ISHAM COOK CHINA

As I wrote in a previous essay, Music and totalitarianism, rock music has an unenviable history in China. Western popular music was banned for almost four decades after 1949, and today rock and pop music both domestic and international continue to be strictly controlled in terms of what lyrics bands are permitted to sing and publish and who can perform where. Not only is the overtly political forbidden, but anything evocative of youth discontent—rock music’s raison d’être—is risky, particularly if it references youth as a whole rather than the individual, anything suggesting the younger generation has been let down by the Party. As a result, Chinese rock-music lyrics tend to be as benign, and banal, as those of Chinese pop music. Rock acts from abroad have only been invited to perform after strict vetting. Those who violated Chinese Government injunctions with their support for Tibetan independence or other taboo flashpoints (Björk in 2008, Oasis in 2009, Elton John in 2012, among others) earned bans or made things difficult for subsequent invitees. As for Chinese pop music, it has long been a challenge to sort out the wheat from the chaff—the few singer-songwriters of genuine individuality and talent, not to mention daring, amidst the unending blight of assembly-line clones.

The varying signs of progress and contradictions in Chinese society’s grudging acceptance of rock and pop music in the decades since these musical genres have been allowed, serve as a barometer of the country’s emergence into a more mature cultural relationship to the world.

In what follows, I will make the case that it is actually the Western classical music scene in China that is more revealing of the country’s changes than the rock and pop scenes. What could classical music possibly inform us? Rock music produces strong, spontaneous reactions from audiences—and in inflammatory cases, from the Chinese Government itself. Classical music seems to elicit only polite applause behind its staid scrim of genteel respectability. It is also scandal-proof against political provocation (well, not completely, as we shall see). Contrary to this stereotyped view, however, Chinese audience reactions to classical music are in fact highly telling, in subtle and not-so-subtle, indeed bewildering ways. Also important for understanding classical music’s place in Chinese society are the sheer quantity and quality of purpose-built concert halls, the huge administrative apparatus bringing music to these venues, and professional training opportunities for gifted musicians. All paint a lively, burgeoning picture of classical music in China.

My own angle on this topic derives from over thirty years of attending concerts in the country, mostly in Beijing. I divide this span of time into three periods, very roughly corresponding to the leadership eras of Jiang Zemin (1993–2003), Hu Jintao (2003-13), and Xi Jinping (2013-present).

PERIOD 1 (1990-99): INCOMPREHENSION

In the nineties, people lived in cramped apartments with fluorescent-tube lighting and bare concrete flooring in five- or six-story walk-up tenements. Restaurants resembled apartments and were indistinguishable from one another. Apart from five-star hotel lobbies open only to their foreign guests and prostitutes with connections, there were no teahouses or coffeehouses, until they started cropping up later in the decade (China’s first Starbucks opened in Beijing in 1998). The few bars that existed were either pseudo-ritzy karaoke brothels for businessmen or informal brothel “cafés.” Young couples had sex in park bushes at night, as there were few other options for privacy. Most people could not afford a computer. They communicated with pagers, which were called beepers. People were only beginning to get driver’s licenses (usually under-the-table with no need for a driving test) and buy joint-venture manufactured cars, and bicycles still dominated the streets. There were few foreigners, and corruption was rampant.

It was also in this decade that old concert halls were being renovated and a few new ones constructed. In 1995 I attended my first classical concert in the country, at the 1,713-seat Century Theatre (built in 1990) in Beijing’s Chaoyang District, where the international business scene was then budding. Across the concert hall on Liangmaqiao Road was a row of makeshift restaurants where one could eat before the concert. There were few places to hang out after the concert, though the nearby Kempinski Hotel had recently opened the Paulaner Brewery, Beijing’s first German-style, genuine craft-beer restaurant.

On the program was Gustav Mahler’s epic Second Symphony, performed by the China National Symphony Orchestra under the baton of American Gilbert Kaplan. At the time, I had never heard of Kaplan. Later I saw some less-than-flattering news articles about him. A wealthy businessman with no professional classical training, he possessed a fervent, obsessive passion for this particular work (he owned the autograph manuscript of the score) and conducted it exclusively and relentlessly, eventually notching up over 100 live performances and two recordings, with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. The view among classical critics was that he conducted stiffly and had financially inveigled his way into the privilege of conducting major orchestras.

