an imperfect pen

A Beauty called Pu'er

2017-04-20T07:28:00.000+08:00

There are many excellent books on Pu'er Tea. I want to bring two of them to your attention.

The first is titled Pu'er Tea by Deng Shihai 邓时海, a retired professor from the Taiwan Normal University (b. 1941). The book was first published in Kunming in April 2004 and remains one of the most authoritative texts on Pu'er Tea.

The second book is titled The Story of Pu'er Tea (2005) by Lei Pingyang 雷平阳 a poet and author (b. 1966), from Zhaotong, bordering Sichuan in northeast Yunnan.

Here are two translated and edited excerpts from the book:

Deng Shihai wrote about stripping Pu'er tea to its basic aromatic qualities, comparing the fragrance of aged Pu'er to lotus, orchid, camphor and fresh green, describing them as "the highest quality Pu'er," "flavorless flavour," as Deng calls it.

The concept of "flavorless flavour" as Deng explains: "is at the heart of Zen Buddhism, a state of mind where the flavour of tea is no longer tea but where tea and Zen have merged as one.

p.48.

It's a race against time when infusing other teas because their life expectancy is relatively short compared to vintage Pu'ers. Aged Pu'er can run the distance, a tea full of lingering reminiscences, a tea that has a lasting inner fragrance.

p.201

Ruan Yirong 阮毅蓉, a former factory chief at the Menghai Tea Factory in Xishuangbanna, wrote one of several introductions in the opening pages of the book:

With its unique flavour and lingering charm, it would be difficult to find two Pu'ers of the same age and mellowness, like trying to find two identical leaves growing from the same tree. And while you might be drinking only one vintage Pu'er, as the tea is steeped and constantly changing in the water, each infusion reveals different flavours and textures.

It is often said that Pu'er tea gets better with age, a sentiment that can be instructive and beneficial in our own life trajectories. If we have looked after ourselves in our youth, we should age gracefully, and like good Pu'er, reached degrees of mellowness. At the same time, we should have tamed the astringency of our younger years.

Time has faded countless beauties, vanquished scores of heroes. But time cannot destroy or vanquish a good vintage Pu'er tea cake. There is a sense of wonder and admiration that such a tea gets better with age. Just as Confucius stood by a river musing about the passing of time, we can rejoice that the flow of time improves a Pu'er, but at the same time be anxious that while the cake has aged it will not live forever.

Rather than rejoice or worry about its permanence or impermanence, we should just sit down quietly, throw everything we have learned and experienced into our tea pot and like the tea leaves that are infusing in the water, observe what has suffused our own lives over the years. Time, we discover, is also fragrant and sweet-scented!

p.9.

Good Pu'er is expected to improve with age. I say "good" because I have drunk from the "really good" to hurl-the-tea-down-the sink terrible.

The "anxiety" or "worry" that Ruan mentions is despite all our efforts to look after the tea, specifically, how it is stored, there are really no guarantees that it will actually improve over time.

I call this the Pu'er Paradox.

I spoke to a Pu'er tea aficionado in his boutique tea shop in Taipei yesterday and we discussed among many other things, exactly what time frame are we talking about when it comes to vintage Pu'er teas, specifically "raw," "unfermented" teas. He said that between eighty to hundred years is the peak for oxidation of Pu'er before it starts to decline or lose its "lingering beauty."

This brings to mind an article mentioned in Lei's book entitled "Pu'er Tea and the Qing Emperors" by Wang Yufeng. In 1963 over two tonnes of tea was found in the imperial vaults of the Forbidden City in Bejing, estimated to be over two hundred years old. In October 23, 1965, Wang was able to inspect these tribute teas, some "resembling watermelons, others the size of ping-pong and tennis balls." A tea expert made some tea from these "drinkable antiques." He didn't have much to say on the tea other than "it was a little on the thin side."

I must admit that I am becoming more and more partial to good vintage "raw," "unfermented" Pu'er (at least ten years old and above), a far cry from my days in Yunnan drinking for the most part, oceans Pu'er harvested in the Spring and Fall. In Taipei I can drink and purchase exceptional vintage Pu'er tea for much less than it would cost in mainland China.

In November 2014 I drank a 50-year old raw Pu'er in what could have been the secret headquarters for Pu'er connoisseurs in Kunming, located on the fifth floor in a nondescript office building along a busy thoroughfare in the heart of the city. I would do no justice to this raw Pu'er tea by describing it, layers, shades of such depth and subtlety, dimensions, colours and textures that blew my palate away.

The brand name, Zhongcha (The Chinese Tea Company) produced Pu'er teas from the late 1930s to the 1980s in tea factories in Menghai, Kunming and Xiaguan.

It would be an amazing tea event to compare three raw vintage Pu'er, all close to 50 years old, from Menghai, Kunming and Xiaguan. That will most likely never happened in my lifetime, but I will keep my fingers crossed. Liu Yonghua, tea technician extradonaire, informed me that the current market price for a tea of this calibre, 357 grams, is at least 200,000 yuan, about 40,000 Australian dollars!

Stories and Legends: Yunnan's Torch Festivals

2015-08-24T14:55:00.000+08:00

I don't recall exactly when I first heard stories about The Torch Festival in Yunnan, but I do remember going to the festival in Stone Forest County in August 2010.

I was with an American colleague who was working at a water treatment plant in Yiliang, about an hour by car from the provincial capital Kunming, and his sister who was visiting from the States.

Driving from Yiliang late afternoon under the dome of a lavender-pink sky, we arrived at Stone Forest County early evening and ate a lamb hot pot while observing the hustle and bustle and clamour of the food stalls and the endless stream of people along the labyrinth of narrow streets.

Fires began to burn in the twilight. The evening turned into a huge Fire Ball.

Here are some photos of that evening courtesy of Nathaniel Dick.

She began with one single story....[a]nd from there, the stories accumulated into heaps of stories, like the dry stone of a date growing into a palm tree, with hundreds of dates covering its branches.

--Hanan al-Shaykh, One Thousand and One Nights, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011:288.

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The body of lore and legend on the Torch Festival is extensive in both oral and written sources. The written sources include 'The Barbarian Women A'nan', 'Zhuge Liang's Southern Expedition,' 'The Burning of Songming Tower' and 'Piluoge Unites the Six Tribes.'

The stories I have read in Chinese are, to say the least, flat and uninspiring, but the stories are not the culprit. The storytelling is the issue.

For the stories to ignite my imagination, I would have to rewrite them, re-imagine them.

Let me give you one example. In one version of the origins of festival among the Yi, a swarm of locusts descend on a village sent by an angry god. The locusts strip the fields and eat the crops after one of his celestial wrestlers is defeated and dies at the hands of a mere mortal.

This is the story in a nutshell.

The story could be reworked and re-imagined from a number of different angles and locations. The locations, in this case, heaven and a village on earth, are also real characters in any story. What of the god and his wrestler? Is the wrestler he sends to earth his personal bodyguard? Does a god, presumably powerful and strong, need a bodyguard?

And then there's the battle between the villagers and the locusts. How are the locusts ultimately vanquished? What of our hero, the wrestler A'ti Laba? And the other torch bearers doing battle with these short-horned grasshoppers? And what of the locusts carcasses in the aftermath of the battle?

Every version of these stories can be to re-imagined into a collection of short stories that as I have suggested, owes less to the source material of the stories than to the imaginary realm of the storyteller.

For me, the Torch Festival is a metaphor for life. Life is a flame. Life burns. The torch bearers in these stories are the custodians of the Fire of Life, fires that have been burning since time immemorial.

The following stories are gleaned from two Chinese sources (see links below). Translating them has reopened a magic door and taken me into the heart of storytelling and the storyteller. 'The universe,' the poet Muriel Rukeyser reminds us, 'is made of stories, not atoms.'

-Peter Micic

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The Torch Festival is celebrated by a number of cultural groups in Yunnan including the Yi, Bai, Naxi, Hani, Jinuo and Lahu.The Festival usually falls on the 24th or 25th day of the sixth lunar month which was celebrated this year across regions of Yunnan in early August. Activities include bull fights, horse racing, wrestling, songs and dances and beauty pageants.

The festival is also called 'Stars Returning (To Heaven) Festival' (回星节). The term 'stars returning' is said to originate in the Bai language or one of its dialects, perhaps a homonym for 'firewood' (xinl) and 'fire' (huix).

In most ancient civilisations, the celestial observances of the moon, sun and planets were used to count the days in making calendars.Fire calendars (火历), also called 'ten month calendars' (十月历) were common in ancient civilisations across parts of China, the burning of fires used to clear the fields in slash and burn agriculture, determine ritual celebrations, mark seasonal events or punctuate processions.

These ancient societies like other ancient societies elsewhere worshipped nature in all its forms-- the sky and the stars, rivers, rocks, trees and the elements such as fire and water.

There is also a connection with the fire calendar and the Emperor Yan ('Yan' literallly means 'flame'), however tenuous, which could tell us much about the Torch Festival whose origins have admittedly been lost in the mists of time.

Some versions of the origins of the Torch Festival

1. Naxi (纳西族)

In one version among the Naxi, there was a god called Zilao Apu. He was ripe with envy over the happy lives of mortals on earth.

He ordered one of his generals to go down to earth and engulf it in a 'sea of fire.' When the general arrived, he met a man carrying his nephew on his back and his son walking by his side holding his hand.

His sister-in-law had died and the man had taken upon himself to look after his nephew. This struck a deep chord in the general's heart. He started to think that all these earthly mortals were equally kind and virtuous. He now had second thoughts about what he was going to do.

He told the man of his plans to turn the earth into a giant ball of fire and how he could deceive the god and prevent a calamity. He instructed the man to tell the villagers that on the 25th day of the 6th lunar month, torches should be lit in front of their houses.

