From Sun Yat-sen via Shanghai jazz to Tears for Fears, on Bakelite, shellac and 78s, a record collection for the ages

A 1924 Sun Yat-sen speech, every recording of China’s national anthem; a Taiwanese medic has the most historically important record collection in China

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What is arguably China’s most historically significant record collection is owned by Dr Hsu Deng-fang, who sits among some of his treasured items above his dermatology clinic in northern Taiwan. Photo: Chris Stowers/Panos

Published: 10:45am, 3 Jun 2023Updated: 12:01pm, 3 Jun 2023

In 1999, Chinese media reported that a great portion of the single largest trove of master recordings from China’s jazz age – 80,000 gold- or silver-plated masters under the care of the Shanghai branch of China Records – had warped, corroded and generally deteriorated beyond repair.

This collection, stored poorly since the 1940s in a Shanghai warehouse, was estimated to represent roughly 75 per cent of China’s pre-1949 recordings. It had once belonged to the foreign concession record companies that launched the genre of Chinese pop music and built its greatest pre-war catalogues.

But it was not only the physical archive of Chinese music that was in danger of being lost. Scholarship on China’s early pop songs was also in a state of neglect.

For both Eastern and Western researchers, Chinese pop music was generally deemed “unworthy of serious consideration, let alone preservation and academic study”, wrote Andrew Jones, a professor of Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley, in his 2001 book Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age.

A few of the thousands of records belonging to Dr Hsu Teng-fang. The Taiwanese dermatologist owns one of the most historically important record collections in China. Photo: Chris Stowers/Panos

Chinese academics viewed Shanghai jazz as tainted by colonial influence and not authentically Chinese, explained Jones, while Western scholars focused on Chinese music with a more unique cultural identity.

So in around 2000, when Taiwanese music historian Hung Fang-yi began researching Shanghai’s jazz-age songs, “It was impossible to do my research with public collections,” she says.