Shanghai’s Yu Garden Sings: Heritage Music Season Runs Through November 15

Shanghai’s most famous classical garden has a soundtrack this autumn. The Grand Yuyuan Music and Heritage Festival is filling Yu Garden and the neighbouring Bund Finance Center with traditional Chinese performance, themed markets and cross-cultural music, in a season that runs through November 15.

Music on the water

The heart of the programme is a water stage near the garden’s Nine-Turn Bridge, where scheduled performances continue on October 24 and 31 and November 7 and 14. The line-up mixes traditional opera and folk music with international acts, and — in a gesture sure to please casual visitors — the performances by the bridge can be enjoyed without a reservation. Around the garden, the wider Yuyuan precinct adds themed markets and cultural activities, turning a visit into an evening out: snacks and shopping in the bazaar streets, then music drifting across the pond at dusk.

A garden with 460 years of history

The setting is half the show. Yu Garden was begun in 1559 by Pan Yunduan, a Ming-dynasty official who spent more than two decades — by some accounts far longer — building a garden to honour his parents. Much of its design is credited to the landscape master Zhang Nanyang. Across roughly two hectares, visitors wind through rockeries, halls, courtyards and pavilions, crossing the zigzag Nine-Turn Bridge — built, tradition says, because evil spirits can only travel in straight lines — to the Mid-Lake Pavilion teahouse at its centre.

Worth the trip

Heritage sites everywhere are experimenting with live performance as a way of bringing old spaces to new audiences, and Yu Garden’s season is a polished example: serious traditional music, performed where it might have been heard centuries ago, in the middle of one of the world’s most futuristic skylines. If you are in Shanghai before mid-November, go at golden hour and stay for the music.

Source: ad-hoc-news