Spring Festival in Inner Mongolia

Today as we continue our Spring Festival Special, we visit Xilin Gol Prefecture in China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. We'll have a look at how local herdsmen spend the Spring Festival, the most important holiday of the Chinese people.

Here's Da Min.

"Blue Hometown" is a local folk song of China's Mongolian ethnic group who mainly live in Inner Mongolia, home to China's largest grasslands.

Located in the central part of Inner Mongolia, Suninte is where the best lamb meat comes from for hotpot, a household favorite dish in the country.

Driving on the vast grasslands, you can see tents and brick houses dotting the snow covered landscape. Herds of camels, red cattle and horses are grazing for food.

The population in Suninte is scattered, with less then one person in every square kilometer of land. Then how do local people celebrate the Spring Festival, which is mostly a holiday for family reunions?

The Spring Festival is still one of the most popular holidays for the locals as for most other ethnic groups in China.

Like the rest of the country, traditionally people stop work to relax and have fun during the Spring Festival, getting ready for spring planting. Housewives don't even cook complicated meals in order to relax and have time to play cards and mahjong with friends. This is also true for the Mongolians.

Preparations for the holiday started in the last month of the Chinese lunar calendar, usually one month later than the Gregorian calendar. Chinese wine and lamb meat are necessities for the family dinner at Spring Festival Eve and traditional Mongolian flour food is made.

By the time of the holidays, at least a dozen kilos of torte and more than one thousand steamed stuff buns are prepared per family and frozen outside their homes. Women are busy preparing New Year's gowns for the family. Made from colorful threads, each gown is a piece of stunning art work.

Adiya, former director of Suninte Zuo Prefecture, introduces the various celebration activities during the Spring Festival.

"Spring Festival is one of the most sacred holidays for us. Celebration activities became more colorful than before thanks to improved living conditions of the local people."
The Mongolians excel at singing and dancing. Adiya says during the Spring Festival, musical groups are organized to tour homes and visit the elderly who live alone.

In addition to watching TV and videos at home, improved transport in the grasslands allows herdsmen, especially young people, to travel to other's homes for parties, musical shows and traditional sports like wrestling and chess.

60-year old Amah Zhula is a model worker of the prefecture. Her two storey building stands alone in a remote corner. Zhula is busy working in her solar energy greenhouse when noises are heard indicating the family's sheep are returning from the prairie.

Zhula raises more than 1,000 head of cattle and sheep and the lambing season keeps her Spring Festival holiday very busy. With instruction from veterinary experts, Zhula can now make 150 thousand yuan, or some 22 thousand US dollars a year from raising livestock alone, and half of that income is put into husbandry.

"If you work hard, we herdsmen can live lifestyles like that of the urban dwellers. That's what I always told my kids."

Along with improved living conditions, China's thirty years of reform and opening up also changed local people to become more open minded. The use of wind and solar energy boosted the economic development in the region. Automobiles, motorcycles and mobile phones are becoming more and more popular in addition to all kinds of home appliances. For example in Suninte Zuo Prefecture, almost all the households own a small four-wheeled tractor and there is at least one motor vehicle in every three households.

Wearing a finely made green gown, Naren Toya, a friend of Zhula, drove her own car to come visit her friend. The young woman says she has learned to drive when she was a teenager.

"Nowadays women are freed from their chores thanks to modern technology and are able to learn to drive. My home is equipped with solar and wind generators so I can use a fridge and a washing machine which made my chores a lot easier. Now I have everything ready for Spring Festival Eve. Then we'll drive to see my parents who live some 20 kilometers away and spend the New Years Day with them."

Likewise, most of the herdsmen will drop their traditional ways of traveling on horses, but instead, they will drive their family cars to pay New Year's calls to relatives and friends during this Spring Festival.