In Beijing after the 1949 “Liberation”, the Music Research Institute (MRI) of the China Academy of Arts was headed by the great Yang Yinliu (1899–1984). From the early 1980s, as the Maoist era gave way to the liberalisations of the early years of reform, Qiao Jianzhong 乔建中 made a worthy successor to Yang’s enlightened leadership, steering the MRI wisely through a new phase.

With Qiao Jianzhong (right) and Huang Xiangpeng, MRI 1989.

Soon after arriving in China in 1986 I was adopted by the MRI, finding Lao Qiao 老乔, as he was known, endlessly supportive as I mined the rich archives (helped by gentle library assistant Li Wenru) and arranged fieldtrips. Those of us who recall the old MRI at Zuojiazhuang are most nostalgic for its dilapidated corridors. The extraordinary energy of scholarship there through the troubled times of the 1950s still animated the building—perpetuated by seniors like the great Yuan Quanyou, unassumingly labouring to produce major anthologies of Chinese music iconography, and Wang Di, successor to the qin master Guan Pinghu. The MRI became my home base, from where I made forays to the countryside to learn the basics of fieldwork under the guidance of Qiao Jianzhong and his talented protégés.

A voluminous anthology of Qiao Jianzhong’s lifelong work has just been published:

• Qiao Jianzhong wenji 乔建中文集 [Collected writings of Qiao Jianzhong] (2023, 10 volumes),

providing yet another opportunity to admire the fruits of fieldwork and research since the 1980s’ reforms. Here I can do no more than list some of the articles that have captured my attention so far. Qiao’s own reflections on his lifetime of study are found in vol.1, pp.31–53 and vol.5, pp.440–53; also useful are the chronology of his life, and an impressive list of his fieldtrips (superfluously reproduced in most volumes, like the introductory tributes). Vol.10 consists of articles by Qiao’s colleagues on the significance of his work.

As an important complement to the text, those with WeChat (perhaps everyone except me) can scan QR codes to access a range of audio/video material and further images, although the process seems to be laborious.

* * *

Qiao Jianzhong was born in 1941 in the Shaanbei town of Yulin, heartland of Mao’s wartime CCP base area; in 1947, during the civil war following the defeat of the Japanese he took refuge with his family in Baotou before it was safe to return to Yulin.

The Qiao family, Yulin, 1962; Qiao Jianzhong (back row, centre) the oldest of eleven siblings
(see Amateur musicking in urban Shaanbei).

Qiao’s early years bear all the hallmarks of the tribulations of artists and intellectuals through the Maoist era. In 1958, aged 17, he managed to move to the provincial capital Xi’an, soon studying at the conservatoire there—with rural interludes as political campaigns increased. By 1964 he gained admission to the Chinese Conservatoire in Beijing, but as the Four Cleanups campaign escalated he was sent down to communes in Xi’an and Hebei. After graduating in 1967 he could only intermittently manage to pursue his growing interest in folk music; but for several years from 1973, assigned to Ji’nan in Shandong, he took part in fieldwork on folk-song, opera, and shawm bands of the Heze region—the latter, even before the end of the Cultural Revolution, a particular concern of local scholars, which would bear fruit in the 1980s after the collapse of the commune system. Having married in 1972, the couple celebrated the end of the Cultural Revolution with the birth of their daughter Xiao Bei.

At last in 1979, aged 38, Qiao was able to return to Beijing pursue a bona fide career in music research. After graduating in 1981 from the Research Students’ Department of the Chinese Academy of Arts (he pays tribute to Guo Nai’an’s lectures in vol.5, pp.510–24), he did further fieldwork in Shandong (the co-authored 1982 Luxinan guchuiyue xuanji 鲁西南鼓吹乐选集 was one of the earliest volumes on local traditions published after the Maoist era); and he became closely involved in folk-song studies, with important early fieldtrips to Guangxi (for minority polyphony) and Gansu/Qinghai (hua’r) in 1982–83.

In 1988 Qiao Jianzhong succeeded Huang Xiangpeng, another distinguished scholar, as Director of the MRI. Coming from such a lowly provincial background, his ascent was impressive, his sincere and modest character shining through. Despite all the burdens of admin, meetings, and laborious missions to fund the institute’s projects amidst the challenges of a radically new economic climate, Qiao still managed to find time for fieldwork and research.

In 1952–53 Yang Yinliu and Zha Fuxi had studied the shengguan wind ensemble of the Zhihua temple in Beijing (for my series of posts on the temple “music”, click here; for Qiao’s 2009 reflections on its tenuous survival, see vol.4, pp.139–59). On 28th March 1986 the MRI made another groundbreaking fieldtrip just south to Gu’an county: thanks to Qujiaying village chief Lin Zhongshu’s relentless visits to scholars and pundits in Beijing, the MRI “discovered” its ritual association; for my brief introductions, see here, and sequel). Revealing his special bond with the lowly yet tenacious Lin, Qiao Jianzhong’s 2014 book Wang: yiwei laonong zai 28 nianjian shouhu yige minjian yueshede koutoushi 望:一位老农在28年间守护一个民间乐社的口述史 is reproduced in vol.7, pp.121–284, commenting at length on Lin’s own oral accounts of the story—one of the collection’s most impressive sections, full of useful detail.

