On the 8th day of the lunar February, you can feast your eyes on flowers all over the Huanshan Mountain in Dayao County. The Yi people there choose that day to hold their special festival called Ikebana.

    This festival is a great occasion for the Yi people to express all kinds of good wishes and share the most beautiful gift from nature in virtue of flowers. Variously-shaped flower shed, corbeil and curlicue indicate the happy, favonian and propitious life of the Yi people. Around the houses and the fields, even on the livestock, flowers can be seen everywhere expressing Yi people’s wishes for harvest and flourishing of livestock. People also place flowers on each other, conveying their blessings. What’s more, people sing and dance with great joy, in commemoration of a girl named Mi Yilu who as the story goes sacrifices herself with a local tyrant by drinking a poisoned alcohol with azalea to save the other girls.  Since then, Yi people commemorate virtuous Mi Yilu by holding a grand Ikebana Festival as the azaleas blossom out every year.

    Source: http://www.yunnantourism.com/chuxiong/index.htm