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Dunhuang's Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake Stage Combined Mid-Autumn and National Day Gala, Reviving Mural Figures and Tang-Dynasty Moon Rites
Reporter 欧亚时报编辑部
During the 2026 Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays, the Mingsha Mountain-Crescent Lake scenic area in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, staged two large-scale themed cultural events in succession — a "Mid-Autumn Gala" and a "National Day Gala" — marketed together under the unified banner of the "Mingsha Mountain-Crescent Lake Mid-Autumn and National Day Joint Gala." The events combined live reenactments of figures drawn from thousand-year-old murals, a reconstruction of Tang-dynasty moon-worship rites, costume displays representing China's 56 ethnic groups, and drone light shows, creating an immersive large-scale cultural-tourism event that blended cultural presentation, folk customs and ethnic character.
The Mingsha Mountain-Crescent Lake scenic area lies about five kilometers south of downtown Dunhuang. It was designated a national key scenic area by the State Council in 1994, named one of China's five most beautiful deserts (desert parks) in 2005, and formally rated a national 5A tourist attraction in 2015. "Mingsha Mountain" (literally "singing sand mountain") takes its name from the booming sound the dunes make as the sand shifts, and together with Crescent Lake — a spring shaped like a crescent moon that has reportedly never dried up in a millennium — forms the natural wonder of "sand and spring coexisting," one of the most iconic cultural-tourism symbols of Dunhuang and the wider Hexi Corridor.
The mural-culture resources underpinning the performances at Mingsha Mountain-Crescent Lake draw mainly from the Mogao Grottoes, located roughly 25 kilometers away. First excavated during the Sixteen Kingdoms-era Former Qin period, the Mogao Grottoes were continuously built upon over successive dynasties — the Sixteen Kingdoms, the Northern Dynasties, the Sui, the Tang, the Five Dynasties, the Song, the Western Xia and the Yuan. The site today preserves 735 caves, roughly 45,000 square meters of murals and more than 2,000 painted sculptures. It was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1987 and stands as one of China's largest and most content-rich complexes of Buddhist cave art, as well as the core source material for international Dunhuang studies.
The Mid-Autumn program ran from 7 to 9 p.m. on September 25, 2026 — the 15th day of the eighth lunar month and the date of that year's Mid-Autumn Festival — and unfolded across four chapters: "Opening the Gate to Dunhuang," "Parading to the Moon Rite," "Worshiping the Moon at Yuequan Pavilion" and "Mid-Autumn Reunion Night." It wove together Dunhuang's ancient rites, a Chinese-style costumed parade and folk-music moonlight appreciation, aiming to recreate the historical scenes and folk atmosphere of a Mid-Autumn night in Dunhuang, the great Silk Road trading town of antiquity.
The reconstructed "Tang-dynasty Dunhuang moon-worship rite" featured in the program is said to be the only such reenactment in China currently backed by historical source material, drawing on High Tang-era murals at the Mogao Grottoes and documents unearthed from Dunhuang's Library Cave. The rite recreated, at a 1:1 scale, the folk moon-worship procedure of the Tang dynasty, laying out six categories of period-accurate offerings — grains and fresh fruit, locally grown Dunhuang grapes and peaches, Tang-style hubing flatbread, Silk Road tribute tea, and silk lanterns — to present historical details of Mid-Autumn moon-worship customs once practiced in the Hexi region during the Tang era.
One of the most closely watched segments was the live reenactment of "mural figures breaking through the wall," in which performers portraying figures drawn from Mogao Grottoes murals — among them the Han-dynasty envoy Zhang Qian, the general Ban Chao, Wang Yuanlu (the Daoist monk who discovered the Library Cave), a moon goddess, and Buddhist apsara donor figures — stepped "out of the paintings" one after another to parade among and interact with visitors, narrating stories from the history of the Silk Road. Organizers said the figures and their characterizations are all grounded in official historical records or documented in Mogao murals and Library Cave texts, aiming to balance dramatic appeal with historical rigor.
The National Day program, built around the three chapters of "Silk Road procession, ethnic song and dance, and NPC carnival," ran nightly from 8 to 8:30 p.m. from October 1 to 5 (extended to 9 p.m. on October 6 and 7). It featured a parade dubbed the "Camel Starlight Avenue," made up of roughly 40 camels, dance performances in costumes representing 56 ethnic groups, flash-mob singing of patriotic songs, and interactive carnival activities with costumed "little camel" characters in Han-style dress mingling with visitors. Each night's program closed with roughly 2,000 drones launched above Crescent Lake, forming patriotic-themed light patterns that brought the evening's activities to a climax.
Driven by the combination of the festival programming and peak holiday travel, visitor numbers at Mingsha Mountain-Crescent Lake surged during the National Day holiday. Aerial footage showed the entire sand mountain seemingly packed with visitors wearing orange, green and blue sand-proof shoe covers, which from a distance resembled "a spilled sheet of colorful Perler beads" — footage that went viral on social media, with many users joking that it "felt like a hundred million people were there." Multiple outlets reported long queues for the camel-riding attraction, described as camels having to "wait at a red light," while the scenic area kept bottled water atop the dune priced at just 2 yuan and ran free shuttle buses after the shows ended, earning praise online for being "crowded but not chaotic."
Beyond the nighttime performances, the scenic area's standard ticketing policy also helped fuel this year's exceptionally high National Day turnout. Since January 1, 2025, the site has eliminated on-site ticket sales entirely, requiring visitors to book in advance — between one and 15 days ahead — through its official WeChat account or other online channels. Peak-season adult tickets cost 110 yuan per person, with a 50 percent discount for students and visitors aged 60 to 69, and free admission for those 70 and older or under 1.2 meters tall. The scenic area also runs a "one ticket, three days" policy: once a visitor's face is registered at first entry, they can re-enter an unlimited number of times within 72 hours using facial recognition, covering the three prime viewing windows of sunrise, sunset and starlit night — a key reason many National Day visitors were willing to return repeatedly, helping drive up attendance at the nighttime performances as well.
This year's exceptionally high turnout was also linked to 2026's unusually long holiday arrangement. Because the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day fell only three working days apart, many people took additional leave to bridge the two holidays, creating a combined window — nicknamed "three days off, thirteen days off" — that became the longest continuous travel period of the year. Transport authorities forecast that the seven-day National Day holiday would see about 2.13 billion trips nationwide, or roughly 300 million per day, a new high for the period, further intensifying visitor pressure on popular destinations such as Dunhuang.
As a key town on the ancient Silk Road and a core site for Dunhuang studies, the area has in recent years increasingly converted the cultural resources of the Mogao murals into tangible, participatory tourism experiences, forming part of Gansu Province's push to deepen the integration of culture and tourism and build a Belt and Road-themed tourism brand. By turning relatively academic Dunhuang manuscript and mural scholarship into mass-appeal immersive performance content, the joint gala is seen as a showcase of local cultural-tourism authorities' efforts to explore pathways for "bringing cultural relics to life."
More broadly, pairing traditional festival folk customs with immersive performances and technology such as drone light shows has become a common strategy used by cultural-tourism destinations across China to draw crowds during long holidays like National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival. The intense online attention generated by the Mingsha Mountain-Crescent Lake joint gala also reflects the strong demand for domestic cultural-tourism consumption during the 2026 National Day-Mid-Autumn holiday period, as well as the operational strategy of local cultural-tourism authorities to amplify event impact through social media.
