Rediscovering Cultural Heritage: Pui Ching Middle School Band in Pre-war Canton and Its Historical Instruments in Present-Day Chinese Musicology

Wind bands constitute pivotal cultural artifacts in the development of Western music in Asian countries. From the time of the late Qing dynasty, the government positioned military bands as cornerstones for modernization, with Canton emerging as a critical center for the evolution of music for military bands in China. The wind band of Canton’s Pui Ching Middle School stood among the most influential school bands, yet academic inquiry into wind and military bands remains conspicuously absent from the modern Chinese musicological discourse. This article employs qualitative methodologies, in order to analyze historical publications to reevaluate the social significance of Pui Ching wind bands in the pre-war era. The band provided numerous significant musical performances of Western music for Cantonese society, participated in community events, functioned as a cultural diplomatic entity, and trained numerous wind performers on wind instruments, who subsequently exerted a great influence on the Lingnan region during the postwar period. The research introduces newly discovered instruments from the pre-war period from the school, offering fresh perspectives on the band’s significance throughout the modern musical development in China. Additionally, the study examines the present-day challenges in the task of preserving historical instruments while endeavoring to reconstruct the cultural significance of these artifacts.