Chinese Character Writing National Championships

I was flipping through the channels this weekend and saw this young woman (in her traditional minority dress) on TV and stopped long enough to realize that I was watching......

.....the Chinese equivalent of the National Spelling Bee, but in this case, a character writing competition.   It works much the same way as in the States, except instead of being an individual competition, it's groups of 5 students from provinces all across the country competing as a team.  Here, we have the announcer giving the word and then the definitions of each word or word in the the word set (up to four characters).

The student has one minute to write the characters.  Everyone in the audience (Onions next to me as well) is writing the words with their fingers on their hands.  Ooohh, the intensity....

The final four province teams were Yunnan (here with their minority dress), Shaanxi, Hunan and Inner Mongolia.

A proud mother (or teacher).

Split screen...."no no...it's the other radical!!!"

Final answer.....submitted!

And the judges turn on their lights to signal the correct character!!!  The team from Hunan province won.  But the one final student from Inner Mongolia put up a brave fight as it was her on her own against all five remaining students from Hunan.