......
......
Ben Gu, Nostalgist Extraordinaire
Ben Gu is one of my best friends. I met him in 2019 while I was eating dinner in a restaurant near the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing. He entered with a group of brass players carrying musical instrument cases. I had to introduce myself, and by the following week I met Ben in the basement of the National Library of China to practice the trumpet with him. Ben is the former director of Foreign Acquisitions and Cataloging for the National Library of China from 2011-2022, where he also previously worked in 2000 on the Chinese translation of the Concise Oxford History of Music. Ben currently is the Advisor of the Chinese Studies Research Center.
When the Covid-19 pandemic closed China in 2020, I was required to exit the country and leave my belongings behind. Ben is the person who helped remove my possessions from my Conservatory apartment and he stored them in the library's office. My possessions were finally returned to me in 2022 while Ben and I remained in contact over the five years sharing research. He found some Chinese library sources for some of my articles, and he translated some difficult passages for me. He also is an author and he published an article in Russian Musicology on a Red Classics Orchestra with whom he performs in Beijing, The Starry Sky Amateur Orchestra.
Ben is currently performing on the trumpet with several amateur Red Classics orchestras in Beijing, particularly the Red Police. I asked Ben if I could join the Red Police to get some musical experience, and he said that due to the nature of its name and the fact that I am a foreigner, they would not allow me. Yet, I moved onto a new aspect of my research and data collection from this, through shared videos and electronic jianpu files. Ben sent me a number of videos, while I collected more from WeChat, and Douyin in China.
Ben Gu shared with and gave me permission to publish some of his school band photographs from the Xincheng Middle School in Shanghai from 1976 to 1978, which was after the Cultural Revolution, when Deng Xiaoping and Chairman Hua Guofeng were restructuring the Chinese economy for foreign exports that led to the Opening to the Outside World. In his first photograph [Figure 3, p. 349], Ben is the middle trumpeter in the back row and the students are wearing typical clothing of China during that era. In his second photograph [Figure 4, p. 349] we can observe a more liberal approach to education in China in seeing the students wearing short sleeve white shirts as their uniform. Ben here is the second trumpeter from the right in the third row.
Ben and I have never spoken about politics. The music says all that needs to be said. We are musicians, not politicians [Figure 5, p. 350].
Figure 3. A Photograph of the Xincheng Middle School Band, Shanghai, 1978 (A photograph from the personal collection of Ben Gu; author use by permission)
Figure 4. A Photograph of the Xincheng Middle School Band, Shanghai, 1976 (A photograph from the personal collection of Ben Gu; author use by permission)
Figure 5. Ben Gu and the author at a restaurant in Beijing near the International Arts Hotel (January 2025)
Updated 4/13/2026