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Qinghai

Qinghai · Map

At Ta’er Monastery, butter becomes a temporary sculpture. In the Hehuang valleys, painted clay, embroidery and temple murals hold other kinds of time. Northward, Qinghai Lake is crossed by fish and birds; westward, salt works and telescopes bring two different kinds of work to the Qaidam Basin. Farther south, painters, carvers, herders and river patrols bring the headwaters into view through particular places and tasks. Follow the material, the water or the work: each route opens another Qinghai.

Qinghai
Xining Haidong Haibei Huangnan Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture Golog Yushu Haixi

Selected waterways · simplified geography

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From Siheji Shrine to a 24-Village Celebration

A 2009 account begins the sixth-month Regong festival at Siheji’s village shrine; a separate 2017 report recorded a celebration shared by 24 villages.

1 min readHuangnan
Original editorial diagram of the 24 participating villages recorded in the 2017 June Festival report. The ring is a counting device, not their geographic arrangement or a ritual route.
Original editorial diagram of the 24 participating villages recorded in the 2017 June Festival report. The ring is a counting device, not their geographic arrangement or a ritual route.

A June gathering begins at Siheji

A 2009 account places the Regong June Festival in the sixth lunar month, when crops along the Longwu River were nearing maturity and pasture grass was lush. It says one sequence began on the seventeenth day of the month at Siheji, then continued in dozens of Tibetan and Tu villages. Each village had a shrine for local and regional protective deities, giving the festival a set of distinct places rather than a single central stage.

A local sequence, a wider celebration

The same account says village observances could last from two to five days. A later report from 2017 described June Festival celebrations expanded to 24 villages. The two dated records show the gathering at different scales: a sequence that moved from shrine to shrine and a wider celebration shared among communities. The Longwu River valley provides the geography for both, while each village remains a setting of its own.

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  1. Original editorial diagram of the 24 participating villages recorded in the 2017 June Festival report. The ring is a counting device, not their geographic arrangement or a ritual route.© 2026 IFreeing · Rights information Photo source ↗ Proportionally resized and converted to WebP without cropping. No objects were added, removed or reconstructed.