When the god Zilao Apu woke up from his deep sleep, he was eager to know whether the general had carried out his instructions. Looking down from heaven, all he could see was a huge fire. He concluded that the villagers had been engulfed in a sea of flames. Satisfied that his order had been executed, he fell asleep, never to awaken again.

From that time on this day became known among the Naxi as the Torch Festival.

2. Lahu 拉祜族

There once lived an evil man on a mountain who enjoyed gorging the eyes of humans and eating them.

Another man on the mountain, who was known for his kindness and generosity, had a plan to rid everyone of this eye-eating monster.

On the 24th day of the 6th lunar month, he rounded up a number of mountain goats and smeared their horns with bees wax then let them loose in the evil man's direction.

The evil man could hear buzzing sparks and thought the he was being fired at. He quickly fled and hid himself in a cave blocking the entrance with a stone slab. He was unaware that the water in grotto gushed out from this one entrance. When the water gushed out the man was submerged in water and drowned.

From that day people we no longer afraid that the eye-eating man and it was commemorated as Torch Festival.

3. Bai (白族)

The origins of the Torch Festival among the Bai, at least one version of the story, is connected to A'Nan (Man A'nan).

During the early Tang dynasty in the seventh century, there were six tribes in Yunnan. Disturbed and agitated that one of the tribes was becoming stronger and powerful, a tribal chieftain by the name of Piluoge convened a meeting with the chieftains from the other five tribes.

The wife of one of the chieftains called Man A'nan was suspicious about why the meeting was convened. She could smell a rat, but could not persuade her husband from not going. Before he left, she tied a circular band around his on his waist as a talisman.

The chieftains gathered in the Songming Tower. Piluoge was now ready to execute his treacherous plan. He ordered that the Tower be destroyed. All the five chieftains were burnt alive.

When Man A'nan arrived at the scene, the circular band she had give her husband allowed her to identify her the body among the smoldering cinders. She carried the body home. To add insult to injury, Piluoge asked for Man A'nan's hand in marriage. Man A'nan bluntly refused. After burying her husband, she killed herself.

It is said that the Bai celebrate the Torch Festival to commemorate "The Burning of Songming Tower" and Man A'nan.

In another version, Guo Shizhong, a Han Dynasty general killed a chieftain in Dali called Man'ana then proposed to the chieftain's wife Man A'nan. As she wept and mourned her loss, she feigned acceptance.

At a memorial service to commemorate her husband's death, Man A'nan burned the mourning hall and then threw herself on the fire.

Each year, the Bai light torches to commemorate her bravery, fidelity and integrity.

4. Yi (彝族)

According to one Yi version, there were two formidable wrestlers. One lived in heaven and his name was Sire A'bi. The other on earth was called A'ti Laba.

A god in heaven was jealous of A'ti Laba's prowess as a wrestler and sent one of champion wrestlers by the name of Sire A'ba to challenge him. But at the time of the competition, A'ti Laba was not in the village. He had been called away on business. Before leaving, he asked his mother to prepare a plate of iron discuses to greet the wrestler from Heaven.

When Sire A'ba arrived and saw the discuses, he jump to the conclusion that the secret to A'ti Laba's extraordinary power and strength was because he ate these circular disks. Frightened, he fled. When A'ti Laba returned and heard that Sire A'bi had left he chased after him.

Finally the competition took place, but unexpectedly, the god's wrestler was defeated and killed. The god was raged and lashed out against A'ti Laba by sending a swarm of locusts to strip the fields and eat the villager's crops.

On 24th day of the 6th lunar month, A'ti Laba rounded up the villagers, hundreds strong, and requested them to cut pine branches, light them and go to the fields where they formed a large semicircle of pine torches in a large open area ready to do battle with the locusts.

This day became known as the Torch Festival.

©Peter Micic

Sources (Chinese):

1. http://baike.baidu.com/link?url=M_FfwCm5no2hAqAu-soeD1eMaNV90ag-917drX1YIh0HID1lSBz-RaL5Nvhdda-v

2. http://yndaily.yunnan.cn/html/2013-07/23/content_731940.htm?div=-1

Tea Horse Road Project

2015-08-13T19:10:00.000+08:00

Image--Fumio Obitsu

Dear Readers,

I have just launched the Tea Horse Road Project blog. You can take a look at the link below.

Peter

https://teahorseroadproject.wordpress.com/

The Chadao Heritage Trail

2015-07-13T09:50:00.002+08:00

I am starting a project--'The Chadao Heritage Trail'--that I hope will promote a greater awareness of 'The Way of Tea' during the Tang Dynasty before it became 'Chado' in Japan.

There just isn't enough material available in English, thus the urgent need to compile, translate and edit textual sources and compile oral histories.

I have read some interesting material in Chinese on chadao emerging in Chan monasteries at Mt. Emei in Sichuan. A lineage of tea masters apparently began in 845 C.E., with the Chan Buddhist Dharma Master Chang Fu (昌福禅师) and it is a lineage, however fragmented or broken, that continues to this day.

Any information in Chinese and English on chadao, articles, dissertations, etc, with the emergence of Chan Buddhism in the monasteries in China circa eighth century and perhaps much earlier, would be greatly appreciate.

I am also looking for a sponsor or short-term residency for up to six months so I can focus entirely on the project.

You can contact me here or at:

petermicic@gmail.com

The Sound of Silence

2015-06-28T17:01:00.003+08:00

Mountains, Water, Deep Affection

I have watched 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters' many times since it was first released in 1988 and I watched it again today, and it is indeed a masterpiece. It is a work that speaks to me on so many levels, a work that captures both the extraordinary beauty of the visual and the aural, a work that engages the heart and soul.

The conventional rendering of the title in English is 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters.''Feelings' might be better translated as 'love' or 'deep attachment,' rather than simply 'feelings.' 'Water' could refer to lakes, rivers, a waterfall, a brook. The word for landscape in Chinese is literally 'mountain(s) and water.' So we could say: 'A Deep Attachment for Mountains and Rivers,' or 'A Love for Chinese Landscapes,' or 'An Affection for Mountains and Water.'

We could also say: 'A Deep Affection For What Can Be Discovered in Mountains and Water.' Such a title conjures up a vision of what we can discover when we 'read' a scroll landscape painting: a mountain hidden in the mist, a recluse disappearing into the clouds, an old man playing the seven-stringed qin zither or a little boat carrying a hermit to a riverbank through a narrow gorge.

This short animation brilliantly melds the brush, ink and paper of landscape painting with music. There are the natural soundscapes of water, wind and rain, now and then the swoop of a bird, a harsh wind stirs, the wind dies down, all is still again. The boy blows a reed calling out into an infinite space, into a great vastness. When I heard the first three pitches of the reed a whole expanse of space began to open up within me.

The reed is actually a sheng, a free reed instrument made up of a number vertical pipes with a long curved mouthpiece.

The performance space of the scholar-recluse and the qin is an iconic motif found in Chinese landscape paintings. Here the space is a qin master and his newly-acquainted student. The qin master instructs and the boy imitates.

To practice a musical instrument in Chinese is called lianqin (练琴). Practicing is also called 'practicing love or affection' (lianqing, 练情). The student who practices for hours a day gradually develops a relationship with the instrument, a bond that can grow deeper with practice. The boy practices and at the same time, an affection for his teacher also deepens.

No words are exchanged between the qin master and the boy. Within the silences a whole new world is revealed, the silence that announces the encounter of a qin master who falls ill and a boy from a nearby fishing village who looks after him, the silence that the qin master and the boy are predestined to meet, succinctly expressed in a Chinese saying: 'Though born a thousand li apart, souls which are one shall meet,' the silence of parting, and the silence when you remember those you met or loved.

'The roots of our English term ‘silence,' writes George Prochnik in Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (2011):

sink down through the language in multiple directions. Among the word’s antecedents is the Gothic verb anasilan, a word that denotes the wind dying down, and the Latin desinere, a word meaning ‘stop.’ Both of these etymologies suggest the way that silence is bound up with the idea of interrupted action. The pursuit of silence, likewise, is dissimilar from most other pursuits in that it generally begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world. Not only is it about standing still; with rare exceptions, the pursuit of silence seems initially to involve a step backward from the tussle of life… [I]t’s as though, as a culture, we’ve learned to ‘mind the gaps’ so well that they’ve all but disappeared.

In this 'ink and wash animation,' we are witness to a silence that speaks of a shared affinity, of deep affection. If we expressed it in words, its beauty would be gone. It is the same silence that permeates the entire canvas of this work: the trees, the birds, the fish, the mountains, the sky, the qin master and the boy.

The greatness of this work lies in the silences. Through silence alone we discover all kinds of hidden treasures among the mountains and rivers, and as these treasures and gifts are revealed to us, an affection, a love, a longing grows.

If I should ever cease to be wonderstruck by the magic of mountains and rivers, I should declare myself dead.

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*You can access the animation from youtube typing: Feelings of Mountains and Waters.

©Peter Micic

Interview with Chelsey Mark

2012-05-27T15:28:00.000+08:00

When I first interviewed Chelsey Mark in March 2009, he talked much about his journey as a singer and TV host in mainland China. Since then, his breadth and craft as a TV host and performer have only grown deeper with each project.

The following interview was conducted via email from late March, early April 2012.

Peter: You have been shaping, crafting and honing your skills in mainland China as a media celebrity for over a decade now, and your portfolio of gigs and projects continues to grow. I want to focus on your perseverance to continue to do what you do when others may well have thrown in the towel and gone home, but first, inquiring minds want to know what you have being since our last interview?

Chelsey: Throwing in the towel isn’t part of my vocabulary. Realizing my goals and reaching my fullest potential is. When you interviewed me last, the programs I was hosting were not being seen by many people, but that has taken a turn since then.

