The first international singing festival on Yellow River will be held at the Yellow River's Hukou Waterfalls in north China's Shanxi Province from June 10 to 12, the festival's organizing committee announced here in Taiyuan Thursday.
   
The festival is designed to mark the 60th anniversary of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-1945) and the centennial birth anniversary of Xian Xinghai, a great Chinese musician.
   
The organizing committee has sent letters of invitation to professional and amateur choruses in more than 10 countries, including Singapore and New Zealand.
   
The festival will be organized jointly by the Shanxi Provincial Tourism Bureau and the People's Government of Linfen city, where the Hukou Waterfalls are situated. The festival intends to bring together Chinese singers from home and abroad to sing songs in praise of the mighty Yellow River, the "mother river of the Chinese nation," according to a brief release dispatched by the organizing committee.
   
The festival will be held simultaneously with a ceremony of mixing water taken from eight provinces along the Yellow River into a big bottle, symbolizing the union of the Chinese nation, an official from the organizing committee said.
   
The Yellow River, totaling 5,464 km in length, is China's second longest, traverses seven provinces, two autonomous regions and empties into the Bohai Sea, in Shandong Province, east China.
   
Hukou Waterfalls is the birthplace of a household song Yellow River Chorus, which was composed by the great musician Xian Xinghai in 1939 to inspire the spirit of the Chinese people against the Japanese aggression.

(Xinhua News Agency April 15, 2005)