The idea that a conductor could conduct only a single work by a single composer throughout his entire career was indeed extremely weird. It’s insulting to classical music, which is breathtaking in its variety. Mahler’s Second is a great symphony but so are other symphonies by Mahler, not to mention innumerable symphonies by other composers.

At the time, anyway, it was nice to see a live performance of the work, with its massive chorus and earth-shaking brass, in culture-starved Beijing, though it was hard to gauge how the audience took in the piece. Few had likely heard a recording of it or even knew who Mahler was. It was fairly well attended but the front rows were empty. They were typically assigned to company work units as gifts to hand out to their employees, again with little likelihood anyone involved had the slightest notion of what sort of event it was and thus saw no reason to attend. After all, the country still had little acquaintance with classical music. In parks in the city in those years, loudspeakers blasted out Richard Clayderman piano pieces—saccharine, easy-listening arpeggios vaguely reminiscent of Schubert and Chopin—and people told me they thought Clayderman was Western classical music. At the concert’s end, the audience clapped politely but listlessly before immediately dispersing. There was no concept of meaningful clapping, to say nothing of the standing ovation or encores.

Many of those attending the Mahler concert were old enough to have gone through the Cultural Revolution, when all of Western music was banned and only eight Chinese “model operas” were played, over and over, in factory workplaces (private radios weren’t permitted). Western classical music in fact has a long history in China, going back to Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci’s gift of a clavichord to the Wanli Emperor in 1601, but had been systematically wiped out in modern times for a whole generation of Chinese. Here is not the space to go over this history, which has been comprehensively and beautifully covered in Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai’s Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese (Algora, 2004).

Yet the tide was starting to turn and interest was mounting. One shop in Beijing selling music CDs and cassettes had a respectable beginners’ selection of classical music. An image is frozen in my mind of an attractive young female who was pouring over some cassettes by J. S. Bach behind the glass cases in which shops at the time displayed their goods.

You may have heard of the documentary From Mao to Mozart, about violinist Isaac Stern’s 1979 visit to Beijing’s Central Conservatory of Music and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, soon after the country’s opening up under Deng Xiaoping, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1981 (available on YouTube). In the follow-up documentary, From Mao to Mozart – Isaac Stern returns to China, 20 years later (2000), Stern gives masterclasses to three string quartets, a piano trio, and an orchestra at the Central Conservatory of Music, during preparations for the 2nd Beijing Music Festival in 1999. The musicians are not named (except for several soloists who appeared in both documentaries), other than being “students from the Central Conservatory.” In fact, the quartet Stern is seen coaching at the start of the film is the Tangula Quartet from the Shanghai Conservatory, two males and two females, all nineteen years old. I know this because I saw them perform at the festival at the Jinfan Concert Hall. This was my first chamber music concert by a Chinese ensemble, and I was a bit worried about being disappointed. On the program were quartets by Haydn, Brahms, and Ravel—serious stuff.

One reason the concert has stuck in my memory—I won’t deny it—is that the two females, second violinist Hou Ye and cellist Jin Jie, were ravishing in their body-hugging black qipaos. All four seemed considerably more relaxed than they had appeared in the documentary, with the camera and Isaac Stern, friendly though he was, no longer hovering over them. The other reason is that they sailed through the three works with expertise and elan. I was blown away. They also didn’t seem in the least perturbed that the audience, acting as if they were there by mistake, hesitantly then inexorably, emptied the hall in the midst of the performance. Now I was appalled. Just a few people held out till the end, feeling sorry for the quartet perhaps, and even they only pretended to clap, their limp hands making no sound, before they filed out. The musicians didn’t act perturbed because they knew China wasn’t ready for chamber music: why go see a couple of string players when you could see a whole orchestra!

Melvin and Cai in Rhapsody in Red relate a similar reception in Guangzhou, also in 1999:

Because the concert was given by the renowned Julliard String Quartet, it drew a large crowd, most of whom had evidently never before attended a chamber concert and many of whom clearly did not often attend classical concerts of any sort. It got off to a bad start when late-arriving audience members forced their way into the concert hall after the performance had started and then climbed over seats to get to the best ones. The situation quickly went downhill when “the entire audience dispersed after the first work, interpreting the brief break as an intermission.” The Julliard musicians were so upset by the audience’s departure that “they argued among themselves as to whether the concert should go on.” They decided to continue, but “during the second half of the program, Smetana’s From My Life quartet, the performance was halted by a beeper in the audience. The musicians were willing to finish only after order was restored.”

