Mo Li Hua

The story

"Mo Li Hua", "Jasmine Flower", is a Chinese folk song of the xiaodiao or "short tune" genre, popular in the towns of the Jiangnan region south of the lower Yangtze, around Suzhou, Shanghai and Hangzhou. It is usually dated to the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (1735–1796) of the Qing dynasty, though the ethnomusicologist Frederick Lau notes that the earliest "Molihua" lyrics appeared in the Ming dynasty's Wanli period. It uses the five-note pentatonic scale, and its many regional versions differ in words and melody: one describes the custom of giving jasmine flowers, popular in the southern Yangtze delta, another the fear of plucking the flower. It is also known as "Xian Hua Diao", "Fresh Flower Melody", and in the north as "La Mei Hua" or "Yu Mei Hua".

John Barrow, a member of George Macartney's embassy to the Qianlong court, was the first to write the tune in Western notation, in 1793. When he published it in Europe in 1804 he noted that it seemed to be one of the most popular songs in China, and his publication gave it, in Lau's words, a "grand entrance on the world stage". It became one of the first Chinese folk songs widely known outside China. From 1896 Qing officials in Europe sometimes used it as a temporary national anthem, until "Cup of Solid Gold" became the Qing state's official anthem in 1911. At the start of the 20th century travelling musicians played it across China, and the music historian August Wilhelm Ambros analysed it in his unfinished History of Music.

Giacomo Puccini, who began his last opera Turandot in 1920, heard the tune on a music box brought from China by an Italian diplomat, probably Baron Edoardo Fassini-Camoss; its sheets misnamed the song "Sinfa". In Turandot (1926), set in Imperial China, it became the leitmotif of the princess's splendour, first heard in the boys' chorus "Là, sui monti dell'est". Puccini's version gained a life of its own: Tan Dun drew on it in his Symphony 1997, written for the handover of Hong Kong. In Hollywood it appeared in The Good Earth (1937), and during the Second World War some films used it to stand for the Chinese.

In 1982 the song was placed on a UNESCO list of recommended songs. Said to be a favourite of the Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin, it was played at his request at the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, and at that of Macau in 1999; it was heard at Party Central Committee meetings and as hold music in provincial government offices. A Chinese girl and Peking University students sang it at the closing ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics to introduce Beijing, and an adaptation by Tan Dun and Wang Hesheng, chosen from more than 4,000 pieces, opened the victory theme at the medal ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Games. It was also played at the ceremony awarding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo.

During the 2011 Chinese pro-democracy protests, called the Jasmine Revolution, protesters reposted videos of Party officials singing the song and suggested playing it on mobile phones as a deniable, hard-to-block sign of support for democracy. The authorities put the song on their list of censored material: videos, including one of Hu Jintao singing it in Kenya in 2006, were removed, searches for its name were blocked, and jasmine flowers themselves were restricted. Activists wrote a new version of their own. The song is still widely performed, by Celine Dion with Song Zuying at the 2013 CCTV New Year's Gala and by Dimash Qudaibergen since 2018, and has been called a national musical icon of China, like Korea's "Arirang" and Japan's "Sakura Sakura".

What it says

A song in praise of the jasmine flower, its beauty and scent. Its regional versions turn this in different ways: one around the custom of giving jasmine as a gift, another around the wish to pick a flower and the fear of doing so.

The words