The Dong use the Han lunar calendar and hold numerous festivals throughout the year giving the young an opportunity to meet boys and girls from neighboring villages. If you plan your journey carefully, you should be able to visit at least one of their festivals.

After the main events of a festival, girls and boys sit opposite each other singing together until dawn. The next morning, dressed in their best costume, the girls sit under the drum towers while the boys and men persuade the girls and women to go with them to their village to continue the festival.

Tai Guan Ren Carnival in Congjiang County coincides with the Han Chinese Spring Festival at the beginning of the first lunar month. Men from a neighboring village dress up as government officials and soldiers and visit local people who are dressed as bandits, goblins, and strange animals. A man dressed in silk like government official is paraded through the village in a sedan chair. Everyone asks him for money and it is only when his purse is emptied that the girls clear the way for him to continue. The money is a New Year gift given by the guests to the host village dressed in their festival clothes. After the parade both villages entertain each other with songs under the drum tower. It can be regarded as an excuse for fun by the Dong people.

This festival is celebrated with great gusto in Tajiang, near Kaili, where the entertainment takes n a unique flavor. Several groups in Taijiang, from the period of the 1st to 15th of the first lunar month.

On the 15 th night they weave through the streets stopping at different households. Each householder gives them money and liquor to ensure good luck for the family during the coming year, the paper-made dragon can't enter. The main street is filled with giant homemade fireworks made from bamboo and packed with gunpowder. These are lit and the flames directed at the dragons. The center of activity is outside the local government building where all the dragons come to receive money. Often there are as many as 30 to 35 dragons to destroy. The excitement continues until midnight with the unmarried ending the festivals by singing love songs to each other.

The Small lower Miao of Nankai Village, near Shuicheng in southwest Guizhou, gather for their Lusheng festival on the 15 th day of the second lunar month. Family groups walk at lest 15 km to the festival ground, washing in the nearest stream en route. They bring their own provisions, maize cobs, coal and twigs for fuel and a giant umbrella to keep off the tai. Rice and barbecued fatty pork are cooked over an open fire. The women wear their best clothes and are often dressed in two or four layers of skirts and jackets to indicate their wealth. Their hair is piled high with huge quantities of red wool in an enormous bouffant style.

The dancing begins at about 12:00 am, led by the boys. A girl shows her liking for a boy by giving him her jacket: at he end of the evening each boy will return all jackets apart from the on given to him by his favorite. Some vendors also sell sugar cane an other candies or deep fried potatoes on the slope. This festival also provides an opportunity for young married girls speak to their mothers about their husbands. Girls with unhappy marriages, will complain about their spouses and can be seen crying and sobbing to their mothers.

Sanyuesan Festival , also called the “Cutworm Fair”, is a traditional festival of the Buyi people, at which in memory of cutworms, the Buyi people scatter fried corns on the slopes and sing folk songs to pray for a bumper harvest.

Now the “Cutworm Fair” has become “Sanyuesan Song Festival” . On every 3 rd day of the 3rd lunar month, the Buyi people in Guiyang and nearby gather round the Xinbao Town, Wudang District. They either join in the singing competition, or sing in antiphonal style by blowing the tree leaves in the dense forest, or travel in groups along the stream playing with the water and singing cheerfully. When finding each other congenial, they will present gifts to each other and then walk in pairs from the crowds into the woods.

Siyueba Festival is a traditional festival celebrated by Miao, Buyi, Dong, Yao, Zhuang, Yi, Tujia and Gelao peoples in Guizhou, the west Hunan and the north Guanxi. The contents and styles of celebration activities are not exactly the same in different places, of which, the most profound and far-reaching one among them is that of the Miao people in Guiyang.

On every April 8th, according to the lunar calendar, the Miao people in their best costumes in Guiyang and nearby gather around Penshuichi in the downtown of the city, to sing and dance to the melodies from the Lusheng and the bamboo flutes to celebrate their own traditional festival. Legend has it that Siyueba Festival is in memory of the ancient Miao heroes buried at the very place where Pengshuichi now lies on the 8th day of the 4th lunar month—Siyueba. This ceremony passed down from generation to generation, thus becoming a custom.

Now, this festival has become a joyous celebrated day by Miao, Buyi, Dong, Zhuang, Shui, Gelao, or even the Han people and other ethnic groups, a grand ceremony to demonstrate the traditional culture of various minority groups. Some young minority people take this advantage of the chance to make friends and choose their future spouses through their dancing and singing with deep love.