Canaan Morse

This project involves research travel to Beijing, Hankou, Shanghai, and Berlin to establish the material provenance of over five hundred traditional songbooks collected in China by the German-American Sinologist Berthold Laufer between 1900 and 1904. These texts, which Laufer donated to archives in Germany and the United States, represent an extraordinary diversity of popular operatic, storytelling, and prosimetric genres from the final decades of China’s last dynasty, many of which are undocumented in current scholarship. The project will illuminate their usage environments, contextualize stylistic differences, and unearth the popular printing infrastructure that produced them.