Some regard Yang Yinliu as the Chinese Bartók. Others think it would be more appropriate to describe Bartók as the Hungarian Yang Yinliu. Yet Yang’s work is all but unknown outside China. Search the English-language internet and you’ll find very little on him, apart from a couple of book chapters, a photo of him playing his bamboo flute, and a bibliography of the books, transcriptions, articles, talks, and research findings which were the residue of his phenomenally productive life. The scope of that bibliography takes the breath away.

Born in 1899 and brought up in the last years of the Qing dynasty, Yang started learning instruments from priests of the Daoist faith which was, and still is, dedicated to the pursuit of the Three Treasures: compassion, frugality, and humility. As a precocious six-year-old he joined an elite music society, becoming adept on the qin zither and the pipa and sanxian lutes; he later learned to sing falsetto for kunju opera. He studied English, and Western music theory, and became a lifelong Christian, something about which, after 1949, he wisely kept quiet. Invited to head a Chinese music institute in America, he declined, saying ‘I can do nothing if I leave Chinese soil, where Chinese music lives’.

Until the mid-Thirties almost all his musicological energies were devoted to adapting English Christian hymns for Chinese consumption, but, appointed professor of Chinese history in Beijing in 1936, he immersed himself in cutting-edge German musicology, and then in the folk music of China. In the Forties, while his friends were joining the Communist resistance, he embarked on a concise history of Chinese music in all its ritual and recreational forms. When revolution came, he cannily wrapped up his musical ideas in the politically correct jargon of the time, and was rewarded with the directorship of the Music Research Institute in Beijing.

His book was circulated in draft form from 1944 but had to go through many political revisions before, with much virtuous talk about the ‘exploited labouring masses’, it was properly allowed to see the light of day. Yang was also roundly criticised during the 1958 Anti-Rightist Campaign, and was induced to sum up his criminality in cringing terms: ‘I was imbued with a sense of idealism, my thoughts coloured by abstractions and theoretical issues.