Over the National Day holiday, Yingjiang County in Yunnan's Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture held a series of Munao Zongge performances under the theme "China Hornbill Valley, Beautiful Yingjiang." The core performance took place October 2-3 at the Yunyanshan Jingpo Cultural Garden, where tens of thousands of local residents from various ethnic groups and tourists from across the country gathered to dance together in what is known as the "ten-thousand-person dance," a traditional Jingpo dance, with drums beating and crowds surging to create a vivid picture of ethnic unity and celebration. Yunnan Radio and Television Station broadcast the event live in full on the morning of October 2, recording the solemn crown-conferring ceremony of Munao Zongge and explaining the historical origins and cultural significance of this nationally listed intangible cultural heritage.

The name "Munao Zongge" comes from the terms used by different Jingpo sub-groups — the Jingpo branch calls it "Munao," the Zaiwa branch calls it "Zonggo," both meaning "everyone dances together" or "joyful gathering song and dance." Legend holds the dance originated as a solemn ritual Jingpo ancestors held to worship the Sun God: the Sun King is said to have invited all things on earth to a grand gathering at the Sun Palace, and all creatures sent birds to learn the dance steps on their behalf — which is why Munao Zongge's collective steps and formations largely mimic birds flying and gathering. The ceremony's central wooden totem pole, the "Munao Shidong," bears plant patterns symbolizing the Jingpo people's migration routes, along with motifs of grains, livestock, the sun and the moon, symbolizing vitality and the ethnic group's prosperity. Traditionally, Munao Zongge is held around the 15th day of the first lunar month and during the new-rice-tasting season around October — an important cultural basis for Yingjiang combining this year's National Day celebration with the Munao Zongge performance. In 2006, "Jingpo Munao Zongge," submitted by Longchuan County, was approved by China's State Council for inclusion in the first batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list, making Dehong Prefecture the core region for passing on and innovating this ancient dance.

Compared with previous years, this year's Yingjiang Munao Zongge performance saw notable innovation in its service model. To address past problems of crowding and tourists struggling to participate up close, Yingjiang County rolled out for the first time an "online slot booking plus offline dedicated wristband verification" system: visitors can choose their preferred time slot via a WeChat mini-program and book in advance, then use a dedicated wristband to check in by time slot, enabling a more orderly, immersive participation experience rather than being squeezed on the outer ring watching others dance as in the past. The area also restructured the performance space, widening the core dance area and audience buffer zone, and built two new roads, bringing the total roads leading to the performance site to four, to improve traffic flow and venue capacity during peak periods.

Yingjiang County sits on China's southwestern border, part of Dehong Dai and Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture, bordering Myanmar, and is home to multiple ethnic minorities including the Dai, Jingpo, Lisu and Achang, as well as rare bird species such as hornbills — the origin of the area's "China Hornbill Valley" cultural tourism brand. The Jingpo, as one of Dehong's representative ethnic minorities, are concentrated mainly along Yunnan's western border and have long maintained a traditional way of life combining farming, hunting and mountain ecology, with Munao Zongge serving as the core vehicle for this ethnic group's cultural identity and social cohesion. In recent years, as China-Myanmar border tourism and cross-border cultural exchange have continued to heat up, Yingjiang has leveraged its unique border location and ethnic cultural resources to gradually turn the Munao Zongge heritage brand into an important engine for attracting domestic and international visitors and driving the border region's cultural tourism economy.

More notably, Munao Zongge in the local area has gradually shifted from a "once-a-year festival event" to a "normalized daily performance." Reports say Dehong Prefecture now has more than 30 established Munao Zongge performance troupes, with people of various ethnic groups and tourists able to join the dance at fixed venues almost every day, no longer confined to traditional festival dates. On May 1 this year, Yingjiang County had already held an "online intangible-heritage Munao Zongge performance" with a full live broadcast, with footage from the event appearing on CCTV's evening news program and cumulative views of related topics across all platforms reaching 2.212 billion — evidence of its considerable reach. Songs adapted from the classic "Munao Zongge March" have spread widely on short-video platforms, while local dance leaders and narrators known as "naoshuang" have become internet-famous through the trend, and related performance troupes have been invited to perform in Xinjiang, Beijing and Guizhou, pushing this Yunnan border ethnic culture onto a national stage.

Data previously disclosed by Dehong Prefecture's culture and tourism authorities show Munao Zongge performances and related cultural tourism activities have brought Yingjiang a sizable, growing stream of visitors and overall revenue across several consecutive holidays, confirming the concrete pull of the "intangible heritage plus cultural tourism" model in border ethnic regions. To accommodate visitors coming for the Munao Zongge events, Yingjiang County also opened government office canteens to the public from October 2-3 — a local manifestation of the broader practice seen across China this National Day holiday of opening government canteens to the public, aimed at easing temporary pressure on local dining capacity during the Golden Week and offering visitors affordable meal options. From a broader perspective, Yingjiang's approach of deeply integrating the National Day celebration with an ethnic minority intangible-heritage performance both offers a concrete interpretation of the theme "all ethnic groups striving together and prospering together," and serves as a model case of a border ethnic region using nationally listed intangible cultural heritage resources to develop cultural tourism, achieving both cultural inheritance and economic benefit. Local culture and tourism authorities say they will continue exploring deeper integration of normalized heritage performances with rural revitalization and border tourism, aiming to turn Munao Zongge from an "internet viral phenomenon" into a sustainable local cultural tourism brand.