The Nanyueli (南岳里) temple-fair cultural food street in the Nanyue District (南岳区) of Hengyang, Hunan, has been a magnet for evening crowds since early August. On August 10 the 2026 summer folk festival opened its second chapter, “Sun-Drying Gathering: A Market Cooling Season,” reconstructing local midsummer customs such as the old saying “on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month, dry the red and the green.” The festival’s third chapter, built around Qixi (七夕), the Chinese Valentine’s Day, follows on August 19, with magpie-bridge scenes, a wedding robe show and local opera on the same streets.
Drying Customs Turn the Street Into an Exhibit
Under the eave-covered walkways, the street has set out tableaux of Hanfu hung out to air, herbs laid in the sun and books turned toward the light, re-creating how Nanyue households once dried clothes, books, medicines and grain under the midsummer heat. The displays carry the old hope of warding off damp and mildew and taking in sun and good fortune, and they have become the most photographed corners of the district. For younger visitors they also explain, in one glance, the seasonal logic that ran an agrarian calendar.
The organizers built the chapter around hands-on games. At the “identify herbs by scent” and “midsummer weighing” stalls, family visitors stop to test plant knowledge and weigh themselves the way the old custom prescribed. A playful “ancient-style snack-snatching” contest restages a classroom prank, with visitors cast as pupils outwitting costumed NPC examiners, and adults say it drags up their own school-day memories. After dark, the “Immortals’ Concert” pairs traditional folk instruments with pop melodies on a waterside stage, giving the street a nighttime soundtrack that draws its own crowd.
Qixi Turns the Bridges Into Magpie Bridges
For the third chapter, which starts today, the district’s bridges are being dressed as magpie bridges for the legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. Costumed figures of the Old Man Under the Moon and the Two Immortals of Harmony will roam the lanes, and synchronized flash-mob scenes on several bridges will re-enact the lovers’ annual meeting. On the opera stage, Qi opera (祁剧) and Flower Drum opera troupes will perform Goddess Marriage, Liu Hai Chops Firewood and Choosing a Groom at the Embroidery Tower, three classic love stories told in local dialect.
A Chinese wedding robe runway will also take the stage, walking gowns from the Han and Tang dynasties through the Ming and Qing periods in sequence, so the show doubles as a survey of how bridal dress and the wedding rite evolved. Traditional games such as needle-threading contests and wish-making round out the evening, and visitors can tie wishes onto the bridges or hang red cords as part of the Moon-Matchmaker interaction.
Between the sun-drying bustle of summer and the magpie-bridge romance of Qixi, the Nanyueli festival runs as one continuous street-level program that mixes tourism, dining, crafts and performance, and the operators say the two chapters have kept the old customs legible to a crowd that mostly knows them from textbooks.