April 21, 2010
By CINDY SUI
DALIN, TAIWAN — When a Taiwan music ensemble performed its reconstruction of Chinese imperial court music last year in Beijing, it marked not just a cultural milestone, but a political one.
The concert provided a rare opportunity to hear ancient sounds salvaged from a nearly vanished musical tradition. The 3,000-year-old genre known as yayue, or “elegant music,” faded with the collapse of dynastic rule in 1911, and nearly succumbed to the later Maoist assault on “feudalistic” elements of China’s past.
But it was also a chance for people from both sides of the long-divided Taiwan Strait to compare notes on which parts of their joint Chinese heritage have been preserved, or not.
“The audience response was quite strong. Many were hearing this music for the first time,” said Xie Jiaxing, director of the China Conservatory in Beijing, which had invited the Yayue Ensemble of Nanhua University to perform in the capital.
“For political reasons, we haven’t done enough to research yayue,” Mr. Xie said. “Taiwan’s Nanhua University has done a really good job in this respect. Afterwards, our students wrote to the school saying how happy they were to discover such a great treasure in ancient Chinese culture, even though they don’t really understand it.”
The Communist victory in the Chinese civil war in 1949 and the flight of the defeated Kuomintang forces to Taiwan was followed by decades of tense separation. Taiwan considers itself a self-governed island, while China regards it as a renegade province.
A détente, first taking the form of economic ties, gathered strength beginning in 2008 with the election in Taiwan of President Ma Ying-jeou, who has made improved relations a hallmark of his administration. Direct flights, tourism and, increasingly, cultural exchanges have blossomed.
While Taiwan has long prided itself on being the keeper of Chinese tradition, until recently it had been distanced from its cultural roots on the mainland. The Communist mainland, by contrast, had in many regards cut itself off from its own past. The exchanges are allowing both sides to fill in the gaps. The past year has seen exhibits and performances unimaginable not long ago.
Last October, the Palace Museum in Beijing and Taiwan’s National Palace Museum held their first-ever joint exhibition in Taipei, displaying paintings and other treasures from a long-splintered imperial collection.
The two museums are also stepping up cooperation, coordinating their catalogs and Web sites, and sharing their expertise in storing and restoring artifacts.
In March, the internationally renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou staged his production of the Puccini opera “Turandot” in Taiwan, performed by mainland singers and Taiwanese instrumentalists.
Mainland provincial governments have been sending delegations to Taiwan to promote investment, trade and tourism, and each brings examples of local culture, some of which had never been seen in Taiwan.
Henan Province brought monks from the Shaolin Temple who demonstrated their martial arts skills. Guizhou Province displayed one of its most famous products — Maotai grain liquor, which is still barred from sale in Taiwan — but also the clothing, crafts and dances of its many ethnic minorities.
Chou Ju-mu, 20, a Taipei fashion design student who visited the recent Guizhou exhibit, expressed amazement at the intricate embroidery, batiks and paper-thin silver ornaments.
“We’ve only learned about the mainland from books,” she said. “Only today are we able to see these things in reality.”
Joseph Lee, a businessman who was also at the exhibit, agreed, saying many aspects of China’s culture remained foreign to ordinary Taiwanese.
“We’ve seen more of the culture of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States or Canada than we have of mainland China.”
That is changing. Banners on the main boulevards of Taipei that once were more likely to promote Western or Japanese performers now advertise coming performances by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra or a Kunqu opera troupe.
Even a singer from the People’s Liberation Army has given a concert here.
These events are not happening without controversy or criticism, especially from Taiwan’s main opposition party and others who suspect that China’s overtures, even cultural exchanges, may all be aimed at eventually bringing the island under its rule.
However, Chen Huei-ying, director-general of the cultural and education affairs department of the Mainland Affairs Council, the Taiwan government body in charge of policies toward China, sees benefits.
“Cultural exchanges are helpful to peaceful development of cross-strait relations,” he said.
“They increase understanding and appreciation for each other and especially feelings people on each side have for one another.”
They are also allowing mainland Chinese visitors to see how their culture evolved on Taiwan, shielded from the Communist campaigns against many traditional practices.
Some folk customs — such as the worship of Mazu, the sea goddess — thrive here in ways they no longer do on the mainland. Chinese temples are seeking help from their Taiwanese counterparts on how to revive Mazu festivals.
In the case of yayue, the classical court music, the exchanges are generating lively discussion, if not always agreement.
The yayue performance presented in Beijing last autumn was the culmination of 15 years of research by Chou Chun-yi, head of the Yayue Ensemble at Nanhua University here in Dalin.
Such was the influence of imperial China over its neighbors that variants of its musical forms and instruments had made their way into the courts of Korea, Japan and Vietnam. Mr. Chou traveled to those countries in search of clues to what instruments should be played and how, what the music should sound like and what the accompanying dance steps might have been. But he also made numerous trips to the Chinese mainland, where he studied ancient instruments unearthed from tombs and had replicas made.
“A people cannot be without its history,” said Mr. Chou. “Japan and South Korea can perform something from 1,000 years ago. Why can’t we?”
The mainland’s state-run China Central Television broadcast a special program about the concert and interviewed Mr. Chou. He maintains that this was the first time many Chinese had heard this music of their own ancestors.
Peng Qingtao, director of the materials research committee of the Cultural Relics Bureau of Qufu, the hometown of Confucius, acknowledges that much of what passes for ancient music in China today may not be genuine. But he wondered how authentic even Mr. Chou’s painstakingly researched renditions could be.
“There are no recordings of the music,” Mr. Peng said. “Even the musical scores were notated under a different system than the one we use now. So it’s impossible for any interpretation to be completely authentic.”
He said China also has much to offer Taiwan in terms of traditional culture.
“We’ve held ceremonies to honor Confucius here for 2,000 years, without interruption until 1949, so it’s not correct to say that all Chinese culture disappeared from China,” Mr. Peng said, referring to the year that Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China.
“We still have documents that show exactly where the musicians stood, and the notices sent out before the ceremonies where yayue was played,” Mr. Peng said.
“These were not all destroyed in the Cultural Revolution,” he said, referring to the 1966-76 political campaign, when Red Guards defaced the tombs of Confucius and his descendents.
Meanwhile, the two sides are sharing their respective understandings of yayue. Partly because of the Beijing performance, the China Conservatory plans to set up its own yayue research center later this year and has invited Mr. Chou to help.
“Yayue is really worth studying and reviving. It’s one of the treasures of our ancient culture,” said Mr. Xie, the conservatory director. “These exchanges are good. They will deepen our understanding of Chinese traditional culture.”
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