University of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums

As World Refugee Day approaches, we turn to a lesser-heard chapter in musical exile: the Russian musicians who travelled east after the 1917 Revolutions. Their story survives in shellac records, cinema orchestrations and melodies that no longer seem to belong entirely to any one nation.

When the Russian empire fractured, musicians scattered like mercury. We remember the émigrés who reshaped the West: Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Horowitz. Yet another current of exile swept Russian musicians into China, where they arrived like travellers from a drowned world.

In Shanghai and Harbin, they brought the discipline of the Tsar’s conservatories and the cosmopolitan habits of imperial Russia. In dance halls and cafés, the air hung heavy with smoke, gossip and the fatigue of exile. Former conservatory teachers trained young Chinese musicians in harmony and orchestration, inadvertently laying the foundations of Chinese “national” music. Among them was Alexander Tcherepnin, whose advocacy of intercultural composition encouraged Chinese composers to weave folk melodies into the loom of Western symphonic forms.

Others drifted into the recording and film industry, often anonymously. Working with Pathé and EMI, Russian émigrés helped shape what later became known as “Shanghai jazz”: a hybrid sound where American swing, Hollywood lushness and eastern tunes blurred into one nocturnal language. Oleg Lundstrem’s orchestra emerged from this world, while Aaron Avshalomov orchestrated for Shanghai film studios and experimented with combining Chinese themes and western orchestral writing. Though often uncredited, their music survives like fingerprints on glass.

Unlike the permanent Russian enclaves in Paris or New York, these communities in China were transient. Some returned to the Soviet Union believing reconciliation was possible; others crossed the Pacific towards the United States as war and revolution swept through China once again.

Have you heard of these musicians? How much of modern Chinese music carries within it these submerged histories of Russian migration? How many sounds we assume to be native were born in transit? Explore our collections in the comments.

PGT student working on your dissertation?

Pop over to the Main Library for PGT Dissertation drop-in sessions with the Institute for Academic Development, for dedicated time to talk through:

📝writing strategies
⌚time management
📄structure
🔎editing & proofreading

When: Wednesdays 10-12 and Thursdays 2.30-4 throughout June
Where: Careers Service (front of house space), Level 3, Main Library
Booking: no booking required

Quick glance schedule | Institute for Academic Development | Institute for Academic Development A quick-glance schedule of Postgraduate Taught study development workshops running in Semester Two AY2025-26.

June is here, and this week marks the start of meteorological summer in the UK. With longer and warmer days, it's time to enjoy the outdoors 🌳 Our latest blog post shares some books from the Wellbeing Collection to inspire you to get out into nature. After all, spending time in green space can benefit your mental health and physical wellbeing.

Read it here ➡️

Here comes the summer – books about nature to inspire you to get outdoors – Academic Support Librarians Here comes the summer – books about nature to inspire you to get outdoors Author Ruth JenkinsPublished on 1 June 2026Leave a comment on Here comes the summer – books about nature to inspire you to get outdoors June is here, and while the weather in Scotland this week might not suggest it, today ...

Thank you for all your lovely letters and cute wee drawings you left on our board at Moray House Library. The library loves you back! 💕

Look at this cool display set up by our lovely colleague Rachel at Moray House Library! The weather is on our side this week, and even 10 minutes of light activity can do wonders for our mental and physical wellbeing. So let's get walking and wheeling! 😎

🌞 Check out Walking Scotland to find community walks in your area or to join fun challenges, like the Summer of Sport Step Count Challenge, starting in July! .org.uk

🌞 If you're curious about upcoming activities within the university, you can reach out to the Active Lives team at [email protected]

Two weeks ago we wandered through the utopian fervour of Joris Ivens and his sympathetic portrait of Maoist collectivism at the height of the Cultural Revolution, which began 60 years ago this month

If Ivens gave us revolutionary theatre with the curtains carefully pressed, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina (1972) offered something far stranger: not propaganda, nor outright critique, but a long, puzzled stare. Filming across the eastern reaches of the People’s Republic, Antonioni applied the same modernist sensibility that had led his fictional characters through landscapes of emotional dislocation. Instead of revolutionary triumph, he captured queues, silences, awkward glances, and the peculiar poetry of ordinary boredom—the "temps mort" that defined his 1960s cinema. His wide-angle cinematography further reduced individuals to tiny figures swallowed by monumental landscapes—less heroic citizens than lonely souls stranded inside history itself. China, in Antonioni’s hands, became not a revolutionary spectacle but a vast, unreadable modernist canvas.

Unprepared to see elderly women with bound feet and nameless faces drifting silently through enormous public squares, Madame Mao and her faction launched a "hyperbolic denunciation," accusing him of "vicious motives" for filming barren lands instead of socialist progress. Yet Cold War irony rarely lacks imagination: Taiwan promptly screened the documentary as evidence of communist failure. One regime’s slander became another’s propaganda victory.

Half a century later, Chung Kuo, Cina survives as something more valuable: an accidental archive of unscripted humanity, captured before history could tidy itself up.

If an artist captures a version of a culture that the culture doesn't recognize, who owns the 'correct' image? Should they satisfy the subjects' expectations or remain faithful to their own 'puzzled' vision? We would love to hear your thoughts.

🪁 Perhaps it is time to return items borrowed from our Libraries 🪁
Return books does not need a library card

Let’s share some tips with you 🪁🥦 :
1) 🧁 Please return all borrowed items to their respective libraries.
2) 🍿 Did you know there's a return machine at the Main Library accessible 24/7 and you don't need your student card? Just look to the right when you enter the Main Library. 🥝 How to use it? Just “open the book and scan barcode”
3) 🥑 Did you know you may return books to "book return box" in some site libraries, e.g. Royal Infirmary Library?
4) 🍒Check your library account on DiscoverEd, not just your own book shelves, to ensure all items that you wanted to return will be returned.
5) 😄 Ask EdHelp Service desk staff members for assistance if needed

🚀 We hope this reminder will help you clear your mind and prepare you for a well-deserved summer holiday ahead 🚀

When was the last time you touched grass? 👉🌱

We know exam time can be really stressful, so please remember to take breaks and enjoy some fresh air🍃. Take a walk around campus, have a chat with friends, or simply sit outside and soak up some sunshine. Your mental health and wellbeing are just as important as your grades! 😊🫶

The May issue of Library Updates is out now! ✨️🌸🌺

Discover more about the Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2026 taking place in June, and hear more about recent Edinburgh Diamond publications 'A field guide to artist-researcher collaborations' and 'Toolkit for Interdisciplinary Learning and Teaching (TILT)'. Go back in time at the Main Library. And find library resources for your wellbeing.

And there's more...

Read Library Updates May 2026 --> https://edin.ac/4wiXyrC