The melody of our heritage

Instruments, once out of fashion, enjoy a surge of popularity as composer combines history with music to provide the harmony of a bygone era, Wang Ru reports.

It was a moment seared in her memory. When Liu Jing played the suite of Dream of the Red Chamber, which is based on a novel of the same title written by Cao Xueqin during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), in the University of Cambridge as a member of a Chinese ensemble in 2011, something strange happened. As she played A Lovesick Knitted Brow in Vain, a tune which describes the failed love story between two main characters Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu in the novel, an old woman who sat in the first row of the audience burst into tears.

She was curious and asked the woman, at the end of the performance, if she had read the novel. The woman said: "No, but I just felt the melody touched me very much when it was created by your Chinese instrument."

The experience was one of the inspirations that urged Liu to promote traditional Chinese music and instruments. Many years later, the woman who is in her thirties now has promoted a series of original music videos featuring traditional Chinese stories and "relayed" by Chinese instruments with her online name Liu Qingyao. They have become hugely popular.