Berthold Laufer (left), Hankou c1904. Source here.

Wonderfully, the Indiana Archives of Traditional Music has now made available the Berthold Laufer China Collection of 385 wax cylinder recordings that Laufer made in Shanghai and Beijing in 1901 and 1902—in the wake of the Boxer uprising, as the collapse of the Qing dynasty was bringing two millennia of imperial rule to an end.

To explore the recordings, click here
(the link may take some time to respond)

The anthropologist Berthold Laufer (1874–1934) led the 1901–1904 Jacob H. Schiff expedition to China, also making a comprehensive ethnographic collection of objects used in daily life, agriculture, folk religion, medicine, crafts, and puppetry, including costumes and musical instruments.

The first 211 tracks in the collection were recorded in Shanghai (including many arias from Beijing opera, in chamber qingchang 清唱 form), tracks 212–385 in Beijing—the latter including drum singing such as Xihe dagu, Meihua dagu, and danxian. For more, see

• Hartmut Walravens, “Popular Chinese music a century ago: Berthold Laufer’s legacy”, Fontes Artis Musicae 47.4 (2000)
• articles by Laurel Kendall.

Of course, Laufer’s precious recordings are far from a general survey of musicking in late imperial China. Still, it would be most churlish of me to lament that he didn’t record other soundscapes such as temple and folk ritual…

For posts on Qing court music, click here; for rare moving images of religious life in 1930s’ Fujian, here; for archive recordings from before and since the Cultural Revolution, here.