Wangguo Festival in Xizang: Earth's highest harvest revelry

At 4,000 meters above the sea level, farmers in southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region gathered to celebrate the Wangguo Festival, a traditional festival to greet the forthcoming harvest.

With barley wine in hand, farmers dance and riders race their steeds across the vast plateau, embracing a ritual that has a history of more than 1,500 years to express their hopes for a bountiful harvest.

The festival, held when crops are nearing maturity, is widely celebrated in Xizang's agricultural regions, particularly popular in rural areas along the middle reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River and the banks of the Lhasa River.

Monks from local temples select an auspicious day for the celebration. On this day, people dress in festive attire, bringing fine wine and food as they gather for the ceremony. Each family sends a member to join a grand procession, led by monks.

As they circle the ripening fields, they chant and pray for a successful harvest.

Colorful banners dance beneath azure skies as the music of fiddles and stomping feet compose the purest of harvest symphonies. This is authentic agrarian joy on the roof of the world, where the revelers, with their exuberance, defy the constraints of extreme altitude.

Due to varying climatic conditions, crop maturity dates differ across regions, meaning the festival does not have a fixed date. It is often observed at different dates in different place.

Wangguo Festival in Xizang: Earth's highest harvest revelry

China's Shenzhou-23 crewed spaceship blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country's northwest on Sunday, sending three astronauts to its orbiting space station.

The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, lifted off from the launch site at 23:08 Beijing Time (15:08 GMT).

The crew members consist of mission commander Zhu Yangzhu, and fellow astronauts Zhang Zhiyuan and Lai Ka-ying, who is also the first astronaut from China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

In another notable first, one of the crew members is set to undertake a year-long stay aboard the space station, double the usual duration of previous Shenzhou missions.

After entering orbit, the Shenzhou-23 spaceship will perform a fast automated rendezvous and docking with the radial port of the space station core module Tianhe, forming a combination of three modules and three spacecraft.

Shenzhou-23 marks the 40th flight of China's manned spaceflight program and the seventh manned flight mission since the Tiangong space station entered its application and development phase in late 2022.

China launches Shenzhou-23 manned spaceship