I was on one of the hottest TV show in China on the biggest entertainment station, Hunan TV in 2009-2010. The show's called 'Baike Quanshuo', a play on the Chinese word for encyclopedia ('baikequanshu'). It's a show of non-stop laughter and comedy skits. I got huge exposure because of my appearance on the show and more people recognized me on the street. I’ve had a steady flow of other shows and public relation gigs. These include Top Gear China, NBA Made in China, Air Jordan Brand, Nike, Li Ning (China’s premiere sports brand), and a gig for The Canada Tourism Commission.

It’s not possible to stay in the entertainment industry in China unless you're constantly expanding your skills. For me, that's been hosting, singing and acting. I started in the entertainment industry as a singer then moved to hosting, and it seemed a natural progression to then move into acting. I just finished my first appearance in a TV drama called 'The Harbin Story' shot in the northeast city of Harbin and set in the 1930s. I played a French pianist based on a real life character. I get shot while proposing to a women during my piano recital. I was killed off in the first episode!

The most rewarding part of my job is when I'm invited to speak to kids in high school and university as a motivational speaker. In the last couple of years, I've slowly built my motivational speaking portfolio. I’m always encouraging China's youth to 'chase their goals and not the dollar.' A big problem with kids here is they don’t go after what really makes them happy in terms of career. They simply choose whatever job will bring in money which invariably spirals many of them into a world of unhappiness. I’m pretty much qualified to talk on this subject since I have always done the things I love to do. And I remember I started here with zero money and zero connections.

Peter: It’s great that you can share your own story with young Chinese and be a role model and mentor. I’d like to return to that in a moment, but I’m interested to know exactly what gig you did with the Canadian Tourism Commission, and how did it come about that you were chosen to promote Canadian tourism?

Chelsey: I wanted to get involved in promoting Canada and China.The Canadian Tourism Commission was also looking for a new face to attract a younger Chinese audience, and I was looking for a way to promote Canadian and China, so it was a perfect fit. Some of the bigger events I've hosted with them include the 'Canadian Winter Olympics 100 Day Countdown' and 'Showcase Canada'- Asia Gala in 2010.

Peter: The poet and writer Jane Hirschfield has a great line from one of her essays: ‘Habit, fear, and laziness conspire to keep us in the realm of the deeply familiar.’ What inspires you to get out of bed every morning, and how do you go about making fearlessness—a reality in your life?

Chelsey: I’m a big fan of the movie 'The Secret.' Its philosophy is simple: 'thoughts become reality'. If you want it to happen just constantly thinking about it will help create that reality, though it goes without saying that you need to take action as well.

I’m also a big motivational MP3 listener. I listen to MP3s from such great speakers as Anthony Robbins, Chris Widener, and Brian Tracy. Being an independent freelancer it’s all up to me to get everything done, so I don’t have a boss or someone telling me what to do, yet with these MP3's I always have a coach giving advice, and revving me up to get out there and do it.

I also watch tons of documentaries and interviews with successful athletes, movie stars, politicians and their stories of how they got to be where they are today. They have succeeded basically because of sheer persistence and constant improvement. This is one of the more important things I teach my students when I speak in public .That is, if you want to do it, you can. All you need is to be persistent. But at the same time, it may take one month, a year, or ten to twenty years before you achieve your goal.

In terms of fear, my life has really taken a big change since my grandmother passed away last year. She was ninety-seven years old! Her long life spanned five generations and twentieth century history: two World Wars, recessions, the Kennedy assassination. You name it she lived through it. My grandma lived through all political and social turmoil of her age, so what excuse or fear do I have living in 2012?

Peter: What do you believe to be your four most successful habits?

Chelsey: Persistence and faith in tomorrow, a strong work ethic, developing myself to be a more professional and happy person, confidence and trusting my instincts.

Peter: How do you view the world differently now as opposed to 3-4 years ago?

Chelsey: It’s still the same world, but with a better understanding of how the 'real' world works. In the past, I believed if I was good enough as an artist I would be successful. The difference now is I understand why and how some artists make it, and why all the others might be the best, but will never have success. To make a long story short, I have a good understanding of business in the entertainment industry.

Peter: You meet and deal with all kinds of people. What have your interactions with people taught you?

Chelsey: You can learn something from each and every person you meet. I’m always learning how to deal with people and social situations better. Everybody really is worth a million dollars. I see the potential and value of each and every human being. It also helps me keep my grounded and remind me to respect everyone I meet.

Peter: What aspects of your life have been most crucial to your development as a host and media figure?

Chelsey: I would say marketing, networking, promoting and developing myself. It's pretty simple: the more people you can get along with and like you, the more opportunities and success you will have. Especially here in China with different markets and traditions, it’s an ongoing learning experience.

There are other things as well like adapting to such a sprawling metropolis that is Beijing, weather, the pollution, the sheer number of people. Keeping physically healthy and maintaining my craft as a performer over the years has been a big challenge. In the high definition (‘HD’) era where everything from a small pimple to an untrimmed nose hair can come up on screen, it’s our duty as artists to stay in tip-top condition.

Peter: Have circumstances in your life always been kind to you? Let me put the question another way. Do you believe you are where you are today because of luck or because of sheer hard work?

Chelsey: I'm a firm believer of '‘opportunities are given to those who are ready'. No matter what opportunities come your way, if you can't say: 'I'm ready for this,' the course of natural selection will eliminate you from that opportunity. The best prime example of this was going back to my days appearing on of Hunan TV’s hugely successful ‘Baike Quanshuo.’ I wasn’t actually their first choice, I was their third! When I arrived on set I realized two foreigners they had selected for the show were not the right mix so basically the opportunity was mine to win or lose. For the next eight months I worked tirelessly on and off the camera, working longer hours, and making it my number one priority. Even though the role I had on the show wasn’t what you would call huge, it was the number one watched program in 2009-10 running every night Monday to Thursday. It was worth all the hard work.

Peter: What family cultural roots do you have in China, and how much impact, if any, have they had on you?

Chelsey: My father was born in Guangdong province in the city of Taishan. Inky Mark left Jining village when he was six years old with all of my immediate family, but some distant relatives still in there. . I went back to visit and see the house where my father was born in 2009. I also saw my great grandfather’s grave which I’m told points north to Canada because many of my Chinese relatives immigrated to Canada. My Chinese roots have had a huge impact on me. The reason I came to China was to find those roots. If it wasn’t for my father’s Chinese heritage, I wouldn’t be in China today. In many ways, I’m continuing the story that started with my great grandfather. That story goes something like this: my great grandfather immigrates to Canada and works on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. My grandfather opens up a Laundromat and Chinese restaurant. (Lees Café). My father becomes a Member of Parliament. I come back to China to find the roots and continue the family story, a story that is just starting for me!

Peter: Has working in main land China been a form of further education for you?

Chelsey: Being an independent singer, TV presenter and actor are skills that I could never learn at school. In China, a lot of success is tied into something called guanxi or 'connections'. Although there are many examples of unfair guanxi here, the whole idea of guanxi is using your personal network to further your goals. My understanding of guanxi is it’s the same all over the world, but just a little bit more 'in your face' here. Sometimes knowing one person may save you years of hard work and finding that break. The biggest key to success here in mainland China is to work on your person, be a professional, be courteous, and continue to become the best person you can.

Peter: There’s that much quoted line in Chinese by a minister of the Qianlong emperor: 'there are only two kinds of people in the world. One is called fame, the other fortune.' Are you seeking fame, fortune, or something else?

Chelsey: I would have to say I'm after something which might seem strange to the emperor's minister, that is, using my skills for the benefit of society. When I was a singer on TV in China I was always thinking, if I could make people happy and that people from all walks of life could follow and realize their dreams, I felt I was making a real impact. When I became TV host, I wanted to be a really funny and energetic and share that with my audience. In 2012 things have changed again. I’m still entertaining people as a media host, but also branching out as a motivational speaker.

Peter: Does Beijing seem like home to you now? Are other media people in mainland China considered your friends or professional colleagues?

Chelsey: I have plenty of friends in the business including movie stars, singers, journalists, CEO’s and cameramen. I still consider my professional colleagues to be my friends. We are all learning from each other. If you can't get along with the people in the business, in the long run, you won’t be around. I remember a great quote I heard from either Brian Tracy or Chris Widener—'you can’t fly with the eagles if you’re hanging with the turkeys'' You need to surround yourself with professionals and like-minded people who will elevate and help you soar to greater heights.

Peter: Are there any projects in the pipeline you want to share?

Chelsey: In discussing projects in the pipeline, I believe if you want a future situation to workout, don’t tell anyone about it. If you don’t want it to happen, then don't talk about it. I’m talking about projects which I have no control over. My own personal projects are different. One recently finished project which has been in the works for months is my English-Chinese website. I am always working on projects, but as I just mentioned I don't talk about them until I have actually executed them.

Sneha Khanwalkar: Sounds of Punjab

2012-04-27T10:39:00.000+08:00

A really cool take on the sounds of Punjab by Sneha Khanwalkar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X21kvYl0Mds&feature=player_embedded

Here's a brief introduction about Khanwalkar's project from Intel MTV Sound Trppin:

Meet Sneha Khanwalkar. Music director. Traveller. Breaker of stereotypes.

Intel MTV Sound Trippin partnered by Woodland is about Sneha venturing boldly into the lesser-known India, backpack and recorder in tow, in relentless pursuit of authentic sound. Why Sound? Coz nothing captures the essence of a location or a community better than its local sounds. The sound of local trains in Mumbai or the tractors in Punjab, are an authentic slice of life as it exists there. And these sounds give us a pure, untainted glimpse into that community & their lives.

