LOO Zhi En, National University of Singapore

The Centre of Sound: The Highland Bagpipe in Colonial India and Britain’s Imperial Asia (1860s – 1947)

One significant musical legacy of the British Empire in South Asia is the contemporary prevalence of the three-droned Highland bagpipe in both national militaries and police forces, as well as in the civilian processional music trade. In regions in the north of the subcontinent such as Rajasthan and Garhwal, the instrument has also been incorporated into various forms of traditional music. This paper, based on a recently completed PhD thesis on the dissemination of the instrument into the colonial Indian Army, argues that these phenomena can be understood as consequences of a longer process of cultural and technological transfer facilitated by British colonial rule on the subcontinent. During the late 19th century, this Scottish variant of a form of musical technology with distribution spanning Europe and Asia was introduced into Indian princely states and the colonial Indian Army. By the early 20th century, colonial India was Asia’s key centre for the recruitment, training and global deployment of pipers. Indian Army pipers were deployed to colonial garrisons and warzones across the globe. Some of these pipers also became composers for the instrument. Colonial India itself became a base for the manufacture of the instrument, with pipemakers in the city of Sialkot in Punjab using local sheesham wood to produce a cheaper product that arguably made the instrument more accessible to civilian and military customers across colonial India and facilitating its further diffusion across the subcontinent. Ultimately, a more complete understanding of the global history of the Highland bagpipe requires going beyond imagining the instrument as merely a Scottish national icon; the three-droned instrument was a piece of musical technology that was disseminated globally through imperial networks and which local actors could appropriate for their own uses.

LOO Zhi En is a part-time lecturer in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore (NUS) with research interests in cultural history, the history of the Indian Army, the imperial dimensions of Scottish history and the history of musical instruments. He has recently completed and defended his thesis entitled “Empire’s Embellishments: The Highland Bagpipe in the Indian Army and the Global British Empire (c. 1860-1947)”. The thesis used the pipe bands of the pre-1947 Indian Army as case studies to explore the imperially mediated cultural encounters and transfers through which the Scottish Highland bagpipe and its associated performance practices were disseminated and received in the Asian half of the British imperial world from the second half of the 19th century up to 1947. Zhi En is also a musician performing mainly on the Scottish smallpipes, though he also plays the border pipes, Highland bagpipes and tin whistle. In recent years, he has performed with the groups Traditionally Speaking, Singapore Trad Collective, Open Score Project, Red Dot Baroque, as well as for the dance company Miao Dance, all of which are based in Singapore.

Sherry Xuezi XU, University of Cambridge

Crossing-Eurasian Courtesan: La Traviata and Operatic Circulations in Colonial Shanghai

Opera is by no means a static artifact rooted solely in its Western European birthplace; rather, it has evolved into a distinctive global network of performance and production throughout history – a music-making process, a market-driven commodity, and a site for power negotiation. One of its distinct transregional trajectories was from Western Europe to East Asia, largely driven by touring opera troupes, including impresarios and singers – unique border-crossing groups that boomed in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Shanghai’s opera scene, this paper examines the transitory performance circuits established by itinerant companies during the city’s treaty-port era – the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – when foreign concessions engulfed the city, Western and Chinese operatic forms intersected, and foreign and local audiences converged. This socio-historical milieu further complicates the performances given by touring opera companies, not merely as an isolated cultural phenomenon, but as an ineluctable infiltration into local cultural practices, epitomizing the power dynamics between Western imperial powers and Chinese nationalism.

To illustrate, I take the case of Verdi’s opera La Traviata, a staple of the repertoire that offers insights into the broader operatic ecology of Shanghai. I show its trajectory from its initial appearance in concert form at horse racing events, performed by the band of the Shanghai Municipal Council, to full stagings by two touring opera troupes – Augusto Cagli’s Royal Italian Opera Company in the 1880s and Adolfo Carpi’s Grand Opera Company in the 1910s and 1920s – held at the Lyceum Theatre, the first Western-style theatre in the city. I also demonstrate how the same story became entangled in the Chinese operatic narrative through the Peking opera Xin Cha Hua (1909), as well as the reform of Shanghai’s Peking opera theatres under the influence of the Lyceum Theatre. This reciprocal perspective sheds new light on Shanghai’s lesser-known operatic history.

Sherry Xuezi Xu is a musicologist whose research focuses on the music history of 18th- and 19th-century Italian opera, contemporary European opera, and traditional Chinese operas. She is interested in how opera – both as a musical work and a historical event – mediates cultural history in relation to broader socio-political issues, including gender, (post)colonialism, and intercultural exchange. Her previous projects have explored British women’s history, celebrity culture, and proto-feminism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries through the lens of London’s Italian opera production and its female singers. She has also published research in Chinese on Peking, Kunqu, and Yue opera, examining both their historical development and musical structures. Xu received an MPhil in Music from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Musicology from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, with a minor in English from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship and Princeton’s Frank E. Taplin fellowship in music (declined), she will pursue her PhD in historical musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2024, her research on a contemporary opera received a prize from the Royal Musical Association.

Sylvia Tongyan QIU, University of California, Los Angeles

Shipped, Uprooted, and Recycled: Bejewelled Potted Landscapes and Clockwork Automata at the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court

The eighteenth-century Qing court was a site of dynamic material exchange, where imported objects and raw materials were dismantled, repurposed, and reintegrated into new artistic forms. This paper examines two interconnected categories of objects—bejewelled potted landscapes (baoshi penjing 寶石盆景) and clockwork automata (zimingzhong 自鳴鐘) —tracing how gemstones, glass, and precious metals moved in and out of the Qing court and circulated within and beyond the boundaries of the Qing Empire. 

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While bejewelled potted landscapes sought to transcend the ephemerality of living plants by creating ‘eternal’ microcosms of nature, the fragility of their construction necessitated constant intervention and care. Similarly, clockwork automata made in different parts of Europe, in Canton, and at the Imperial Workshop often underwent modification and repair as they were transported between the Imperial Palace, Rehe, and Yuanmingyuan. Beyond maintenance, the Qianlong Emperor actively ordered rework on potted landscapes and clocks to adjust to his taste. Previous scholarship has focused on their roles as diplomatic gifts, luxury commodities, and marvels of mechanical ingenuity, but little attention has been paid to their im/material afterlives. 

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Analysing the Imperial Workshop records, discussions from European sources, and comparing them with extant objects, this paper positions these acts of reassembly and alteration within the global networks of trade, material understandings, and technological experimentation in the 18th century. Rather than treating bejewelled potted landscapes as merely symbolic, auspicious displays unique to the Qing court and clockwork automata as predominantly imported products, this paper demonstrates the interactions and interdependency between the two. It aims to demonstrate the composite nature of objects made in the “Palace Machine”—where the boundaries between foreign and domestic goods, old and new technologies, exotic and familiar materials were constantly being redefined. 

Sylvia Tongyan Qiu 邱童颜 is a second-year Ph.D. student in Art History at UCLA. Her research explores the intersections of early modern globalization and the visual and material culture of the Qing court. Her dissertation examines the relationship between image-making and diplomacy at EurAsian courts between the 17th and 18th centuries, specifically, the trans-medial construction of European visions of the Qing Empire through illustrated ambassadorial accounts. Her research interests also include the consumption of gemstones and natural products in EurAsian courts. She received her MA in Art History from UCLA and BA in History of Art from University College London. Her research has been supported by UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, and the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History.​