Sounds that will be recorded and stored for the ages

Li Qi walks into a room and stands near a table on which sit seven different musical instruments, including drums, cymbals and gongs. Before sitting down he picks up a drum stick and ties it to his left lower leg since there is a percussion instrument set under the table. He is familiar with the locations of all of the musical instruments and finishes the preparations by himself.

Li, 51, the leader of a folk band in Xianghuan county, southern Shanxi, was in Beijing on June 13 with five other blind musicians, including Du Ying, Ma Xingping and Lu Shuiqing, with an average age of 60 years old.

They performed on an outdoor stage in downtown Chaoyang Park that day, and the next day recorded folk songs with a total length of nearly six hours in a Beijing recording studio.

Like neighboring Zuoquan county in eastern Shanxi, Xianghuan has a group of blind musicians who have been taken their performances from one village to another since the 1950s. Their style is called Xianghuan Gu Shu, which refers to the blind musicians telling stories while playing their instruments. Their performance combines solos, duets and narrating the plots. In 2008 Xianghuan Gu Shu was put on the list of national-level intangible cultural heritage items.