In a made-for-Hong Kong performance called Song of the Yellow Earth, playing in the Arts Festival in March, performers will try to convey the spirit of these barren plateaux of the Shaanxi region.

'By using modern technology - a mixture of music, film, slides, and audio effects with a powerful surround-sound system - we will help the audience imagine what it is really like to be in this region,' said Vincent Sung, a Taiwan-based film producer and specialist in traditional Chinese music, who has been working on the project for several months. 'We hope that this will bring the music alive. I want the performance to show not only what the people of the yellow earth sing, but also what it is that makes them sing like that.' Last year he took a Beijing film crew of 10 people to Shaanxi to spend almost two weeks shooting the landscape and the lives of the people of the yellow earth region, and collecting sound effects.

Many of the locals were amazed: they had never seen a film before, let alone a film crew.

'These people lead a very hard life,' Sung said. 'In many villages they do not have machines or electric light. They thresh their grain by hand and move it on wooden carts; there is very little now, in the 1990s, that was not around in the 1890s.' These hardships are echoed throughout rural China. But what makes life in the loesslands particularly tough is the constant shortage of water.

The whole area is a desert, with a thin layer of sand on the surface. On the occasions that it does rain the mud fills everything and makes the water unusable for humans.

The Yellow River only runs through a small corner of the huge region, and even that is 70 per cent mud.

Sung said at the centre of every village was a well - usually just a single one, very deep, communally owned and the source of many discussions and disputes.

'It means that water is only for drinking, and too precious for irrigation,' he said, adding that the local diet was 'mutton and noodles'.

'And many people cannot afford the mutton,' he said.

Such a lifestyle has given birth to a curious song tradition. The song of the yellow earth is one that is usually sung alone, and is heavily inspirational, Sung said: 'They call their songs shintianyou, which means they begin in the heavens.' The haunting tunes carry words about whatever the singer is most concerned about at the moment of utterance.

'They sing about what first comes to their minds, which can be work, or a pretty girl they see in the fields, or the landscape,' he said. One of the songs is about a girl who is dreaming of love in the mountains: 'Oh, there comes the herdsman. If you are my lover then please wave your hand. If you are not, then just continue on your way.' Another conjures up a picture of a man sitting high above the river: 'Do you know how many curves the yellow river has, how many valleys the yellow earth has? Do you know how many boats are on the water, or how many masts upon the boats?' The land might be full of people living simple lives, but the concert in March will be performed by artists who now travel around the world to demonstrate their musical tradition. Although this is the first time they have worked together, they are all experienced touring artists.

Feng Jianxue, who has been called one of the top 10 interpreters of Chinese folk music, will be singing the female roles. She has toured to more than a dozen countries, and is the deputy director of the Shaanxi Song and Dance Theatre.

Fellow vocalist Wang Xianrong is a member of the Shaanbei Yulin Song and Dance Troupe and has sung many film theme songs and performed in Beijing concerts. They will perform with Jin Wei on huqin, Ding Xiaoyan on ruan and Yang Huiqing on guanzi.

Sung said there were some difficulties in moving the performers on from the communist song and dance troupe programmes in which they had tended to perform a revised post-revolutionary repertoire.

This would consist of either pieces on the lines of the model operas, or of pre-revolution melodies sung to post revolution lyrics. 'We had to work out a style that would be acceptable to Hong Kong audiences, that did not have that communist flavour,' Sung said. 'We wanted to go back to basics.' There will inevitably be that element of the 'song and dance' artificial preservation of folk culture in almost any performance coming out of China today. But Sung said the song cycles to be performed in Hong Kong were still very much alive in villages.

'But they are disappearing fast,' he said.

'In the towns and cities no one sings like that any more. There is just pop music. Like everywhere else.' At last year's Hong Kong Arts Festival there were two sell-out performances by a group called the Jian drummers, which had also been put together specially for the occasion. They made the thunder dragon roar in the auditorium of the Cultural Centre, and so impressed several overseas promoters that they spent the summer touring Europe.

'We hope we can make a similar impact with Song of the Yellow Earth, ' said the festival's Grace Lang.

'Of course, with the Arts Festival we always want to show high quality work from overseas, but we also want to introduce some of the best things from our own region to an international audience.' Song of the Yellow Earth, Cultural Centre Grand Theatre, March 6 and 7 7.30pm, $90-$240. Tickets: 2734-9009