Collection 154 - Li Family Cantonese Opera collection

• Sound recording

• Textual record

ca. 1,000 pages textual records
130 audio cassettes

This material was collected by Kitty and Stephen Li's father. He acquired it from Hong Kong between 1980 and 2000. Some of the items were collected during his travels around mainland China. Mr. Li was good friends with Master Tao Wong, who donated his Cantonese Opera costume collection to MOA.

Collection includes 130 audio cassette tapes of Cantonese opera recordings and over 1,000 Cantonese opera scripts, many of which are in the gongche musical notation (工尺譜). All of these materials are well preserved by the donor.

The cassette tapes were commercially released in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China from the 1970s through the 1990s. The scripts were not published, but are presented in a textual format that supplements the audio medium of the cassette tapes. The scripts are also presented in a notation widely circulated among professional performers, amateur singers, and musicians in twentieth-century community singing clubs (qushe曲社) in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and similar Cantonese opera associations in diaspora transpacific Chinese communities, from Southeast Asia to Melbourne, Havana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, to Vancouver.

This donation complements MOA’s holdings of Cantonese opera, notably the Cantonese Opera Collection of about 800 stage objects, which is the largest known collection anywhere of early-twentieth century Cantonese opera stage materials. MOA also houses other archival materials, mainly textual records, photographs, and video recordings. The additional digitized archival materials here position the Museum of Anthropology at UBC as one of the largest and richest collections of Cantonese opera outside China.

A detailed inventory of this collection is in progress. Contact archives for more information.