BEIJING - A Chinese man organized 49 giant dancing carrots to propose to his apparently embarrassed girlfriend at a shopping square in the north-eastern city of Qingdao, reports said on Thursday.

An online video of the event showed the man, identified by the surname Pang, emerge from one carrot suit to confirm his carefully choreographed proposal to a giggling Zhao Lu.

The human carrots had performed a popular song from a television dating program, while the hidden Pang spoke through a microphone to tell Zhao how he fell in love with her when they met six months earlier.

"Are you angry with me?" Pang, a finance worker, asked Zhao as he took off his fabric carrot head.

Some of the dozens of onlookers shouted "Marry him! Marry him!" to Zhao, whose favorite color is orange, but it was not clear if she accepted Pang's proposal.

A report by the Qingdao Morning Post said the proposal was planned over three weeks at a cost of some 100,000 yuan (S$18,900).

The video was viewed 193,000 times on the popular Youku website while photographs of the event also attracted tens of thousands of hits on news websites.