While most of us can only hear the noise in these sounds, Sneha can hear the music!
Every episode will be Sneha's dogged pursuit of authentic sound. Finding that gushing stream, a mother's lullaby, the persistent thumping of a tractor, the tinkling bells on a bullock, even the rhythmic swishing of a broom will form the first layer of her journey and the base of her track. Unearthing hidden local talent & Sneha's easy interactions with them will add the next layer. The final element, which will also add to the richness of the narrative, will be the showcasing of art forms like song, dance & theatre by the locals themselves. Sneha will then use all of these to create a brand new track, completely authentic to that location!

Source: http://mtv.in.com/soundtrippin/about.html

The Bimo

2012-04-08T09:46:00.004+08:00

I was in Xichang, capital of Liangshan prefecture during Chinese New Year where I spent a week with some Yi friends. One early morning, I was asked to attend a ceremony in a mountain village that would be officiated by a bimo, a male ritual specialist.

The ceremony lasted almost six hours and involved a man in his early thirties whose soul had apparently left his body. His mother was mortified that her son’s soul had taken flight and insisted that a bimo be called in to make things well again. The man had no deep religious beliefs, but his mother believed that if the ritual did not take place immediately it would have a direct impact on his future and the happiness of his family.

I have wanted to write a story of what transpired during those many hours in a small village courtyard, but recently stumbled on this poem by the Yi Nuosu poet Jimu Langge 'The ‘Coming of the Bimo' (translated by D. Dayton), which says a lot of what I saw that day in fewer words.

The Coming of the Bimo
When feeling jinxed
I go invite the Bimo
and get some things ready
branches, grass
and of course a lamb

The Bimo sits at the head
bundling grass according to custom
and chatting genially
while a bowl of wine is placed before him.

The lamb is led by the person leading it
its expression sedate and seasoned
as if it was raised by the Yi
from the time it was born to fulfill this duty
Actually, people and sheep are different
People, in a lifetime, have to experience many times
this spectacle
but sheep only have one chance
after which they will be slaughtered
The lamb head and pelt given to the Bimo
and the meat shared among everyone.

At nightfall the Bimo sobers his smiling face
beginning the recitation
Rhythmically clear the scriptures are
akin to black people's singing
with the addition of eastern mysticism
The Bimo steadily lifts and swings the bells
a crisp ringing accompanying the reading words
It spreads into the darkness outside the room
and into the hearts of the people.

The Bimo has come
Ghosts and goblins will be subdued
Man and beast will live in harmony

The famous Bimos are all very busy
In other villages
the same sound
resonates with the serenity of the evening
Even if outside cultures
are like the cows and sheep at nightfall
entering the mountain villages in waves.

Yunnan's 18 oddities

2012-03-15T10:57:00.000+08:00

Every country around the world offers its share of things considered weird, strange or wacky. Yunnan has its own yellow directory of 'oddball' attractions that have come to be enshrined in what is called 'Yunnan’s 18 Oddities.' They are regional attractions or customs considered to be unfamiliar, unusual or odd.

It may be argued that they were 'unusual’ in the not-too-distant past, 'unusual' that is to outsiders or on levels beyond the understanding of outsiders to the tradition—bamboo hats used as rice or wok covers; eggs tied up vertically in bundles like long-braided hair and sold in markets; trains moving slower than cars because they have to cut through narrow, precipitous tunnels, or that Yunnan did not have its own domestic railway system in the early twentieth century. It did however, have an international railway line built by the French stretching some 460 kilometers from Kunming to Hanoi.

These 'oddities' might also well be ‘a tourist stunt,’ as one blogger has written, presented or packaged as part of an ‘exotic,’ ‘mysterious’ Yunnan tour for Chinese and foreign tourists.

Depending on what you have read, online or otherwise, there is no agreement to what exactly are the official 'traditional' or 'representative' 18 Oddities. Let’s look at one 'traditional' list compiled by Zhang Nan published in 2002.

According to Zhang, these 'oddities' have circulated as texts transmitted primarily by oral means since the 1940s. Here are some examples:

--ice cakes called ear pieces.

--counting broad beans as you sell them.

--three mosquitoes make a dish.

Other variations that make up the 'traditional 18' include:

--going by overhead cable is faster than taking a ferry boat

--fire and water worshipped as gods

--houses built on bamboo or wooden pillars

--rice is cooked in a bamboo tube

The explanations that I have read in Chinese for the above entries are vaguely informative, but then they are not written with an anthropologist in mind, or anybody else who would like to gain a better appreciation or deeper understanding of how these customs or modes of behavior came about.

Apart from the 'traditional 18' and their variants, there are also '18 folk oddities,' as well as 'new editions' or creative improvisations on the traditional 18. In one text I recently consulted, the editors have ‘tracked down’ 81 unusual attractions in the province!

The 'new editions' have circulated since the late 1970s and early 198os and include 'Seagulls Have Arrived in the Spring City', 'Ants are Jumping Vegetables,' and 'Everybody Loves Across the Bridge Rice Noodles.'

Popular destinations and food have also succumbed to the lure of the 18 oddities. The chain restaurant Across the Bridge Rice Noodles, as one example, opened its doors in Kunming in early September 1990, and its huge popularity spawned its own oddities named after its founding chef and CEO Ji Xinyuan (吉鑫园十八怪).

The traditional 18 oddities have become a permanent fixture of the province, and there is no shortage of creative offshoots. Yunnan is very much a province out of the ordinary—culturally, linguistically, a ‘biodiversity hotspot’ as Conservation International called the province in 2007—but rather than just read what others consider 'unusual', 'odd' or 'unique' about the province, get busy and start compiling a list of your own.

Thirteen Yunnan Poets

2012-03-15T10:50:00.000+08:00

A Selection of Poems by Thirteen Yunnan Poets (云南十三人诗选), was officially launched in early January at Loft Jindian 1919 in Kunming. It brought together a lively and highly-charged gathering of poets, including veteran poet Yu Jian who was among the special guests handing out humorous awards to each of the young poets.

The thirteen poets are: Shang Zhengcan (尚正灿), Li Xuliang (李续亮), He Wenzhao (和文朝 )Yang Xiaowen (杨晓雯), Shi Yuanxi (施袁喜), Wu Yunli (吴云粒), Zhang Xiangwu (张翔武), Fu Ziwen (伏自文), Lu Wei (陆薇) Yang Qing (杨青), Hei Niao (黑鸟) Fengren Yuma (蜂人与马) and Ye Feng (野风).

This collection of over one hundred poems has all the big themes-- love, longing, separation, the intimacy of human relationships, the fragility of life, the solace of nature. They are also characterized by rich metaphor, startling imagery, and a compelling sense of immediacy.

Perhaps the hardest thing for any poet is to include the reader in every verse, a line that refreshes and reinvents our world. Dan Weber, a visual poet and multimedia artist writes that ‘the power that poetry has is the judo throw of a paradigm shift.’ If that shift is done with grace, insight and poise, the poem can wake us up and allow us to see the world with fresh eyes. Whether or not a poem works or whether you 'get it' is not easy to pin down, but there can be no higher praise for the poet if you’re struck by the language and syntax and want to say: 'Now this is a poet.'

A few memorable lines from this collection have stuck. Take for example the following line from Yang Xiaowen’s 'Moments of Forgetfulness' –'on a spring day, I had to confront the premature death of a flower.' (p.127), or the following line from Hei Niao’s ‘My Happiness’—'Let the errors of my childhood be shown again like a film' (p.216).

The shorter poems (less than one page) are much more assured in the directions and more skillfully executed than some of the longer poems. One of my favorite shorter poems in collection is called ‘Alleyway' (胡同) by Hei Niao:

An alleyway at three o’clock in the morning

I brace myself in the darkness

A man walking in my direction also braces himself

A scary-looking alleyway

We brush past each other.

At that moment when the robbers start their day

A lonely man

Conceals all the weapons of the world.

(p. 209)

胡同

凌晨三点的胡同

我硬着头皮往前走

凌晨三点的胡同

那人硬着皮头往前走

杀气腾腾的胡同

我们擦肩而过

盗匪出没的时刻

一个孤独的男人

藏着全世界的凶器

a brief encounter

2012-03-15T10:29:00.000+08:00

One late afternoon I walk past Wheatfield Bookstore and notice a black and white poster on the window billing a literary festival in Kunming. There are snapshots of the writers running across the top of the poster. The first writer is Yu Jian, one of China’s bestselling contemporary Chinese poets.

A week later I am reading Yu Jian's 'A Brief Encounter.' I walk pass Wheatfield Bookstore, stop and look at the same poster on the window and then meet, quite unexpectedly, the author. I can’t remember what we said, but there was no awkwardness or affectation, only an exchange of literary ideas, a love of words, and poetic phrases. And then we fell silent, letting the words hang between us.

Chéngyǔ 成语

2011-01-18T07:35:00.003+08:00

The Chinese language is rich in idioms, and although it is possible to converse in non-idiomatic standard Chinese, a foreign learner with only a superficial knowledge of Chinese idioms will be at a serious disadvantage in reading, and even more so when taking part in discussions. Apart from idioms, there are also the allegorical rhymes, onomatopoeia words, words from regional dialects, popular sayings, proverbs, and most importantly the literature—the vernacular and classical Chinese, that will catapult your language to the next level.

By idiom I am referring to what is called 成语(chéngyǔ) in standard Chinese. Like an idiom in English, we can define a 成语 as a combination of words with a special meaning that generally cannot be inferred from its separate parts. The Enlarged Dictionary of Chinese Idioms 中国成语大语词典 I have on my table here lists over 18,000 entries. Many 成语 but not all, are made up of four characters and for this reason the term is sometimes translated as 'a four character idiom.'

Let’s take a look at a two random examples:

1. 车水马龙 (chēshuǐmǎlóng). If we literally translate the idiom it means 'chariots, water, horses, dragons.' Clearly, it is rather difficult if not impossible to figure out this meaning from the separate words. In other words, the meaning of the whole idiom is different from its parts. The sentence has two meanings, a literal one, which means very little, and a metaphorical one which is the idiom. This idiom can be traced back to the Han dynasty when an empress described a stream of horses and carriages on a busy street: 'the chariots are like flowing water, the horses moving to and fro like dragons.' ('车如流水, 马如游龙').