The “discovery” of Qujiaying led to our major project through the 1990s, again headed by Qiao Jianzhong, with my splendid colleagues Xue Yibing and Zhang Zhentao, that opened the door onto the world of amateur village ritual associations throughout the Hebei plain. With Qujiaying soon becoming a media circus, I focused on the nearby village of Gaoluo, whose ritual contexts were better maintained and where I could make a base (dundian 蹲点, see under “Rapport” here) informally.

Qiao Jianzhong (left) and Lin Zhongshu (2nd left), 2013,
documenting nearly three decades of tireless work on Qujiaying.

In 1992 I arranged for Qiao to visit the National Sound Archive in London with Xue Yibing to copy some of the MRI’s precious early recordings—a visit which resulted indirectly in the 2-CD set China: folk instrumental traditions (AIMP, 1995), some of whose tracks feature in the audio gallery on the sidebar of this site, with commentary here.

It was perhaps significant that Qiao’s retirement in 2001 coincided with the relocation of the institute to sanitised modern buildings in Xinyuanli, bereft of the personal histories of the old MRI. But despite losing his wife in 2008, Qiao has been no less active in his later years, with a busy itinerant schedule of teaching and lecturing in Shanghai, Beijing, and Xi’an, as well as Fuzhou, Hangzhou, and Taiwan, supervising many PhD students—and still doing fieldwork (Gansu, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Liaoning, Jiangsu, Hubei, Hunan, Zhejiang…). Since 2013 his main bases have been the Xi’an Conservatoire and his old home Yulin—where he headed a new museum of Shaanbei folk-song and celebrated his 80th birthday in 2021.

* * *

Temple procession, south Gansu, June 1997.
Photo: Frank Kouwenhoven. © CHIME, all rights reserved.

Qiao Jianzhong is best known for his research on folk-song cultures (see here, and here), particularly on Shaanbei and huar in the northwest, but with such wide field experience his national surveys are also valuable. His influential book Tudi yu ge 土地与歌 (1998; revised edition with A/V 2009) forms the nucleus of the present anthology (note also the essential CD sets of archive recordings from the MRI that he masterminded, especially the folk-song disc).

Through the 80s and 90s, Qiao’s studies coincided with the fieldwork and editorial tasks for the monumental Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples, on which he has many insights (cf. my major review, cited e.g. here). Inevitably, too, since 2004 he has had to reflect on issues surrounding the Intangible Cultural Heritage project, sounding notes of caution.

While the themes of the ten volumes seem rather loosely grouped, with my own focus on ritual I find volume 5 particularly salient. As Chinese music scholars are well aware, life-cycle and calendrical rituals form the constant backdrop to all folk genres in social life: folk-song, narrative-singing, opera, instrumental music, and dance; and as I keep saying, soundscape should be an essential component of ritual studies. While the senior generation in China couldn’t necessarily latch onto the anthropological approach and thick description that began to develop there from the late 1980s, fieldwork inevitably immersed them in “ritual music”. Qiao has wise words on projects to document ritual traditions (pp.380–96). He was closely involved in the major series edited by Tsao Poon-yee, Zhongguo minjian yishi yinyue yanjiu 中国民间仪式音乐研究 [Chinese folk ritual music]; I learn from his substantial survey (pp.531–79) for the East China volume, and he was a major contributor to the Northwest volume (see under Rain rituals in north China; vol.1 (pp.240–69) contains Qiao’s notes on a temple fair in Hengshan county in Shaanbei, “Xinyang yu jianshou” 信仰与坚守  (“Faith and perseverance”, 2012). As a native of Shaanxi, Qiao has also promoted the long-term research on the ritual groups around Xi’an, initiated by Li Shigen in the early 1950s (e.g. the valuable survey “ ‘Xi’an guyue’ yanjiude liushinian” 西安鼓乐研究的六十年, vol.5, pp.486–509).

Always cultivating the research of promising younger scholars, Qiao Jianzhong gradually handed over the reins to my brilliant fieldwork colleagues Xue Yibing and Zhang Zhentao, and the illustrious Tian Qing—all of whom take “religious music” as a crucial theme. Another outstanding scholar trained at the MRI is the music anthropologist Xiao Mei (see her excellent tribute to Qiao, vol.1, pp.12–19), who went on to establish the Centre for Ritual Music in Shanghai. In Beijing, besides the MRI, research at the conservatoires also thrived, with another senior scholar, Yuan Jingfang, at the Central Conservatoire. Despite an inevitable caution over broaching social/political issues, younger scholars have published a plethora of theses under their guidance, based on fieldwork.

I find it deeply satisfying to browse this collection—a tribute to both Qiao Jianzhong and the MRI, and an essential general education in the whole range of Chinese music studies, continuing that bequeathed by Yang Yinliu.