It’s an epic family photo: more than 500 members of the Ren family got together at a Chinese village to celebrate a family reunion.
Ranging from the age of a few months to over 90, the family spans seven generations.
Photographer Zhang Liangzong told the BBC that the pictures were taken during last week’s Lunar New Year celebrations in Shishe.
Zhang said the Ren family can be traced back to the area for over 850 years, but village elders hadn’t updated their family tree in over 80 years.
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“One reason (for the family tree) was to understand where our descendants have spread to, where they have ended up and where they live, to account to our ancestors,” chief village elder Ren Tuanjie told Chinese state media.
Ren, who is part of the 26th generation of Rens, also said he wanted those who were in his extended family to “know their roots.”
Zhang said elders found more than 2,000 living descendants during their search.
Though it may seem large, 500 is nowhere close to the record for largest family reunion. In Canada last year, the Steeves family had about 1,900 people attend their family reunion in New Brunswick. They failed to clinch the Guinness World Record though, because not everyone who attended had the last name Steeves. The record for having the most people with the same last name gathered together in one place goes to the Gallagher family in Ireland, who had 1,488 people show up to their reunion in 2007.
READ MORE: Steeves family reunion in Hillsborough, NB tries to break world record
The Lunar New Year, which marks the start of the year of the rooster, sees the largest annual mass migration on earth, as hundreds of millions of workers board trains, buses, aircraft and boats to spend the holidaywith their families.
The Chinese government estimates up to three billion trips are made each year by people criss-crossing the country to visit family and friends on what for many in China is the only holiday of the year.
— With files from Reuters
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