If we bring the idiom to the present, it refers to an incessant or endless stream of cars—heavy traffic on the road, for example, or a scene crowded with people and vehicles. Compare: 人山人海 (lit: 'people mountain, people sea').

2. 见钱眼开. Unlike the first example, if we literally translate this idiom we can guess its meaning: ‘see money, eyes open', in other words, avaricious. Another example of a 成语 that we can pretty well guess its meaning if we read each character literally is 人生如寄 (rénshēngrújì): living in the mortal world is like a sojourner in a hotel, that is, life is short.

If you read the news whether that be that actual news print form (how old-fashioned is that?) or online, start collecting idioms. Many of them will be bookish idioms in contrast to colloquial ones, but keep an eye for one’s that keep cropping up in print as well as one’s your Chinese friends use.

The Language Adventures of René in China

2011-01-17T08:00:00.001+08:00

In December last year, a large number of people contact me to ask who on earth is René and what exactly I was trying to achieve by writing 'The Language Adventures of René in China: Essential Expressions for Beginners, vol. 1.'

Below is part of the preface from volume 1 which should give readers a good idea of what I was trying to achieve.
-peter

Chinese language textbooks devote little space to explaining how the language is used in social situations or why Chinese people express themselves in such a way. This volume attempts to explain a number of greetings, common expressions, not to mention other speech acts, that will allow the foreign learner to understand the language better.

Why greetings and expressions might not be readily understood by foreign learners underscores the erroneous assumption that there are "equivalences" between languages. An equivalent of Ní hǎo can be found in the English "Hello" or "Hi", but there are numerous greetings and expressions that do not have equivalences in English.

Davies and Barmé have rightly pointed out this assumption 'presupposes the existence of a formidable metalanguage that has the capacity to match words, ideas, statements, and idioms across languages, according to some mysterious "law" or universal communication.' [1]

More than half a century earlier, the linguist and songwriter Chao Yuen Ren (1892-1982) expressed something similar:

Any utterance in an actual context can be translated fairly accurately, to be sure, but not necessarily by the same means of expression. Thus, the English phrase 'No, thank you!' can be translated more 'idiomatically' by a smile and a polite gesture than by the recent translation borrowing Duoshieh, buyaw le! [duōxiè, bú yào le 多谢,不要了] "Many thanks, I don’t want any more." [2]

The linguistic diversity of China and the large number of regional dialects that are mutually unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country is aptly summed up in the popular saying 'speech changes every ten li' (shílĭ bù tōngyīn 十里不通音).

This saying highlights issues of comprehension among different regional speakers of the standard language or pŭtōnghuà (普通话) who may come across an initial 'impasse' or 'obstacle' (不通) when hearing standard Chinese spoken by dialect speakers, invariably coloured by local speech habits and accents.

For the foreign learner, accents and pronunciation do cause major practical problems, especially once they leave the classroom setting:

The great majority of Chinese speak standard Chinese with a dialectal accent, which may be so mild as to be scarcely noticeable or so heavy as to make normal conversation impractical. These accented speech variants are usually unknown even to advanced western students of Chinese until they arrive in China and find themselves experiencing much difficulty in communication. [3]

Each entry in this volume contains a common greeting or expression ‘acted out’ by a fictional character called René, a foreigner language student studying in Beijing whose course of study includes a part-time internship in a joint-venture market research company.

René encounters a number of difficulties in communicating with Chinese and makes a number of errors along the way, but he experiences an epiphany of sorts, a moment of understanding, where he realizes that he has expressed himself incorrectly or that a common expression in English finds a different medium of expression in Chinese.Numerous examples could have augmented each entry, but the challenge has been to condense the narrative to one or two pages and allow readers to grasp various aspects of the language quickly and easily.

References:

1. Gloria Davies Voicing Concerns: Contemporary Chinese Critical Inquiry (2001:xi).

2. Chao Yuen Ren Mandarin Primer (1961:50).

3. Liang, DeFrancis and Han, Varieties of Spoken Standard Chinese (1982:1).

Yang Yinliu and his Draft

2011-01-17T07:36:00.000+08:00

Yang Yinliu (杨荫浏) wrote a critique of his Draft History of Ancient Chinese Music 中国古代音乐史稿 (hereafter Draft) in the April issue of Music Research (音乐研究) in 1958.

It was more of a self-criticism. Yang wrote that he had a far-from-perfect grasp of Communist doctrines and that he had not become ‘proletarianized’ enough.

Yang (third from the left in the photo) started on the Draft in 1959 and completed two volumes by July 1977. The two volume work was officially published February 2, 1981. In 1965 Mao Zedong instructed that Yang's book be published without delay and Yang worked frantically to complete the text. At the time, Yang was reluctant to make any revisions, politically that is, and the book ended up on the printing press shelves for another ten years.

References:

Micic, Peter, 'Gathering a Nation's Music: A Life of Yang Yinliu' in Lives in Chinese Music (Helen Rees, ed), University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 91-116, 2009.

Abing and the Webster Chicago Wire Recorder

2011-01-17T07:26:00.002+08:00

When I was researching the life of Yang Yinliu 杨荫浏 at the Music Research Institute in Beijing almost a decade ago, I was always excited to see what I could dig up from the reference library and sound recording archive. Yang was among the first musicologists to experiment with recording musicians in their natural environment and many of his recordings made in the 1950s are held in the archive.

It was Stephen Jones who drew my attention to the Webster Chicago wire recorder used by Yang and Cao Anhe 曹安和 in their fieldwork recordings in Wuxi in the summer of 1950 and the six ‘legendary’ recordings of Abing 阿炳, three each for pipa and erhu, respectively.

Two of these recorders used by Yang Yinliu and Cao Anhe are housed in the Chinese Traditional Music Sound Archive at the Music Research Institute in Beijing. According to Wang Yusang, an audio engineer who works in the sound archive, two Webster recorders were brought back from Hong Kong by composer Li Huanzhi 李焕之 in 1949. I was able to view the two reels used to record the six works of Abing in 1950 from a computer screen in the archive. Wang also told me that more recordings could have been made, but the team of musicologists ran out of wire.

References:

Micic, Peter, 'Gathering a Nation's Music: A Life of Yang Yinliu' in Lives in Chinese Music (Helen Rees, ed), University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 91-116, 2009.

A Brief History of the Auto Industry in China

2011-01-13T07:55:00.003+08:00

A short piece from my auto archives 2003-2004.

--peter

Ford Motors, GM and Mercedes-Benz set up auto plants in Shanghai during the Republican period. In 1902, Yuan Shikai bought a Mercedes-Benz from Hong Kong as a gift to the Dowager Empress Cixi. This vintage model is housed in the Summer Palace Museum.

China began to manufacture automobiles in 1955 with Soviet trucks, buses and tractors. The first commercial vehicle to roll of the assembly line was the 'Jiefang' (‘Liberation’) truck, manufactured by the Changchun No.1 Automotive Plant in 1956. The Plant started production of Hongqi (‘Red Flag’) limousines, and a passenger car called Fenghuang (‘Phoenix’).

From the 1950s to the early 1980s, passenger cars were essentially the prerogative of China’s ruling elite. In the early 1990s, however, the Chinese government designated the automobile industry as one of the country’s so-called pillar industries making it easier for individuals to purchase motor vehicles.

In the 1980s, Steyr-Daimler-Puch , AMC Chrysler Jeep, Volkswagen and Audi had set up shop in China. U.S. component manufacturers Delphi, Ford, and Bosch soon followed. By the early 1990s, one million auto vehicles were rolling off the assembly lines annually.

With China’s entry into the WTO in December 2001 the auto industry turned a new page. Foreign manufacturers were keen to grab a piece of the fastest growing auto market in the world. Sales of passenger cars soared from 750,000 units in 2001 to 1.2 million in 2002 and then nearly doubled to 2.1 million in 2003.

China's auto industry, however, was far from regulated. As Erik Eckermann writes in his book World History of the Automobile (2001):

the auto boom of the early 1990s often generated chaotic conditions. High custom duties gave rise to organizations involved in smuggling parts and entire cars. Auto parts and dealerships sprouted in huge numbers, while a fragmented industry operated in an uneconomical and labor-intensive manner (p. 209).

Some 4.5 million cars rolled off the Chinese assembly line in 2004 making China the fourth largest producer in the world. By 2010, it is predicted that China will become the world’s number two producer after the USA.

Translating Modernity

2011-01-12T11:40:00.026+08:00

Foreign translators, lexicographers and their Chinese assistants were a busy lot in the late nineteenth century. Their collaborative efforts and their contributions to modern Chinese lexicology were profound, yet who really remembers their works? Although their achievements seem nowadays to be little more than curios relegated to the shelves of archives or rare book collections in libraries, they provide a unique trajectory of how foreign terminology, including musical terms entered modern Chinese.

The bulk of texts written and translated by foreign missionary educators and their Chinese collaborators at the Tongwenguan in Beijing and the Kiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai included science, history, geography, geometry, chemistry, law and medicine.

As the translation of these texts had to be rendered into acceptable literary Chinese that was beyond the capabilities of most missionary scholars, an oral transmission of the original text was read to a Chinese assistant who then wrote it down. This procedure was no different to what Jesuit missionaries were doing two and a half centuries earlier, and if we comb the earliest translations of Buddhist texts in China, we will find that this collaborative process has a long history.

Let's look at a few examples. The American Baptist missionary Carl T. Kreyer and his Chinese assistant Cai Xiling compiled a trumpet manual titled 喇叭吹法 published by the Kiangnan Arsenal in 1877. Cai could have chosen a phonetic transliteration for trumpet, but he used 喇叭 presumably because the Chinese instrument (also called 唢呐) share a similar curved-back flaring bell.

