ACCORDING to his tradition, Tserendorj, a Mongolian horse-hair fiddler who had been in Hong Kong for only two days, sang an improvised praise song to the territory.
'Hong Kong is an amazing place: you have so much technology, you are a trading station for the entire world. We found it rather wet, but we liked to see the sea and the shops. But although you have so much already, we are happy that your hearts are big enough to want to embrace us and our music,' he sang during a concert at City Hall last Friday.
This was the first time Tserendorj and his seven fellow musicians had been out of Mongolia, and the first time they had seen the ocean or a large city.
And their biggest surprise was that their concerts, which mostly took place last weekend, were a complete sell-out weeks before the biennial Asian Arts Festival started.
The group is in Hong Kong to represent Huur Magnai, a Mongolian foundation formed after 1990 with the aim of restoring national culture following the repressions of the communist regime.
For years the members of Mongolia's different tribal groups were forbidden to express their individuality, because their communist overlords believed that traditional music was part of the feudal system which, like the despised Genghis Khan, was a history that should be forgotten.
As well as being restricted in other cultural practices, the nomads were also punished if they played musical instruments that were special to their own groups, in a way that would differentiate them from the other two million Mongolian people who live in a land the size of Western Europe.
