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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 the journal

A Singing Mountain: Laoye Mountain’s Hua’er Gathering

At Laoye Mountain in Datong, the annual sixth-day-of-the-sixth-month gathering joins hua’er singing with a mountain pilgrimage. The song meeting places open-air performance at the center of the seasonal event.

2 min readXining
Laoye Mountain’s annual gathering on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month brings Han, Hui and Tibetan singers into hua’er antiphony; the separate 2012 festival had four sections and 20+ performances. Original editorial diagram; not a photograph, a depiction of an actual meal or performance, or a measured site plan.
Laoye Mountain’s annual gathering on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month brings Han, Hui and Tibetan singers into hua’er antiphony; the separate 2012 festival had four sections and 20+ performances. Original editorial diagram; not a photograph, a depiction of an actual meal or performance, or a measured site plan.

A song meeting on the sixth day of the sixth month

Every year on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month, the Laoye Mountain gathering in Datong brings hua’er singing together with a pilgrimage and mountain fair. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes the event as a meeting where Han, Hui and Tibetan singers join in folk-song antiphony. The setting matters: the gathering unfolds on a mountain associated with worship and seasonal celebration, while singing draws people into shared outdoor space.

Hua’er is not simply a stage genre in this account. Its presence at Laoye Mountain connects a named local gathering with a broader regional song tradition. The Ministry’s description places the event in Datong County and names the annual lunar date, giving the festival a rhythm that follows the calendar rather than a fixed Gregorian weekend.

The mountain and the exchange of voices

The mountain has also hosted organized public performances. A 2012 report records the third Laoye Mountain Hua’er Festival opening at the mountain plaza on 21 July. Its program was arranged in four sections—“Flowers in Four Seasons,” “Red Flowers in June,” “Passionate Hua’er” and “Village Invitation to Hua’er”—and included more than twenty performances. The documented edition placed hua’er within a larger public program of music and cultural activities.

That festival was one organized edition of a gathering also associated with an annual lunar date. The two accounts show different scales of the event: a recurring mountain meeting tied to the sixth day of the sixth lunar month, and a staged festival whose 2012 program brought a larger audience into the plaza.

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  1. Laoye Mountain’s annual gathering on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month brings Han, Hui and Tibetan singers into hua’er antiphony; the separate 2012 festival had four sections and 20+ performances. Original editorial diagram; not a photograph, a depiction of an actual meal or performance, or a measured site plan.© 2026 IFreeing · Rights information Photo source ↗ Proportionally resized and converted to WebP without cropping. No objects were added, removed or reconstructed.