Wang Tao (1828-1897), one of the founders of modern journalism in China, used the word dānchún (单纯) a phonetic transliteration of the English 'dance' in his Jottings of Carefree Travels (1867) to describe 'men and women in western countries' moving about rhythmically in fixed steps or sequences to music. He writes:

In Western countries men and women assemble for what is known in their language as 'Dancing.' It can perhaps be seen as a survival of the Miao custom of dancing in courtship under the moonlight, as is still practised in Japan and other countries to the east. To the British it is a form of amusement. Each year in June and July big gatherings are held, and what a sight they are! A hundred, or perhaps two or three hundred handsome boys and girls, twelve to sixteen years old, are chosen from the town and partnered up by age. They are first taught the steps by a female instructor, taking months of practice to master them. Each of the various dances is named according to step and rhythm.

Liang Qichao's 'new-style prose' was imbued with vocabulary from Chinese Buddhism, Daoism, the Yijing, and vernacular novels. He also favoured the Japanese variants, what are often called 'graphic loans.' The loans as Lydia Liu writes referred to 'classical Chinese character compounds that were used by the Japanese to translate modern European words and were introduced into modern Chinese.'

Foreign loanwords expressed an allegiance to something 'new' and 'modern,' but transliterating foreign names and words was far from standardized. Liang bemoaned of names ‘being translated in a hundred different ways by a hundred people.' Robert Morrison, Elijah C. Bridgman, William Milne and other Protestant missionaries grappled with attempting phonetic transcriptions as did many of their Chinese collaborators. If we swing the lexical pendulum in the other direction, foreign lexicographers of English-Chinese dictionaries in the nineteenth century found a number of Chinese terms for the one English word.

In Lobscheid's English and Chinese Dictionary (1867) the entry for 'school’ includes the following:

書房
書館
學館
學房
學堂
學校

Each of the Chinese renderings of 'school' has slightly different shades of meaning. The word 学校 was reintroduced from the Japanese gakkō, but as Masini points out 学校 was already used by Mencius, employed by Guido Aleni in Zhifang waiji (Records of the Places Outside the Jurisdiction of the Office of Geography) in 1623 in Hangzhou and by Fan Shouyi in Shenjianlu (My Observations) ca. 1720 'to refer to the European school system.'

Liu Ching-chih describes the lack of uniform transcription rules in rendering foreign musical terms and names in the early twentieth century:

Most of the translations were for teaching purposes, especially during the first half of the 20th century during which there were practically no music text books on the development of European music, compositional techniques and aesthetics. In view of this, teachers at conservatories of music and university music faculties had to compile their own textbooks by rendering articles and books in foreign languages into Chinese.

Let’s now have a look at some instruments rendered into Chinese taken from several texts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

These examples are taken from 'Appendix III' in my unpublished doctoral dissertation School Songs and Modernity in Late Qing and Early Republican China, Monash University, Melbourne, 2000.

1. 阿保笛 (oboe). Modern equivalent: 双簧管. Used by Xiao Youmei in ‘Introduction to Music '音乐概说', in 学报, no. 1, 1907.

2. 阿尔赓 (organ). Modern equivalent: 风琴. Used by Guo Songdao in London and Paris Diaries, 1876-1879 (伦敦与巴黎日记). 风琴 is used by Zeng Zhimin in ‘音乐教育论 (1904) and Xiao Youmei in '音乐概说,' 1907. Cf. 大筒琴 rendered as ‘European organ in Lobscheid English and Ch:inese Dictionary (1867, vol 3:1256).

3. 古拉料捏笛 (clarinet). Modern equivalent: 单双管. Used by Xiao Youmei in '音乐概说' 1907. Cf. 掂笛 in Lobscheid English and Chinese Dictionary (1867, vol 1, p. 395).

4. 洋琴 (piano). Modern equivalent: 钢琴. Used by Li Shutong in ‘Biographical Sketch of Beethoven,’ in 音乐小杂志, issue 1, 1906. Cf. 大洋琴皮亚娜披雅娜. 'Pianist' in K. Hemeling (1916: 1308) is rendered as 弹钢琴家and 大洋琴家. 钢琴 is used by A.H Mateer New Terms for New Ideas: A Study of the Chinese Newspapers (1913:70).

References

Hemeling, K, English-Chinese Dictionary of the Standard Spoken Language and Handbook for Translators, Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1916.

Lobscheid, W, English and Chinese Dictionary with Punti and Mandarin Pronunciation, Hong Kong: Daily Press, 1867, vols. 1-4.

Liu, Lydia Translingual Practice: Literature,National Culture and Translated Modernity in China 1900-1937, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995:331.

Masini, Federico, The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840-1898, Department of Oriental Studies, University of Rome, 1993.

Mateer, A. H., New Terms for New Ideas: A Study of the Chinese Newspapers, Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1913.

'Selections from Jottings of Carefree Travel by Wang Tao (trans. Ian Chapman), Renditions 53, 54 (Spring and Autumn): 2000, p 172.

To er or not to er

2011-01-12T11:27:00.004+08:00

"One of the hotly debated questions of language policy is to what extent rhotacization should be adopted as a feature of the standard language. Many nonnortherners are unable to pronounce such forms correctly and avoid the –r suffix as much as possible, even in those cases where it serves to distinguish different grammatical categories: for huà huàr ‘to paint a picture', many southerners will say huà huà."

--Jerry Norman Chinese, 1988:145.

The title of this piece is taken from Dayle Barnes ‘To er or not to er’, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1977 (5):211-36. The following is adapted from Zhou Jian ‘眼与眼儿’in Zicizhongde quwei (Humorous Chinese Character and Terms) Beijing: Xin shijie chubanshe, 1999:193-195.

In standard Chinese, particularly in colloquial speech, words or morphemes undergo a phonological process called rhotacization [also known as érhuà finals] which refers to adding a suffix -r to the final syllables. Rhotacized (érhuà) finals do not exist in isolation. In pinyin romanization, the suffix -r is placed after the original final syllable and the character 儿 is added after the word or morpheme.

Q: Does it matter if words or morphemes are not in their rhotacized form?

A: It doesn’t matter if some words appear in rhotacized forms or not. But for others it is essential because they function to semantically differentiate words.

Q: Why does fànguăn require a rhotacized form and not túshūguăn?

-Guăn (馆) does not appear in a rhotacized form for grand, dignified public institutions such as embassies, art galleries, museums, cultural history institutes or organizations, exhibitions halls and hotels.

The suffix –r can be added to informal places such as restaurants (饭馆儿), pubs (酒馆儿) tea houses (茶馆儿), and cafés (咖啡馆儿).

Rhotacized forms convey diminutive overtones and objects considered cute or familiar. Usually, cock and rooster do not habitually appear in rhotacized forms, but by adding a final -r to a small chicken or chick
(小鸡儿) it conveys something loveable or endearing.

The suffix –r can also serve distinguish parts of speech as in the following:

gài 盖 'to cover'
gàir 盖儿'cover'

jiān 尖 'pointed'; 'tapering'
jiānr 尖儿 'point'; 'tip'

Wind and Rain

2011-01-07T07:43:00.000+08:00

The planning of the imperial capital Peking melded traditional philosophy, yin and yang cosmic forces, religious thought, ancient mythology, and cosmology expounded in ancient texts. The Jade emperor's celestial abode was populated by stars and constellations.

There were originally four palaces corresponding to four cardinal directions: east, south, west and north. The Han dynasty historian and eunuch Sima Qian attempted to shuffle the celestial order of palaces by adding another called the Purple Palace (Zigong), its domicile being the North Star.

These five palaces adopted symbolic correlations of the five elements with cardinal directions and colors:

Wood (east, green)

Fire (south, red)

Earth (central, yellow)

Metal (west ,white)

Water (north, black)

There were symbolic correlations with the number five such as musical pitches, stages of human growth and human virtues. Some of the symbolism had a significant impact on the architectural and spatial dimensions in city planning and the construction of palaces like those in the Forbidden City.

You can see yang odd numbers everywhere. Five and nine are especially potent numbers: the five-claw dragon, the five bridges. You'll see buildings divided into nine bays. The large gates with protruding bosses on them run nine across and nine down, nine being the most auspicious yang number and metonymy for the emperor. Dragons are virtually synonymous with the son of heaven, but in the Chinese cosmic scheme of things, there are actually nine. Nine also looms large in the music of the court. Numerous state sacrificial songs in late imperial China were composed with nine or less pitches and within the range of a ninth.

Dragons were also thought to control the wind and rain which is what fengshui means (literally 'wind and water'). Fengshui did not just refer to wind or rain but to cosmic or primordial energy which moved through the veins and vessels of terrains and winding watercourses.

Those gothic-like roof creatures that grace the eaves of the buildings in the Forbidden City--some of the figures appearing more than once and the number of creatures indicating the buildings' importance.The Hall of Supreme Harmony, the largest and tallest building in the Forbidden City and the first of the three ceremonial halls, has ten, not nine.

I have always wanted to get hold of a book that would give me eyes to look at buildings. When I first visited the Palace Museum many years ago, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the buildings in which a surfeit of servants and their masters lived and worked. I am not an architect, but it has always been a hobby of mine to be able to read a building or a conglomeration of buildings like those in the Forbidden City. The stones in the Palace grounds can tell us much about the construction history, damage and reconstruction, extensions and repairs in times of prosperity and so on.

How does one go about reading something as gargantuan as the Forbidden City? The simple answer is to do it step by step. I could imagine spending a few days examining a cathedral in Europe, but the Forbidden City could take months. How to read the Forbidden City—it’s a book that needs to be written—would include examining the general orientation of the place, buildings and furniture, numbers and shapes, colours, construction, the roofs, columns, domes and ceilings, animal, bird and plant symbolism, and looking beyond the objects and images of the Palace to examine the history and symbolism of imperial dress, the ceremonial attire of the emperor, for example, or the dress of tributary envoys or the Mongol nobility.

