Xinqiao and a dozen other pint-size patients at the Beijing Women and Children's Hospital laugh and shout as the clown waves his magic wand and turns black-and-white drawings in a colouring book to colour.

Dangling his legs off the bed and crunching on a rice cracker, Xinqiao hardly notices as his mother pats the IV needle into place. His attention is focused on clown Liu Yongjun, who, with his brother Liu Jinjun, has been brightening up the drab wards of two Beijing children's hospitals since 2003.

With their goofy blue-and-white balloon trousers and magic wands, the Liu brothers are China's first hospital clowns, pioneering the therapeutic benefits of a dose of laughter.

"This type of performance is taking our clowning to a new level," Liu Yongjun said.

"We're here to make the kids laugh, to make them forget. It's all about happiness."

Hospital clowns are familiar figures in the West, where doctors and nurses sometimes don frizzy wigs and crack jokes to jolly small patients along the road to recovery.

But in China, public hospitals are bleak places where strict visiting hours mean children might see their parents just once a week.

It was the lack of support or activities for hospitalised children that inspired Claudia Vogg, a German woman who was working in China, to set up Magic Hospital.

"All I could see was adults providing for children what adults think they need - food, clothes, medicine and school work. But I thought, 'They're children, so why not try and bring in a bit of fun?'," she said.

Vogg has returned to Europe and is setting up a version there of the same programme to conduct theatre workshops for children in hospitals and prisons.

Besides the Liu brothers, the Magic Hospital team includes teachers of art and English. - Sapa-AP