The curtain rose Monday afternoon on a traditional festival of the Li and Miao ethnic minority groups, as singing began at the foot of Wuzhishan Mountain in South China's Hainan Island. 200 ethnic minority groups' representatives from Taiwan celebrated the festival with Li and Miao people together.

The March 3rd Festival, or the Love Festival, is celebrated annually on March 3rd of Chinese Lunar Calendar by Li and Miao people to commemorate their ancestors, celebrate the harvest, sing about life and look for love. This year's festival has special significance, as ethnic minorities from Taiwan also came to celebrate.

With the themes of Happiness, Harmony and Fraternity, 200 Taiwan guests from 9 different ethnic minority clans sang folk songs and danced traditional bamboo pole dances with Li and Miao people.

Chunde Lin, the head of the Taiwan delegation and a legislator in Taiwan, sang a Hainan folk song in Hainan dialect in the opening ceremony. The ethnic minorities of Taiwan and Hainan have gathered together on March 3rd, the Mid-Autumn Festival and other occasions, he said.

Ethnic minorities in Taiwan and the Li ethnic minority group are kindred groups, he added. "We belong to one family from of old."

Yongchang Sun, a councilor of the county of Hualian in Taiwan, said that he was touched by the clemency and respect of the people in mainland China, especially when compared to the harm and humiliation some Taiwan parties inflicted on aborigines in Taiwan Island.

Since the first exchanged visit between Taiwan and Hainan in 2001, this festival is the 10th exchange activity of the ethnic minority groups of the two islands.

Singers from Taiwan and mainland China performed in The Same Song concert, broadcast by China Central Television (CCTV).

Source: Xinhua