University of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums

This week is Refugee Week. We have recently learned that Russian musicians, cast adrift by the revolutions of 1917, helped shape the musical landscape of China, carrying conservatory traditions and café-orchestra repertoires into Shanghai's unsettled modernity.

Yet exile in twentieth-century China was never solely a European story. Throughout the Republican era, floods, famine, and war drove millions into Shanghai, where refuge and exclusion occupied the same narrow lane. Newspapers and social surveys of the period reveal a city acutely conscious of native-place identity. Accent, origin, and deportment became social markers; newcomers from poorer provinces often found themselves the targets of sophisticated slurs and urban wit. Cosmopolitanism, it seems, required its own outsiders.

Popular culture told a different story. In songs, pictorial magazines, and cinema, the refugee acquired a new face: the drifting songstress. Bathed in electric lights and skyscraper shadows, she wandered through dance halls and alleyways, singing of loss, injustice, and uncertain futures. Transformed by left-wing cinema from an object of urban pity into a proletarian heroine, she became a moving melody through which the nation imagined its own vulnerability. Poverty, once lamented as misfortune, was recast as a credential for revolutionary virtue; the homeless were elevated onto the silver screen as symbols of national awakening

History's twist arrived in 1949. As refugees themselves, many Shanghainese elites exported south to Hong Kong not only songs, studios, and memories, but also the cultural archetypes fashioned in Republican Shanghai. The displaced songstress was seamlessly reinvented in post-war Hong Kong cinema, evolving from a passive victim into a gritty, modern breadwinner navigating a British colonial city. Exile, it seems, travels not only in people, but in the images that acquire new meanings wherever they arrive.

The Library's collections offer rich pathways into these histories of displacement, performance, and representation. Share with us your research.

We look forward to welcoming you to the undergraduate Open Day on Monday, 22nd June. Visit us at the Main Library or King’s Building to learn more about how the Library can support your studies.

⚠️ New College library had to close unexpectedly today Friday, 12/06/26. We will keep you updated about reopening.

🎈🎉Have a nice summer! 📯🍓

🍒 In summer, you take a break and the libraries become quiet.

📯 If you do visit our libraries, you will find things magical …
e.g. enchanting your midsummer dreams through books found in New College Library

🪂 If you go outdoors, you will find inspirations by reading books found in our libraries, e.g. Moray House Library, or online

🚁 Or, discover, e.g. the DNA patterned pavement near Royal Infirmary Library

🚀 Or, read true stories from Faced of Edinburgh Medical School Outdoor exhibition at Portobello Promenade, Edinburgh, from 29 April to 14 June 2026

🍎 We hope you enjoy your restful time and feel refreshed when you return

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! 💕