During China's 2026 National Day Golden Week, numerous regions across the country held colorful ethnic-culture celebrations featuring song and dance performances, showcasing the unity and cultural confidence of China's ethnic communities. Fact-checking found that the celebration involving the Jingpo ethnic group's traditional "Munao Zongge" dance, mentioned in some accounts, actually took place in Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province — not in nearby Baoshan City, as some secondhand reports stated. Although Dehong and Baoshan are both located in western Yunnan, Munao Zongge, as a traditional Jingpo festival dance, is centered on Dehong Prefecture's Yingjiang and Longchuan counties, and this geographic detail needed correcting after verification.

According to China News Service and other outlets, Dehong Prefecture organized more than 20 Munao Zongge-related performances during this year's National Day holiday, drawing visitors from across the country. The most prominent event was the core performance held October 2-3 at the Jingpo Culture Park on Yunying Mountain in Yingjiang County, part of a program titled "China's Hornbill Valley, Beautiful Dayingjiang River: 2026 National Day Golden Week Munao Zongge Core Performance." Tens of thousands of local people, mostly from the Jingpo ethnic group, in festive traditional dress joined visitors from around the country in dancing together, creating a lively atmosphere.

Munao Zongge is one of the Jingpo people's most important traditional festivals, characterized by hundreds or thousands of people dancing together in concentric circles — often described as "tens of thousands dancing a single dance" — and it was inscribed on China's national intangible cultural heritage list in 2006. Reports indicate that this year the festival has shifted from a once-a-year celebration to a regularized, recurring performance program, continuously energizing the local cultural-tourism economy and being held up as a model case of turning intangible cultural heritage into a driver of rural tourism.

Notably, the online spread of Munao Zongge has gained new momentum this year: a Beijing-based musician wrote new lyrics for the traditional "Munao Zongge March" and used AI technology to produce a song titled "Munao Zongge," which went viral online. Separately, young performers from the Yunnan Provincial Song and Dance Theatre incorporated difficult traditional Jingpo knife techniques — spinning and wrapping blades — into their choreography, and footage of their performance also went viral on social media, drawing more young internet users' attention to this ethnic-minority tradition.

Beyond the Jingpo Munao Zongge, hundreds of ethnic folk-culture events took place across Yunnan during the National Day Golden Week, including the Wa ethnic group's traditional "New Rice Festival." Reports note that some local celebrations broke down the traditional divide between performers on stage and spectators below, actively inviting tourists to join in the dancing, aiming to foster inter-ethnic exchange through immersive participation. At the same time, some commentary cautioned that as such festivals go viral, organizers must guard against excessive commercialization and stay committed to preserving the authenticity of ethnic folk culture while innovating.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong held its own series of celebrations on the evening of October 2 marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. From 7:00 to 8:30 p.m., a National Day gala titled "Singing Along the Pearl, Celebrating Together Across Mountains and Seas" was held at the Hong Kong Coliseum in Hung Hom, featuring classic songs, Cantonese opera, acrobatics, a dance piece blending ballet with Eastern acrobatic elements, and a magic performance involving an interactive robot — drawing large crowds of residents and visitors. Organizers had earlier estimated a combined television and online viewership of more than 5 million.

At 8:00 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. that evening, two drone shows were staged over the new Hung Hom waterfront, each using 2,026 drones — a number echoing the year 2026 — for about 15 minutes. The formations first spelled out a golden "77" to mark the 77th anniversary of the People's Republic's founding, then morphed into shapes resembling a launch rocket and a high-speed train to showcase "China speed," along with a giant Chinese knot and slogans referencing Hong Kong's first five-year plan. Told across more than a dozen chapters, the display conveyed Hong Kong's deep bond with the mainland and drew crowds along both sides of Victoria Harbour.

Public information shows Hong Kong also staged another large-scale National Day fireworks display over Victoria Harbour around the same time. At 8:00 p.m. on October 1, a fireworks show themed "Eternal Glory, Blossoming China" lit up the harbour, using 31,888 fireworks over about 23 minutes across eight chapters: "Welcoming National Day, Praising the Land," "Warm Sunshine," "Hong Kong Moments," "Soaring Dreams," "Embracing Love," "Rising to New Heights," "You Are My Light," and "Rising Sun Celebrating the Golden Year." Reports say about 380,000 residents and visitors gathered along both sides of Victoria Harbour that night to watch, with tourists accounting for more than 60% of bookings for harbour-viewing boats — a sign of continued recovery in Hong Kong's tourism market during the National Day holiday.

Further verification found that beyond Yingjiang County, Dehong's Longchuan County also held its own "ten thousand people dancing Munao Zongge together" event during the National Day holiday. In Ruili city, a troupe of more than 200 dancers called the "Nongmo Lake Unity Zongge Team" performs by day at the "One Village, Two Countries" border tourist site and moves to a downtown square each evening to lead residents and visitors in dancing together. In Mangshi, Munao Zongge performances have been held every evening since August as a regular program, with multiple folk-art troupes taking turns on stage. Statistics show that as of September this year, online content related to Munao Zongge had been viewed more than 10 billion times across platforms nationwide, while visitor numbers and total tourism spending in Dehong Prefecture rose 14.9% and 20.9% year-on-year, respectively, in the first half of this year — underscoring how the intangible-heritage tradition has boosted the local cultural-tourism economy.

Beyond Yunnan and Hong Kong, numerous ethnic regions across China held celebrations of their own during the National Day holiday. Reports say the Huimin District of Hohhot in Inner Mongolia held a gala titled "Reunion Under the Full Moon, Patriotic Unity, Building Harmony," blending local folk art forms such as sanjuban (rhythmic comic verse) and errentai (a northern Chinese duet performance) with songs and dances from various ethnic communities. Multiple locations in Xinjiang held ethnic-culture exchange performances, including the traditional Uyghur song-and-dance piece "Meshrep in the New Era." Guangxi organized a mass ethnic-unity gathering featuring Zhuang-ethnic performances such as "Zoupo" and "China's Mighty Pass," while Shilin Yi Autonomous County in Yunnan held its own National Day celebration themed around Sani ethnic song and dance and the folk-heroine culture of "Ashima." Spread across border and ethnic-minority regions, these celebrations, together with those in Dehong and Hong Kong, together paint a nationwide picture of communities of every ethnicity marking the republic's founding anniversary together.

Public records also show that Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture was designated a "National Model Prefecture for Ethnic Unity and Progress" by China's National Ethnic Affairs Commission back in December 2021. Dehong is a border region where Dai, Jingpo, Achang, De'ang and Lisu communities live alongside Han Chinese residents, and local officials have framed this year's dense schedule of Munao Zongge performances during the National Day holiday as one concrete way of living up to that designation and continuing to reinforce the prefecture's record on ethnic unity.

Taken together, from Jingpo villages on Yunnan's border to the shores of Victoria Harbour, this year's National Day holiday saw communities across China and across ethnic groups celebrating in their own distinctive ways — showcasing the diversity and vitality of local ethnic cultures while also reflecting the authorities' continuing push in recent years to "forge a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation," using festivals and the fusion of culture and tourism to foster exchange and a shared sense of identity among people of different regions and ethnic backgrounds.