Another chamber performance I attended a year or two later by members of the Central Conservatory was confronted with the same audience incomprehension. They were better prepared, or at least they thought so, giving little lectures about each piece—several Mozart piano trios—before performing them. Nevertheless, at the end of the evening, when the audience was invited to air their impressions, two women stood up, one after the other, and angrily expressed their disappointment that the musicians hadn’t played music they were already familiar with. What Mozart music were they familiar with, I wondered, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik? Or was it Richard Clayderman they were referring to?

PERIOD 2 (2000-6): ENTHUSIASM

At the turn of the century, residential housing and restaurants began to discover decor, garish, faux-rococo and mass-produced, with no idea of individual taste. Teahouses and bars open 24/7 had private rooms where couples could have discreet sex, though from 2003 hotels began allowing unmarried couples to room together for the first time. Coffeehouses were sprouting up like mushrooms, with the country’s newfound interest in coffee (there were even fake Starbucks). Everyone now had a personal computer and a Nokia or a hinged Samsung cellphone. Massive traffic jams occurred at intersections since drivers were only reluctantly getting used to the idea that they could get to their destination faster by obeying traffic lights. Car exhaust and rising factory production led to serious air pollution. The foreigner populations exploded in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, both tourists and those on legit or shady working or business visas.

Recalling its glory days in the International Settlement and French Concession in the 1920s-30s, classical music was finally gathering force in Shanghai, with the 1998 opening of the 1,631-seat Shanghai Grand Theatre. While Beijing was razing whole neighborhoods of hutongs to make way for high-rise developments and imposing office buildings, three new concert halls popped up that changed the equation for the city’s classical music scene. The Beijing Concert Hall, originally the Central Cinema built in 1927, officially opened for classical music in 1986, but it was not until its 2004 renovation that this 1,024-seat gem of a hall started attracting audiences with its discerning programming.

A twenty-minute walk away via Tiananmen Square was the 1,419-seat Forbidden City Concert Hall, originally built by the Japanese in 1942 but renovated not until 1999. There in 2001, I saw Tang Muhai conduct a concert version of Pietro Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana with the China Symphony Orchestra to stunning, roaring applause. Overnight, it seemed, the Chinese had learned how to applaud not only properly but passionately.

The Forbidden City Concert Hall also boasted superb acoustics. Wherever you sat, you could pick out the individual instruments with intimate clarity, as if they were poised in different positions in space just in front of you. The only other concert hall where I recall similarly remarkable sonic imaging was the 3,800-seat Louis Sullivan Auditorium in Chicago, built in 1886. The modern science of acoustics is now employed wherever new concert halls are built. There must be countless other venues with equally superb acoustics I haven’t had the opportunity to experience myself, apart from the newly minted concert hall of the Beijing Performing Arts Centre (to be returned to below). Fine acoustics couldn’t come soon enough. Peking Opera, which I also frequently attended, seemed to still be using Soviet-era entertainment technology. Whatever the venue, screechy loudspeakers amplified the singers so painfully that I had to stuff balls of tissue in my ears, if I didn’t walk out first.

But it was a curious incident at a performance I attended in 2004 at the 1,428-seat Poly Theatre (built in 1991 and renovated in 2001) that suggested audience appreciation was improving by leaps and bounds. The concert hall, which doubled as an opera house, was the new home of the annual Beijing Music Festival. Back in 1999, I had met a Chinese woman in the personals section of an English-language magazine (when we still used magazines to meet people), who was seeking an Italian man interested in classical music. As an American, I only fit half the bill, but she agreed to meet and we soon became friends. She happened to be a key liaison person for the Beijing Music Festival. Her job was to escort bigwig musicians flown in to perform at the festival and dole out free tickets to everyone she knew. And so I became a regular attendee.

