An encounter with Chinese music in mid-18th-century London

Abstract

This article offers an overview of British responses to Chinese music in the 18th century, and discusses in depth an informal musical performance by a Chinese visitor to London, not previously remarked upon in musicological literature. Taking place in 1756, this may have been the earliest Chinese musical performance in the West. The imbalance between the European response to Chinese visual and musical cultures is explored, and an examination of Purcell's The Fairy Queen is used to argue that even in musical contexts it is Chinese visual culture, rather than musical culture, which was most prominent. British responses to Chinese music are distinguished from those of continental Europe, on which they are nevertheless shown largely to depend at least until the period of Lord Macartney's embassy to China in 1793. A transcription of one of the pieces of music played by the Chinese visitor (which was published in a contemporary magazine account of the event as 'A Chinese Air') is discussed, and the Chinese performer is identified as 'Loum Kiqua' with the aid of other documentation of the period. A portrait of Loum Kiqua by Dominic Serres - known today only through a print by Thomas Burford - is considered. Broader issues of Chinese-Western cross-cultural musical interchange are raised with reference to the specific example of 'The Chinese Air', and the possibility is also considered that Loum Kiqua met Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith during his stay in London, perhaps even providing one of the inspirations for the latter's The Citizen of the World, a satire on British society presented as written by a Chinese visitor. Amongst Western commentators on Chinese music considered are Gaspar da Cruz, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, Joseph-Marie Amiot, John Barrow, Johann Christian Hüttner and Charles Burney.