A touch of the real Chinese character: Hearing race in nineteenth-century British descriptions of Chinese music

In nineteenth-century Britain, race scientists and music historians responded to the country’s deepening musical connectivity with China by theorizing the sound of race. This chapter examines the writings produced by these intellectuals, building upon recent historiographical insights concerning the multisensory construction of racial difference to argue that acoustic responses to Chinese music-making were integral to the racialization of Chinese bodies in Victorian Britain. It highlights the racial significance projected onto several specific features deemed characteristic of China’s musical culture, namely the attention to timbral differentiation observed by Chinese instrumentalists, and the idiomatic vocal techniques used by Chinese singers. Overall, the chapter argues that music was a fundamental tool used by nineteenth-century British writers to delineate and diminish China’s status within the racial hierarchy of humanity. While the attractiveness and sophistication of China’s material and visual culture had once impressed an earlier generation of eighteenth-century China watchers, the country’s musical culture suggested to nineteenth-century thinkers that the real Chinese character was uncivilized and racially marked.