Kang Ding Love Song is one of the most popular Chinese folk songs. Its simple melody and vivid rhythm are easy to remember and sing, and its lyrics tell a timeless theme — LOVE.

Behind this famous folk song, there are two stories. One is inside the music – how it was written; the other is outside the music, how it became well-known. Let’s me tell them one by one.

This folk song was a theme song in a popular movie “Liu San-Jie” in the 1960s.

According to legend, in Tang Dynasty there was a peasant girl in south China named “Liu San Jie” who loved to sing folk songs. Young guys within a radius of hundred miles came here singing in antiphonal style to ask for her love, but she fell in love with Li Xiaoniu of her village.

“Why Are the Flowers So Red” was originally an interlude in a popular 1960s spy movie “Visitors on the Icy Mountain”. It was based on an old Tajik dance music. In order to allow the music to reveal a sense of time and space, Composer Lei Zhenbang appropriately slowed down the speed of the original music in the process of adaptation. The music after adaptation has a kind of feeling of distant and vast space.

Overall, this folk song is well recognized to western listeners because of Puccini and is played at many formal situations, kind of like our second national anthem. Mo Li Hua (茉莉花), which means ‘Jasmine Flowers’, is a popular Chinese folk song.