner, most people are counting down the days until they can throw off their ties, stuff themselves silly and party with reckless abandon.

Having to wait an entire year for just seven days of festivities feels like a huge letdown. So, what if we told you there was a festival in China where you could party for over 1.5 months straight? Enter the Duan Festival of the ethnic Shui people.

Shui women often wear white head cloths. /CGTN Photo

Reason 1: Go off the beaten track, literally

The Shui people live in the hills of Sandu County in southwest China’s Guizhou Province. Before the introduction of modern roads, most of the traffic in and out of the county was via narrow mountain paths or the Duliu River, one of the tributaries of the vast Pearl River system.

Due to this isolation, the Shui have retained many of their customs: They have their own written language and lunisolar calendar, which is different from those used by the other parts of China.

A Shui lady gets ready for Duan Festival by preparing "fish stuffed with chives". /CGTN Photo

Every year from around August to October, after the autumn rice harvest, they hold their New Year celebrations in the form of the 49-day Duan Festival – the longest festival in China.

Reason 2: Drink like a fish

The festival separates Shui villages into seven groups who take turns to celebrate the New Year. The night before the festival every household will lay out a feast, which must first be offered to the spirits of ancestors before it can be eaten.

One tradition of the Duan Festival is the hosts cannot eat meat until after midnight. /CGTN Photo

To wash it all down, the Shui drink rice wine. Here the rule is anytime someone makes a toast, everyone downs three cups. This quickly leads to a lot of drunken revelries, especially since after midnight, you’re supposed to visit every neighbor in the village and drink with them too!

Reason 3: Take part in the ‘Running of the Horses’

The next day, most people will head to the hills to watch an all-day horse racing event. Here, it’s less about winning and more about taking part – everywhere you look, drunk and hungover spectators jostle for space beside the muddy race course, and many even run on to the track to heckle the jockeys as they gallop by.

The horses are unruly too, often charging into crowds and butting spectators into ditches. It’s like the "Running of the Bulls" in Spain, but minus the goring.

Anyone can enter the race as long as they own a horse. /CGTN Photo

The horse race is a big attraction. Every time a horse forces someone to fall face-first into the mud or tumble into a ditch, the boisterous spectators erupt into laughter. After all, this is what the Duan Festival is all about: Letting loose, and partying for 49 days straight!

Explore Sandu County with Travelogue host Tianran He in the eighth episode of our epic 10-part series, “The Pearl River: Mouth to Source.” It broadcasts on CGTN on Sunday, December 24 at 7:30 am (Beijing Time). Rebroadcast times: Sundays 4:30 pm, Mondays 2:00 am and Thursdays 1:30 pm.