A revisionist history of the Chinese zheng that the complex origins of a single instrument.

As the Chinese plucked zither known as the zheng was popularized in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, its role in musical composition and virtuosic capacity made it into a stalwart standard of Chinese music. In the past, the zheng had appeared in small instrumental ensembles and supplied improvised accompaniments to song, becoming a means of nation-building that was eventually promoted as a marker of Chinese identity in Hong Kong. In Contemporary History of the Chinese Zheng, Ann L. Silverberg uses evidence from the greater China area to show how the narrative history of the zheng created on the mainland did not represent the true history of zheng music. This book contends that the restored “traditional Chinese music” created and promulgated from the 1920s forward—and solo zheng music in particular—is a hybrid of “Chinese essence, Western means” that essentially obscures rather than reveals tradition.