Wang Luobin

Wang Luobin (Chinese: 王洛宾; 28 December 1913 – 14 March 1996) was a Chinese songwriter. He specialized in publishing Mandarin-language songs based on the music of various ethnic minorities in western China. Wang was born in Beijing on 28 December 1913. As a child, he and his father were jailed by the Kuomintang-led North Route Army for "disturbing the peace" after they had sung an aria outside following an opera performance. This would turn out to be one of several times that he would be detained, and was quoted in his later life as stating "I have been fated to meet with two things in my life: one is music and the other is prison". He graduated from the Music Department of Beijing Normal University in 1934 and actively participated in the Second Sino-Japanese War on China's behalf beginning in 1937 in Shanxi Province. In 1938, in Lanzhou in Gansu Province, Wang published his first Xinjiang-inspired song, "The Girl from Dabancheng". He took up residence in northwestern China for more than 50 years since then, and devoted his time there to transcribing, adapting, collecting and revising western Chinese folk songs. In all, Wang wrote seven operas and edited six songbooks, and published some 700 Xinjiang-style songs, the most famous of which include "Alamuhan" (阿拉木汗, inspired by a Uyghur song), "Awariguli" (also supposedly a Uyghur song), "Flowers and Youth" (pinyin: Hua'er Yu Shaonian, a Hui Muslim folk song), "In that place wholly faraway" (a song from Qinghai Province), "Lift Your Veil" (掀起你的盖头来), "Duldal and Maria" (a Kazakh folk song), "Mayila", and "The Crescent Moon Rises" (半个月亮爬上来; pinyin: Ban Ge Yueliang Pa Shang Lai). A common theme in Wang's work was the portrayal of local women as "beauties" for a male Han narrator to fall in love with, which corresponded with broader...