Musical based on popular folk songs

In Northwest China's Gansu and Qinghai provinces and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a kind of folk song called hua'er is so popular that almost all the ethnic groups - Han, Hui, Salar, Dongxiang, Tu, Bao'an, Tibetan - sing them.

Literally meaning flowers, hua'er is characterized by its wide range of prolonged tones and most of the songs are love songs.

The Gansu Opera Company has produced a musical, Hua'er and Shaonian (Flowers and Young Men), featuring these hua'er folk tunes woven through touching love stories involving people from different ethnic groups.