Tour to China promises the world's biggest aduience. Made with funding from NZ On Air.
The Shanghai International Tourism Festival is one of the biggest shows on earth - and this year the Whanganui Brass Band will be one of the star attractions.
"The main event of the festival is a big street march and parade through Shanghai," Jonathon Greenwell of Brass Whanganui said.
Helikened it to Thanksgiving Day parades in the US.
"There'll be a few million people lining the streets, but then there's 200 million people who will watch a live televised broadcast".
The Shanghai International Tourism Festival is billed as a "celebration of cultures" and is on a scale that's hard to imagine.
"[There's] about two and a half kilometres that we march down," Greenwell said. "And about three or four spots along the march, we stop and there's tiered seating, and we do a mini-marching display for two to three minutes, to dignitaries who are seated and then we carry on. So it's pretty cool."
Jonathon Greenwell's previous largest audience was a measly 100 million in Edinburgh. Photograph / Georgie Ormond
As well as performing in Shanghai, Brass Whanganui have been invited to provide the fanfare for the opening of the Tomb of Terracotta Wariors - a remarkable invitation for the Whanganui band.
"They've invited us to Xi'an which is where the terracotta warriors are and they're opening up a new area that's never been seen outside of the Chinese Archaeologists. The band and a few dignitaries will be the first people in the world to see this new part of the Terracotta Warriors.
The band is holding a movie fundraiser on May 29, a concert in July, and a Boosted campaign which ends in two weeks.
Greenwell reckons it's worth the effort.
"I was in the NZ Army Band for a few years and this is bigger than anything we did there. Certainly the biggest live audience with 200,000,000. In Edinburgh we only got 100,000,000 so there you go."
