The Good Hunter Performance Ensemble.	Mongolian Burenbayar (left) and Ewenki Wurina, artistic directors of the children's choir.	A performance of the ballad, Keniye.

Baatar Dorje, 13, was born of the Ewenki ethnicity in the central Hulun Buir grasslands of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. True to the Ewenki horse-riding tradition, Dorje has been riding bareback since age five, and helping to break horses since he was eight. Ewenki folk songs that have been sung for generations are an aspect of his daily life.

Last August, Baatar Dorje sang his favorite folk song, Mother in My Dreams, at a Beijing theater. His clear, poignant rendering of this Ewenki children’s favorite reduced the audience, among them seasoned performance celebrities and hardheaded enterprisers, literally to tears. When Mongolian poetess Xi Murong from Taiwan spoke of Dorje’s performance the next day, she was hard put to contain the nostalgic emotion that the boy’s voice had kindled.

Baatar Dorje’s solo was one aspect of the Colorful Children’s Choir performance. The choir comprises 37 singers of ages six to 13. The children are variously of the Ewenki, Oroqen and Daur ethnicities; some are also descendants of the ancient Mongolian Barag and Buryat tribes. All hail from the deep Hulun Buir pasturelands.

The songs performed by these 37 children at the Beijing concert were as gladly received as a breath of fresh, grass-scented air. The media was ecstatic in its praise of the choir, citing it as a "new pinnacle of entertainment within today’s performance market."

Songs from the Heart

This theatrical coup d’etat was the brainchild of the choir’s artistic director, Mongolian singer Burenbayar, and his Ewenki wife Wurina. They selected these 37 young songbirds out of more than 300 contenders.

Wurina is herself enchanted with the overtly pure spirit of these children of the grasslands. Listening to them sing the songs that they learned at their grandparents’ knee moves her as powerfully as it does audiences hearing them for the first time. The couple’s first inkling of the national appeal of Mongolian children’s ballads was in the year 2006, when Wurina, Burenbayar and their young niece’s rendition of one such song received a unanimously warm response. Despite most of the audience’s having no understanding of its Mongolian lyrics, they were nonetheless charmed by the song’s distinctive melody and the little girl's clear, tuneful vocals.

Ballads sung by these young bareback riders are imbued with the reverence for nature that is the keynote of their ethnic cultural background. Many, such as the Happy Shepherd, relate to daily-life activities. Baatar Dorje recalls that looking after the lambs while his parents were out working was one of his and his peers’ regular household chores.

One ten-year-old girl performed songs in the distinctive Mongolian long-drawling song genre, learned from her mother. The long of a long-drawling song, sung at a high pitch in a slow tempo, does not refer to its length, but to its elongation of each syllable. The Mongolian long-drawling song is on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.

The couple’s aim in cultivating the choir is, as Wurina says, “To celebrate the children’s unsullied nature, rather than instill professionalism, although we do insist on strict tunefulness and harmony.” To this end, Wurina and Burenbayar invite art teachers from the Buryat Republic of Russia and Mongolia to ensure correct harmonization of the children’s songs.

Conveyers of Cultural Heritage

To Cao Zhenghai, secretary of the CPC Hulun Buir municipal committee, putting these children on the stage is a serious matter. It was only one year ago that the Hulun Buir municipal government set about establishing a children’s choir, at an investment of RMB 3.5 million. As Cao points out, “Children are the conveyers of cultural heritage. Our hope is that the choir will inspire other local children to communicate and entertain one another in their ethnic language.”

All these young choristers sing in their mother tongue, and are encouraged to learn and speak their ethnic language, Wurina tells us.

As minorities such as the Ewenki, Oroqen and Daur have no written language, main aspects of their culture have been passed on in the oral, storytelling tradition. Promoting communication in native ethnic language is consequently vital to preserving the culture of each ethnic group. Hulun Buir is the main Ewenki, Oroqen and Daur settlement in China. Cao Zhenghai confirms that children’s ballads sung by the choir are to be taught at local schools and kindergartens in a drive to encourage more children to communicate in their native language.

Their efforts, by virtue of the choir, have already borne fruit. One 11-year-old Daur boy states proudly, “The Daur language is similar to the Barag because both belong to the Mongolian branch of the Altai language family.”