Republican Blues

2011-01-07T07:28:00.000+08:00

It was January 1912. The newly-formed Ministry of Education needed a national anthem for its new Republic. Letters were sent out to modernizing elites to start drafting suitably soul stirring texts.

A committee had read over three hundred submissions, but they were tossed out because they were not 'suitable.' It came down to the Republic's new boss Yuan Shikai to decide. He chose Song of the Green Clouds, 'green clouds' being a hallowed metaphor in Chinese for purity and loftiness. Choosing an anthem that would encapsulate the narrative of a new republic was not as easy as selecting the best stories of the nation or its best writers.

When Yuan Shikai died in June 1916 not before announcing that he would become the emperor in January, the country was run by warlord commanders and regional governors.

A number of national anthems circulated depending on who aspired to govern the nation. Yuan had chosen another anthem for the Republic in 1915 called China’s Strength and Power Strand Firm in the Cosmos. In this anthem, the epochal transformation from dynasty to republic is praised by none other than the mythical emperor Yao in the closing lines of the anthem.

Even the crumbling Qing Empire had its own anthem. In a diary entry dated September 28 1911, Yan Fu, one of China’s pre-eminent translators wrote that he was off to the 'Imperial Qing Guard Public Office to decide on a suitable anthem.' The anthem was called Strengthening the Golden Bowl, penned by Yan Fu, and music by Pu Dong, a military training officer with the Imperial Guard.

The empire would need more than an anthem, however, to strengthen and unite the 'golden bowl.' Within two weeks of selecting the anthem, the Qing Empire, and China’s last imperial dynasty collapsed.

In setting a preexisting melody to a text, Yan and Pu adopted the models prescribed by the fashion of their time, but this compositional process went back much further, a practice that has its provenance in Chinese poetry. As early as the southern Song (1127-1279), it is recorded that poems were first chanted then set to a melodic line which became a song.

In May 1921, Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist Government in Canton issued their own anthem. Three years later, delegates to the First National Party Congress unanimously endorsed another new anthem penned by Sun Yat-sen and composed by Cheng Maojun performed as part as a cadet ceremony at the Huangpu Military School June 16, 1924. The anthem remains the national anthem of the Republic of China, Taiwan.

The Bodyguard

2011-01-04T07:33:00.000+08:00

I am assigned to be the emperor's bodyguard. It’s mayhem here these last couple days with the largest fall of snow in years and the attempted assassination on the emperor’s life by a group of palace ladies. They were cut up into bite-size pieces yesterday. A detective is on the case. The emperor’s mind is distracted. His thoughts piled higgledy piggledy in a vast mound.

Waiting for the water to boil, I watch the palace servants make up the emperor’s bed. The son of heaven is next door with his barber. 'My life has become one protracted ceremony', says the son of heaven. 'I’m sick of playing the emperor, weary of all the banquets, and tired of hearing those bells and drums. My doctors keep reminding me the importance of coitus reservatus in prolonging my health and longevity. Everything I do is minutely scrutinized including my sex life.’ All the emperor’s resentments are suddenly being projected on a huge billboard and he is convinced that everyone is in the know about it.

I am bodyguard-cum-retainer-cum-comrade-in-arms. I am also a eunuch. I had my balls cut off by one of the certified cutters in the city in my teens. I was given a narcotic herbal tea and my memory of that morning was that my penis and testicles were numbed using a paste made from hot chili peppers. I do remember the imperial cutter grabbing my genitals and then the wounds bandaged. I was not allowed to drink any liquids for three days.

We eunuchs get a lot of bad press. Most of us are illiterate. Some like me have climbed up the rungs of the imperial ladder to become stewards in the Imperial Household Department. Some of us meddle in politics, others feather their pockets by doing shady deals in antiques, treating the palace like it was their own imperial gift shop. And then there are the pyromaniacs.

Remember the last emperor Pu Yi? He had ordered his eunuchs to make an inventory of antiques in the Palace of Established Happiness, but an audit would reveal that many of the imperial treasures had vanished, sold off to buyers and dealers outside the Forbidden City. Eunuchs burnt the Palace of Established Happiness to the ground. Firefighters from the Italian legation came in to extinguish the flames. A foreign couple who were standing on the roof top of what is today Raffles Hotel witnessed the fire and spirited off to help. When they arrived the last emperor was covered in soot among the cinders trying to salvage his treasures.

Before I became a bodyguard my daily tasks included cleaning chamber pots, and getting up at some ridiculous hour to beat drums in the drum tower. There’s a lot of bullying among us—we are as stratified as the palace women. When we are punished we are usually beaten by a eunuch lower down the ladder. A eunuch that once served his master is now in charge of beating him.

But you know we are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. There was a historian, one of our finest .He offended the emperor and chose castration rather than death. I can understand that having your lower parts tampered with is better than being killed, but this guy argued that his castration could enhance his masculinity by pouring his energies into literary texts. For the emasculated scholar-official, the writing brush, as one contemporary writer puts it ‘was a substitute for the penis.’

Not having a phallus does not make us lesser men or heroes, but if things were different, I’d rather have my brush and my phallus as well.

References

Huang, Martin, W. Negotiating Masculinities in Late Imperial China , Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006: 24.

Menzies, Grant- Hayter. Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, Hong Kong: Hong University Press, 2008:132.

Rawski, Evelyn S. 'Palace Servants, in The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998:162-166.

China's Car of The Year

2010-12-31T07:24:00.000+08:00

I wrote a quite a lot of articles on China's auto industry in 2004 in Beijing. Here is part of a longer article I wrote for an auto research company on China's car of the year.....

Cars are perhaps not as salacious as pop idols or create nationwide hysteria when a new model rolls into a showroom, but the launch of a new car, an Auto Expo or Auto Award can cause auto mania among demanding consumers in China.

The Car of the Year Award in China has become an important barometer on what is hot and what is not in the auto industry. The annual event began in 2002 and has become a permanent fixture of the auto scene. So what are the most popular cars in China? Auto surveys and reports show that the Beijing Hyundai Elantra, the Shanghai GM Excelle and the Guangzhou Honda Accord are among the most popular passenger cars.

According to an article on cn.hubei.com titled ‘Trendy cars Driven by Successful Men’ (May 9 2003), eight cars are listed alongside different types of ‘modern’ Chinese men. Audi is the preferred car driven by successful businessmen. Your rugged, outdoors intrepid Chinese male drives a Cherokee, while Polo is the preferred car driven by white-collar workers.

When choosing a car, Chinese women look not only for ‘trendy colours’, but enough space or special compartments to store an extra pair of shoes, and the versatility of a smaller car like the QQ 0.8 ‘when you have to make a dash to a party or visit friends.’ And what do the stars drive? Xu Fan, a famous movie star and wife of the film director Feng Xiaogang, drives a gleaming white Golf, while the Hong Kong Cantopop singer and actress Kelly Chen drives a Citroën because they are ‘safe and spacious like German cars’.

Silk and Bamboo

2010-12-30T07:47:00.008+08:00

Shanghai, a bridge, a park, a lotus pond, a pavilion. Lovers, couples, children and the elderly stroll past, others sitting on benches. Some exchange the latest gossip or news, while others observe courtships in the making or broken hearts. The wind carries up leaves and fallen willow, marking its course as it sails across the lotus pond. A solitary bird dips its head in the water. Music as the writer Indra Sinha reminds us ‘does not all have to be with strings and bows and pipes, it can also be made by drops of rain or wind cut by a leaf.’

I could tell you that silk and bamboo music is performed on bolts of silk in a bamboo grove or music of bygone dynasties performed by lithesome maidens for the emperor’s pleasure. It is in fact music that comes from the south of the Yangtze River. It is hugely popular in Shanghai but some of the repertory is staple for conservatory-trained musicians around the country. Silk refers to the string instruments that once had silk strings and the bamboo mostly flutes. The music includes percussion instruments, usually played by one musician holding a wooden clapper in his left hand and a drumstick in his right.

This afternoon I’m listening to silk and bamboo performed by a group of men in a pavilion. This is not a concert hall so there are no obligatory silences before or during a piece. Tables are full of tourists, Chinese and foreign, tea attendants running around filling pots of green tea. A piece ends and some of the musicians leave their places while others take their places. Above the constant chatter of voices, I hear the leading instruments, the bamboo flute and two-string spiked fiddle playing florid ornamented melodic lines, at times together, at times anticipated or delayed.

The homogeneous blend of instruments has a striking polyphonic texture with a strong harmonic feeling in the cadences even though I know that its musical architecture has no harmonic foundation. Its embroidered musical textures are what musicologists call heterophony. 'Hetero' means 'other' or 'different' and 'phony,' 'sound.' The texture present in many types of Chinese music, vocal and instrumental, has 'different sounds' or 'different voices,' but it would be more correct to say that there are different instruments performing the same tune at the same time. There are also heterophonic relationships between voice and accompaniment found in regional opera genres as well as Peking opera.

Heterophony in Chinese literally means 'branch-sound polyphony,' and it is often explained as Lawrence Witzleben points out, as 'resembling small branches of a river that continually diverge from the mainstream then return to it.' The branching tributaries analogy is pretty much what goes on when musicians decorate or ornament a melody, 'adding flowers' as it is described in Chinese, then bringing their oars back to join the other rowers. The ornamentations are never the same, and there are variations among performers.

I have always been fascinated by the changes that happen from one rendition to the next that are accepted within the tradition. More difficult to pin down, however, is trying to understand how the physical and mental state of the performer—that is—emotions ranging from happy sad to anxious and indifferent—influence the subtle execution of 'flowers.'

