The grand opening of the Chou-Chin Folk Art Festival was held at An Shang Village on April 10, 2007. Over 30,000 people attended the festival on the first day. Government leaders from the provincial, municipal and county levels delivered very encouraging speeches. Overseas visitors from 10 different countries were also present at the opening ceremony. This was the first folk art festival of its kind organized by local farmers in the long history of Northwest China.

   A newly built Chou-Chin Folk Art Gallery in the village includes features of traditional Chinese architecture and courtyard. A spirit screen just beyond the front gate is a reminder of times past. The screen entrance leads into the courtyard where three groups of life-size sculptures give a vivid description of the past village life and culture. A bilingual description engraved on the back of the screen tells about the gallery.

   The gallery consists of 10 exhibit rooms. They house nearly all major categories of folk art and crafts in the western part of Shaanxi Province, including paper cutting, clay sculpture, woodblock printing, lacquer painting, shadow puppets, ladle masks, wheat straw pictures, cloth-work, embroidery, farmer paintings, replicas of 3000-year-old bronze ware, traditional Chinese ink-and-water painting, calligraphy, and more.

    An Shang does not have any access to mountains and rivers, from which farmers could make a living. However they live in the middle of the well-known Land of Bronze Culture with a 3000 year history. The local people have a fine tradition of hand-made arts for home decoration and gifts for various occasions. By living and working together with Global Volunteers and hosting other American visitors during the past five years, the farmers have exposed themselves to western culture, and changed their traditional concepts a lot. They have accepted some new ideas, and have broken through their conventional concept of farming and weaving. As a result, they have decided to blaze a new trail to build a well-to-do village by carrying forward their ancient civilization by further developing their cultural products.

    During the week-long art festival, they had 16 shows of local opera performance, plus 2 puppet performances and one shadow show which local people under 60 years of age have never seen before. The old performing art so important to past lives was revived! For the first time in village history we had a large scale Buddhist scripture chanting performance during a festival. The festivities came to a very successful conclusion with a 30-minute fireworks party on April 17. Beginning with the first stage performance on April 9, the festival lasted for 9 days.

    Since this was the first folk art festival initiated and sponsored by the Chinese farmers themselves, 15 of the Chinese leading media came to An Shang village to cover this event, including CCTV whose crew of five stayed in the village for 8 days. Nearly all the newspapers in ShaanxiProvince published articles, news items and photos about the festival. An internet search relating to the opening of the An Shang Folk Art Festival produced thousands of items.

   The success of the festival was also due to the support and help from our friends overseas. We have received 16 congratulatory messages from political leaders and VIPs from the United States. They are-