A conversation across 1,000 years

For more than 1,000 years, the music of Nanyin — one of the oldest existing musical genres in China — has carried the sounds of southern China through generations.

Now, a group of young musicians in Quanzhou, Fujian province, is giving the ancient tradition a contemporary voice by pairing its distinctive melodies and vocal style with folk, pop, blues, electronic music and modern instrumentation.

Called Nanyin Xin Shili, or Nanyin New Force, the ensemble is less a fixed band than a creative collective. Its members come from different musical and artistic backgrounds, using Nanyin as a starting point rather than a boundary.

At its center is Chen Huanxi, a Nanyin inheritor who has been immersed in the tradition since childhood. Yet her relationship with Nanyin was far from straightforward.

As a child, Chen was energetic and easily bored. She began learning pipa (four-stringed Chinese lute) largely because her friends were doing it. The slow pace of Nanyin initially frustrated her, and she once argued with her parents because she wanted to study painting instead.

Known for its restrained melodies, distinctive singing style and traditional instruments such as the pipa, dongxiao (Chinese vertical bamboo flute), sanxian (three-stringed lute) and erxian (a two-stringed instrument), Nanyin is often described as a "living fossil" of Chinese music and was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.

"I always thought I didn't like Nanyin," says Chen, born in 1995. "It was only much later that I suddenly realized I had never been able to separate myself from it."

That realization came after years of working with the tradition in increasingly unconventional ways.

Chen graduated from Quanzhou Normal University in 2017, where she studied Nanyin. She went on to teach the music, perform in local teahouses and eventually became a freelance musician, taking Nanyin to the streets, bars and cafes.

She began explaining the centuries-old art form to curious passersby and asking audiences what they wanted to hear.

"What surprised me was that some people in Quanzhou didn't even know what I was singing," she says. "I thought, this isn't right. This is such beautiful music. People should be able to understand it."

For Chen, the challenge was not simply preserving Nanyin, but closing the distance that had grown between the tradition and the people whose lives it once accompanied.