The ad for one upcoming concert, entitled simply “L’Orfeo,” with no other information, caught my attention. They still needed to work on nailing down the identity of composers, so paramount in Western classical music. In Chinese classical music, traditionally passed down orally, composers were anonymous and long forgotten; only the names of works survived. Moreover, there was little historical sense among Western classical fans in China, no understanding of the different musical periods (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.). Apart from the late-Baroque composers Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, Early Music (the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras) was beyond the pale. I couldn’t believe they were performing Claudio Monteverdi’s opera, composed in 1607, the first opera and a milestone in the history of Western music. It wasn’t until I received the program notes at the concert that I could find out who the musicians were: the renowned New London Consort under Philip Pickett (who sadly in 2015 was convicted of rape and sentenced to eleven years in prison).

Outside the hall after the opera, which needless to say was outstanding, an excited man came running up to my Chinese female companion, chosen at random, telling her, “Miss, do you have any idea how extraordinary this concert was? You will probably never see a performance of this caliber in China again!” He seemed not to have known anything about Monteverdi but was receptive enough that the force of the music and the quality of the performance hit him like a bombshell.

In other Beijing Music Festival highlights, the world premiere of contemporary American composer Philip Glass’s Cello Concerto was held in October of 2001, with cellist Julian Lloyd Webber (Glass himself decided not to attend over fears of flying in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks). 2005 saw the first complete cycle in China of Richard Wagner’s four-opera Ring, conducted by Philippe Auguin with the Nuremberg Philharmonic Orchestra. In another first, German conductor Klaus Weise in 2007 delivered a concert version of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde with the China Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2008, the Poly Theatre staged Wagner’s Tannhäuser, under Peter Schneider and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. The foreign female dancers in the bacchanalian Venusberg scene were, appropriately, topless. This was probably the first and only occasion in China where bare breasts were allowed in an artistic performance; it’s unclear whether this had been cleared with the authorities or was sprung on them. No one in the audience, including myself, seemed to mind (nude dancers in opera are not uncommon in Europe and North America). But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we jump into Period 3, I have another anecdote.

In 2005 I attended a master class at the Central Conservatory by the Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelić, a favorite pianist of mine whose albums I had collected for years. A graduate student pianist, Gong Jing, was chosen to perform Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, an unimaginative if understandable choice for someone wishing to display his prowess. Tall, devilishly handsome Pogorelić, wearing an embroidered kufi, strolled in. He moved with a deliberate grace, proceeding to open the window and announcing in his deep resonant voice that fresh air was needed in the stuffy room. He sat politely with us in the audience during the student’s rather mechanical but proficient-enough performance, marking up his copy of the score at various points. At the end, he only made one select point for everyone’s benefit but made it thoroughly. He stood behind the pianist and with his hands on his shoulders, showed him how to sit with a posture that channeled natural strength through the body and arms rather than attacking the keyboard solely with the hands. Pogorelić sat down at the piano and a sonorous chord materialized at his slightest touch. Then it was time for a more detailed critique in private. He had a kindly expression on his face as he slowly followed the nervous pianist into another room.

I saw Pogorelić perform a few days later at the 8th Beijing Music Festival. The key work on the program was Robert Schumann’s dense, knotty Fantasie in C. His torso writhed and crawled over the piano like a strange animal, occasionally looking up into the distance with his dreamy eyes. It was a powerful display.

PERIOD 3 (2007-present): SOPHISTICATION

The Chinese are dressing better, with more style and taste, bringing out their individuality. Less exclusively obsessed with money due to rising living standards, they are becoming friendlier and more personable. Tea and coffeehouses are increasingly elegant and comfortable, lavishly but tastefully decored. In 2007, the director of the State Food and Drug Administration is executed for corruption involving adulterated food products to send a message. This is nonetheless followed by the 2008 melamine scandal, a fake protein substitute in baby formula that sent 54,000 infants to the hospitable. Meanwhile, the 2008 Beijing Olympics is brought off to acclaim. City metro and high-speed railway systems are rapidly expanding. Just about everyone has an iPhone, but Huawei will soon be a serious competitor. Air pollution is hitting crisis levels, and the government is finally acknowledging the problem and cleaning up the tourist cities. The Chinese are traveling abroad in record numbers and bringing back luxury goods—and new ways of thinking. Beijing’s brewpubs and the classier pizza joints, many run by foreigners, are as good as anywhere in the world. Video surveillance cameras eerily proliferate in every street and public building, but it’s accompanied by a noticeable drop in crime.