Any explanation will not be simple. Connections between music and mood are so idiosyncratic to make any explanation unsatisfactory. It’s a bit like asking a chef what he added to a dish that has transformed it into a dazzling culinary experience. I have not infrequently spoken to bamboo flute performers in the bamboo and silk tradition after a rendition of a piece and said: ‘I really like the way you added flowers in that piece', which is another way of saying, 'I really liked the way you added melodic ornamentations and used neighbouring passing pitches to create momentary deviation.' Whether it is a chef or a musician, what is made different or changes with each dish or the rendition of piece of music has become thoroughly internalized through years of practice. The intuitive stuff is never easy to pass on.

Variation is such an integral part of silk and bamboo music that transcriptions and published scores need to be handled with care,especially when so much of the spirit and nuances of the music are initially transmitted between teacher and student. The adding of flowers is what brings the tradition to life. It starts in a practice room with a notated score and teacher and incrementally blossoms into intuitive variation.

References:

Lawrence Witzleben Silk and Bamboo in Shanghai: The Jiangnan Sizhu Instrumental Ensemble Tradition, Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995:106.

Membrane Flute Mystery

2010-12-16T08:48:00.014+08:00

At some point in Chinese music history, the idea of boring a hole on a flute between the blow hole and the six finger holes and covering the hole with a membrane became aesthetically valued and desirable. Enter the dizi, a transverse bamboo flute. It’s been around for centuries in China, but we still don’t have ay idea exactly when and where the membrane started.

One of the crumbs of evidence is found in Chapter 148 of a music treatise by Chen Yang, a scholar and theoretician of the northern Song dynasty (960-1127 C.E). This treatise was presented to the throne in 1104. We find reference to an instrument called the seven-star pipe and its maker Liu Xi.

During a trip to Shenyang in China’s northeast province of Liaoning in January 1993, I was able to read the chapter in question, a Qing dynasty handwritten copy housed in the Special Repository Section at the provincial library. There was only threadbare information about the instrument and Liu Xi. While Liu is attributed to single-handedly inventing the instrument, the fact remains that dubious and rather murky figure does not appear in any of the standard musical dictionaries or encyclopedias. Nor do we have the foggiest idea of where Liu was born or when he died.

Chen’s reference suggests to me that he merely recorded what was considered by the northern Song—and by others much earlier—as the popular or accepted account surroundings the origins of the instrument like Hermes in Greek mythology is attributed to inventing a tortoise-shell lyre. If Liu was the brainchild of a membrane flute during the Tang dynasty why is it mentioned some two hundred years after it was allegedly created? Is it possible that musicians and instrument makers at the Jiaofang, a performing arts academy established during the reign of the Tang Emperor Gaozu (r.618-626 C.E.) knew of a membrane flute like the seven-star pipe, but turned a deaf ear to its tone quality because it was not aesthetically pleasing? If so, what does this tell us about Chinese concepts of musical aesthetics during the early Tang?

I have always wanted to turn this organological mystery into a story with a hard-nosed sleuth around the early Tang dynasty and Southeast Asia as the setting. A young Chinese detective from China is called in to solve the membrane mystery and in the course of his investigations finds himself caught in a web of murder and international intrigue. But that would certainly be crossing the lines of fact and fiction.

Let me explain what we do have. We do have our aforementioned textual reference—Chen Yang’s music treatise, and we do know there are other membrane hole flutes found in parts of southeast Asia which cropped up around the sixth century and earlier. The taegum, for instance, a large transverse flute from Korea, was one of the three major flutes of the Unified Silla Period (688-935 C.E.), and an important instrument in folk and court traditions and many shaman ensembles. The instrument has six fingerholes and corresponds in structure to two other flutes of the Silla Period, the medium-sized chunggum and sorgum. Unlike the membrane on the dizi, the membrane on the taegum is protected by a metal plate 'laced to the instrument with leather thongs.'

We can also map membrane-hole flutes from Vietnam, the transverse cai on dic, the internal-duct vertical flute cai sao, and from China the wenbeng from southwest Yunnan province, the tongxiao of the Korean nationality in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces in China’s northeast and the limbe found across regions of Mongolia, and Qinghai in China’s northwest. In Okinawa, there is also a membrane-hole transverse flute which is known under at least four names.

There are also flutes found in East Asia that have membranes not applied to cover a hole but are exposed. The zhumoguan found among the Dong in China is an end-blown flute with no fingerholes. A strip of bamboo one-sixth the length of the pipe is cut and scraped away to expose a bamboo membrane. Among the indigenous aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, the modi similar to the zhumoguan among the Dong in China in that it also has an exposed membrane, is used by hunters to lure and capture wild deer.

Our organological map highlights cultural diffusion, migrating populations, artifacts, customs, ideas, techniques, political factors and so on. The tributary system which began as early as the Han dynasty in China played a crucial role in cultural diffusion as it was soon adopted by neighbouring countries like Japan, Korea, Burma and Thailand. We know that when the Japanese decided not to send any more envoys and missions to China in 894 C.E, the membrane had not become and indelible feature of transverse flutes used in court music in the imperial capital in Chang’an (present-day Xi’an).

The mystery hinges on one major question: Did the membrane originate independently in China around the sixth century or was it introduced to China from one of its southeast neighbours or among its ethnic peoples? Several Chinese musical instruments came to China via its northwestern border like the pipa, konghou and huqin, but what of a membrane-hole flute? There are no examples of such flutes found in Central Asia or India, and such a lead, while worthy of further investigation is in my view, highly dubious.

The rest is speculation until we have more tangible leads. And there will be many broken tiles to complete this mosaic puzzle.

Rockin’ the Stage

2010-12-07T07:53:00.004+08:00

On a hot summer’s evening on March 1990 a large group of students gathered outside the Eastern Lake Hotel in Wuhan demanding to see their rock idol Cui Jian. The hotel had once been a regular haunt and secluded meeting place for some of China’s most famous Party luminaries. Now it had another star. As Cui Jian sat in his hotel room, exhausted after performing to a capacity crowd at the Hongshan Sports Stadium, the stifling heat suffocated the city.

Cui Jian was the defiant pin-up boy who exploits were acted out not in the Jade Emperor’s peach garden or among the denizens of a deep like the Monkey King, but at venues in Beijing and across the country. He was the guy who triggered off rock music in the mid eighties or at least launched rockets to propel the movement further.

Rock was an animal that didn’t exist at the time. The West had done it, or it had up to date done so in an orderly fashion since the 1950s. It was now time for China. Cui Jian’s ‘I Have Nothing’ came out in 1986 and the rest, as they say, was history. Bands started appearing like birds released from their cages, voices that had been locked up far too long and wanting to be free: China Power, Brother, White Angel, Fly, Toto, Da, Da, Da, Acupuncture, and 43 Baojia Street, the home of the Central Conservatory of Music. I don’t call them imitators; Chinese rockers delighted in subverting the genre and making their own.

Some rockers were professional musicians like the band 43 Baojia Street, transferring their skills to Western instruments. Cui Jian had played the trumpet since he was a kid and had also played with the Central Symphony Orchestra. Cui, I imagine was bored shitless just playing trumpet and like many of his music friends was ready for change.

A torrential downpour of popular music genres from the West rained down on China’s youth thanks to what today might seem like antiquated technology, the humble cassette tape. Foreign expats, tourists, businesspeople, Chinese returning home all played their part in getting the music to China. It was now up to cassette tape recorders and the airways to disseminate it.

In 1986 in the provincial city of Shenyang in northeast China, Lionel Richie was crooning ‘Hello’ through speakers in a park that was the burial grounds of a Manchu emperor and his empress. I have no idea how the park authorities got hold of a Lionel Richie tape, but a foreign student at Liaoning University had apparently met someone who worked at the park and had passed on a copy of the song. It was also at the same time that China’s economy was getting ready for a growing consumer market and record companies in Hong Kong and Taiwan saw the enormous potential for popular music, including rock that would return them profit and prestige.

Rock music has always worn the 'anti-badge', but no matter how we want to talk of rock music’s deviance—the bad boy or bad girl—it’s still part of what it projects to beat up or move away from. Rock music in China obviously created a space for alternative voices like anywhere, but live public performances of rock music have always been 'sensitive,' especially if you were someone like Cui Jian. One summer’s evening in a jazz bar in Beijing, the authorities decided to gag the rock icon: he could play the trumpet but not sing.

More than once I have found myself in a run-down warehouse in the capital listening to rock and grunge bands finely alchemizing the technique, the group precision. These are musicians who spend many hours a day honing their musical craft. They practice, they rehearse, knowing full well that there are little if any financial rewards. But that doesn't hold them back. There's a collective raw energy that binds them, a devotion not to persuade an audience and a larger community of spirits but to connect. Timothy Rice’s influential model of ‘how do people historically construct, socially maintain and individually create and experience music’ is equally valid here in these warehouses as any other music.

Many years ago I went to a punk rock concert in the capital with an American businessman who had an extensive vocabulary of Beijing’s foul language. The lead vocalist was the punk-rocker He Yong. Going around my head after the concert were words from his song ‘Garbage Dump’:

This world we live in is like a garbage dump

The people are like insects.

Everyone’s struggling and stealing

We eat our conscience

And shit ideology.

During the performance of the song I was watching all the other non-verbal phenomena going on stage and the interaction between the audience and the band. The audience helped shaped the song expressing their own opinions with shouts and applause, punctuated all the while by pulsating rhythms, electric guitar distortions and all the other bits and pieces suggested by the instruments.

It was pouring outside, the sound of rain lashing against a long line of parked cars. I was lucky to get a taxi. The driver was playing a CD of the Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng. I was now light years away, musically, from what I had experienced that evening. I had moved across the popular music grid as effortlessly as Clark Kent darts into a phone booth and comes out as Superman.