I don’t know how often sinologists, or other bibliophiles, overhaul their groaning shelves, but it’s been a delight to reorganise my Chinese library over the last year—part of a thorough decluttering of all my Worldly Goods as the entire house is renovated.

• First, I resolved to slim down the collection, radically—a process which itself took several months. This, of course, involves deciding which books and recordings I am actually likely to refer to ever again, and which I might possibly seek one day for a reference…
• Then I found Good Homes for many of the volumes and recordings with which I could bear to part—one main recipient being the CHIME library in Heidelberg.
• Then, along with all the other aforementioned Worldly Goods, I put everything into storage for six months.
• Next, with a brilliant team, devising a loft (now a generous space) that would take the remaining material (China books in English, including religion, anthropology, and literature, mostly belonging on the ground floor).
• Then—at last!—unpacking all the heavy boxes and adorning the loft.

So what for forty years had steadily grown into a random, grimy accumulation of books, journals, * offprints, fieldnotes and fieldtapes, instruments, CDs and DVDs, spread over various rooms, has now become a compact shrine that reflects the enchantment of doing fieldwork in China since 1986, including precious volumes from the Maoist era, along with a modest selection of meaningful artefacts. Far more than a dry repository of arcane academic material, it’s become a tribute to generations of Chinese peasants and scholars, along with the whole history of fieldwork in the PRC.

Although I have no illusions of doing further fieldwork in China (both out of decrepitude and as a futile moral stance against worsening repression), my three decades studying there make an enduring perspective on my whole worldview, and I will continue to reflect on their significance, in both Chinese and global contexts.

left, 1956 facsimile of 1425 Shenqi mipu tablature for qin zither;
right, Yang Yinliu‘s report from 1956 Hunan field survey.

With many books double-parked yet still accessible (and a multitude of loose documents neatly stored in brightly-coloured box-files on another wall!), the classification goes something like this:

• Ritual and fieldwork (interspersed with volumes of the great Anthology):
  • Beijing and Tianjin temples, ritual associations on the Hebei plain
  • Shanxi, Shaanxi: Daoists, shawm bands
  • The Jiangnan region: Daoists, silk-and-bamboo…
  • South China (Fujian, Taiwan, Guangdong)
  • Ethnic minorities, notably Tibetan and Uyghur cultures

• a little collection (again pared down) on the qin zither (see e.g. here, here), and
• general surveys, encyclopedias, early history, and so on

—all tastefully adorned with posters from tours with the Li family Daoists, one of their exquisite sheng mouth-organs (made by Gao Yong), the lovely little folding stool that Li Manshan made in the late 1960s; shadow puppets, god statuettes from Fujian, gifts of calligraphy, fieldwork photos… 

My fetish for taxonomy is reflected in several posts (starting here, with links to the joys of indexing and the Sachs-Hornbostel system…). The loft is just one locus for taxonomy—where do table mats and salad bowls belong, for instance (or, more ambitiously, All Things Bright and Beautiful)?!

Renovating the whole decrepit little house has been a gruelling but hugely rewarding project. The result is just exhilarating. As to the loft, it’s far from a mere cosmetic exercise: sure, I’ve managed amidst chaos for forty years, but a conducive environment creates headspace—heartspace—for focused thought. So the new Chinese studio is now a tranquil haven that I, and perhaps visitors too, can relish—to sit, browse, study, relax, play violin or even erhu…

京西微玄觀內碧雲罐庵
Priory of Azure Cloud Bottle within Belvedere of Tenuous Obscurity

* I had a substantial collection of the major PRC musicology journals for c1980 to 2000, largely superfluous as they became available online—at least until CNKI toed the Party line of closing China off to the world again. Anyway, by now personal libraries should be increasingly manageable, with many books also available as pdfs. Still, without rigorous self-control, collections tend to expand…