China is already a contender for world-class concert and opera halls. Ground was broken in 2001 for the mammoth National Centre of the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing (1,859-seat concert hall, 1,035-seat opera house, and 556-seat theater), designed by French architect Paul Andreu, which opened in 2007, and in 2005 for the magnificent 1,804-seat Guangzhou Opera House, designed by perhaps the most famous architect in the world at the time, Zaha Hadid, opened in 2010. With the country’s penchant for grandiose vanity projects, great displays of form without content, I was concerned the spectacular NCPA was just for show and no one would be bothered to actually manage the place and set up a stable repertoire of programs and concerts.

I’m proven wrong. A gleaming titanium bubble sitting on an artificial pond, the “egg” is entered through an underground tunnel beneath the water and opens into a vast wood-paneled atrium enclosing the concert hall, opera house, and theater in a single glance. There is an extensive shop selling books and classical CDs and a couple cafés serving sandwiches, palatable coffee, and wine (a strict policy forbids smuggling in one’s own food). The performances are numerous and first class. To list just a few among the many I attended: Bernard Haitink conducting the Haydn 101st, Bruckner Seventh, and Mahler Sixth with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2009, the Old Vic Theatre from the UK staging Shakespeare’s Richard III in 2011, and the NCPA’s own production of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, directed by Giancarlo Del Monaco in 2012-13, with the NCPA Orchestra. Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki were frequent guests, the latter conducting his own and other works.

Even more adventurous offerings were taking place at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, which had been cooperating with various embassies to bring in exotic troupes to educate the Chinese public on Early Music. I attended, among other concerts, the French ensemble Le Poème Harmonique in 2009 and the Canadian ensemble Les Voix Humaines in 2015, both performing music of the French Early Baroque. At the latter concert, the bass viola da gamba player had left her instrument on the stage during intermission. A couple young ladies, possibly classical-music students, came up to examine the unusual instrument, superficially resembling a cello but with a fretted fingerboard and five to seven rather than four strings—a cross between a cello and a guitar (the viola da gamba and the guitar have a common ancestor in the fifteenth-century vihuela). The viol family predominated in the Renaissance and Baroque until superseded by the violin family in the Classical era.

Today many troupes specialize in Early Music, and countless high-quality recordings are available that unveil the beauty of original instruments (see my John Dowland and the lost English Consort School of chamber music). Incidentally, the Chinese manufacture viols and other ancient Western instruments to the highest standards and at lower prices than in Europe. Markku Luolajan-Mikkola of the Germany-based viol consort Phantasm plays a Chinese-made bass viola da gamba, for example (confirmed through an email exchange I had with the group’s founder Laurence Dreyfus).

It all came crashing down in January 2020 when Covid-19 hit. All public performances throughout the country were halted for the first year or so, before various provincial governments slowly allowed them back once the virus was under control. But everyone at classical concerts was required to wear a face mask, and I had no desire to sit through several hours of music with the hot encumbrance on my face. I had also moved to Ningbo for employment, a big city on China’s coast but a classical-music backwater. I wasn’t able to attend a proper concert again until 2025, Tristan und Isolde at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, a co-production of the Shanghai Opera House Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. I was pleased to note that the seats remained filled for the entire five-hour performance. Audience attrition in Wagner operas can be a problem even in the West.

Back in Beijing for a visit in mid-2026, my excitement returned at the prospect of a concert at the spanking new Beijing Performing Arts Centre, unveiled in 2023 in the suburb of Tongzhou thirty kilometers to the east, a “small” city in its own right (pop. 1,850,000), where the municipal government is in the process of moving most of its operations to reduce congestion in Beijing. To persuade people to move there, the government spruced up the Grand Canal scenic area, built a museum devoted to the historic canal and nearby, the stunning new Beijing City Library as well. The Performing Arts Centre is a huge continuous structure devised by a team of foreign and Chinese architects, housing a 1,600-seat concert hall, a 1,000-seat opera house, and a 500-seat theater—in scale only slightly smaller than the NCPA.

