Rural farmers choir delivers uplifting song of bountiful harvest at Spring Festival Gala

China

Rural farmers choir delivers uplifting song of bountiful harvest at Spring Festival Gala

2026-02-16 22:01 Last Updated At：02-17 05:07

A talented choir consisting of villagers and farmers from one of China's agricultural heartlands took to the stage at the main venue of the China Media Group (CMG)'s Spring Festival Gala in Beijing on Monday evening.

The farmers from the rural Dazhanchang Town of Zhongwei City in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, teamed up with Chinese pop music duo Phoenix Legend, to deliver an uplifting song about sharing in the joy of a fruitful harvest.

The colorful segment took viewers on a journey to experience a bountiful autumn harvest with baskets brimming with grain, golden rice stalks and fiery red chilies -- one of the region's signature culinary ingredients.

The Spring Festival, or the Chinese New Year, is the most important traditional holiday for the Chinese people, and watching the Spring Festival Gala, also known as "Chunwan," on is a cherished part of the celebrations in hundreds of millions of Chinese homes.

Since first broadcast in 1983, the gala has been a cherished part of Chinese people's celebration of the Spring Festival. The gala recognized by Guinness World Records as the most-watched annual television program on the planet.

The Spring Festival itself was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2024.

The 2026 Spring Festival falls on Tuesday this year, ushering in the Year of the Horse.

China launches Shenzhou-23 manned spaceship

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.