IT is a land of cave dwellers and of villagers who, even today, have never known the comforts brought by electricity or telephones.
A land where, it is believed, Chinese civilisation first began, and where there is a tradition of singing that is said to come straight from the gods.
This is the northern loessland of China, a land where, musically and culturally, time has almost stood still. At least in the villages.
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.