It was a marathon Brahms concert of all three of his piano quartets by the Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet. The three quartets are substantial works and seldom executed in one sitting; it’s the equivalent of an orchestra doing three Brahms symphonies in a row. The audience was as quiet as in a library, with nary a cough, and gave the musicians a standing ovation at the end. The cellist thanked the audience for their patience over the “long evening.” For an encore, they played a movement from a Schumann piano quartet, adding an historical aside that an admiring Brahms had visited Schumann as a young man to learn his compositional secrets. The acoustics in the concert hall were excellent, though as I was up front in the eighth row, the instruments were merely loud and clear; I would have needed to sit farther back to ascertain the quality of the house’s sonic imaging.

CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE

John Adams, whom I believe to be the second preeminent contemporary American composer, after Philip Glass, turned President Nixon’s ground-breaking 1972 visit to China into an opera, Nixon in China, composed in 1984. It’s an odd subject for an opera, but he succeeded and the work is performed around the world in the more adventurous opera houses. Despite being a great opera musically speaking, I fear it may never be performed in the People’s Republic, at least in the near future, not due to anything particularly objectionable in the opera’s content—it paints largely sympathetic and humane portraits of both Nixon and Mao—but the subject matter is too recent in Chinese history to allow anyone to comment on the Mao era outside the official narrative. It doesn’t matter how pro-Chinese or pro-Mao the opera is; the very attempt to provide an individual perspective on this history is in the Chinese Government perspective simply taboo.

The government is certainly aware of the work. A China Daily article back in 2011 (now evidently suppressed) raised the possibility of getting it performed in China. American blogger Cathy Barbash gathered everything she could on the controversy and cites a Chinese commenter familiar with the opera, “My god, this period of history. Old U.S. knows it more deeply than we do” (Nixon in China but Not (Yet) Hong Kong). Another China Daily article that came out the same year (and may have replaced the earlier article), in classic Chinese news media fashion, reviewed the premiere performance of Adams’ “masterpiece” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, without once making the obvious connection to the possibility of a performance in China (Met celebrates Nixon in China). The mere appearance of this article was nonetheless a tacit acknowledgment that it’s on some government back burner, if a distant one.

Western classical music in China has come a long way since the Cultural Revolution, when Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, caused an enormous headache for Eugene Ormandy of the Philadelphia Orchestra, upon arriving in Beijing for their momentous 1973 concert at the Great Hall of the People, following upon Nixon’s visit. She didn’t want Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to be on the program, already scheduled and rehearsed, since it was about “fatalism.” She proposed the Sixth Symphony instead on the grounds it was about nature and the countryside, though her lackeys protested it was really about rural folk’s bondage to landlords and the feudal class and was thus as unacceptable as the Fifth. More problematically, the orchestra lacked the scores for the Sixth. They were dredged up from conservatory storage somewhere and quickly provided. In the end a compromise was reached and both symphonies were performed.

I mention the Nixon in China conundrum because it’s a synecdoche for the entire repertoire of Western classical music permitted in China today. While countless works have been aired in the media and performed on the nation’s stages, we don’t know how many more have not been allowed for one inscrutable reason or another.

In such an atmosphere, it’s understandable why China’s greatest living composer, Tan Dun, emigrated to the U.S. in 1986, where he has since flourished (see my Philip Glass and Tan Dun). He has been allowed to return to his homeland on plenty of occasions to perform his works. It is interesting, however, that his opera, The First Emperor, which received its world premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006, has not yet been performed in China (though a symphonic version was given in Xi’an in 2023). Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BCE), China’s first emperor, is generally remembered fondly for unifying the country but was also infamous for burying 460 scholars alive for possessing banned books. I can’t help but sense that this historical association over two millennia ago is behind the refusal to stage this opera today. Let’s hope and see if I’m proven wrong.

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Other posts in this series:
Insights into China, Part 1: A walk down the street
Insights into China, Part 2: A meal in a restaurant
Insights into China, Part 3: A stay in a hotel
Insights into China, Part 4: A visit to the library
Insights into China, Part 5: An invitation to a party
Insights into China, Part 6: An afternoon in a café
Insights into China, Part 7: A glimpse inside a school
Insights into China, Part 8: An immersion in a museum
Insights into China, Part 9: A journey to the hinterland

Also by Isham Cook:

THE TAO OF POISON
“The bold characters, kinetic plot, and rich sense of atmosphere make this epic tale a studied contemplation of how beauty can usher in tragedy and sorrow.” — BookLife Reviews by Publishers Weekly