The Gramophone Comes to Asia

The gramophone is an invention of the last third of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸ American inventor Thomas Edison developed what he called the “phonograph” in 1877 and received a patent on February 19, 1878.Footnote ⁹ As a scientific sensation the machine was showcased in different countries immediately after its invention. During an exhibition in the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum) it was introduced to China’s first envoy to England, Guo Songtao, who found it important enough to make a note in his diary in May 1878.Footnote ¹⁰ However, the phonograph remained a curiosity, because it was not immediately clear for what purpose it should be used. In addition, it was difficult to operate, the recording quality was low and recordings were usually ruined after a few playbacks. Incremental improvements to the technology by Edison and others over the following decade eventually turned gramophones and recordings into a true commodity.Footnote ¹¹ The series of improvements that made the business profitable led to a series of patents acquired in different national contexts and frequent legal battles over copyright infringements and lawsuits. Major manufacturers of gramophones (for an overview, see table 1) engaged in strategic contractual agreements, dividing the world market between them. For example, the Anglo-American Gramophone Co. agreed with the American firm Victor to serve Europe, the British Empire, and Russia, while leaving the rest of the world to Victor. As a consequence, after 1907, India was served by the Gramophone Co., whereas China was part of Victor’s sphere of influence.Footnote ¹²

Table 1

Major gramophone companies before World War I

* The Gramophone Co. Ltd merged with a typewriter manufacturer in 1900 and changed its name to Gramophone and Typewriter Ltd. In 1907 it changed its name again to Gramophone Co. Ltd and continued with this name until 1974. See Reference MartlandMartland, Recording History, 68 n103. In this article, the company is referred to as Gramophone or the Gramophone Co.

From its inception, the gramophone business was highly international. The gramophone companies’ entry strategies to India and China had many similarities. The gramophone was one of many technological items manufactured in the West and exported to India and China since the late nineteenth century, others being sewing machines, typewriters, bicycles, cameras, clocks, watches, radios, electric fans, and cars.Footnote ¹³ It travelled in the footsteps of imperialist expansion and colonial politics.

In both countries, the novelty item had to be introduced to the public, which regarded it with curiosity and sometimes resistance. In India, events were held to celebrate the gramophone’s arrival, such as a “Phonograph Concert” at the Dalhousie Institute in Calcutta (Kolkata) on November 16, 1899, where the Edison phonograph was played for the public.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, in China, Thomas Edison’s local agent Everett Frazar (1834–1901), was sent as a special agent in 1889 to introduce the phonograph to China (and Japan.) In the following summer, Frazar & Co., Shanghai, sent a phonograph to China’s most powerful man, Viceroy Li Hongzhang (1821–1901) in Tianjin. As his son revealed in a letter, Li was enthusiastic about the machine, invited Edison to China and even proposed a Chinese name for the machine: “Transfer-Language-Box” (Chuan yu he).Footnote ¹⁵ Although Edison never visited China, the gramophone was continuously discussed in Chinese scientific circles and journals, but generally regarded as insufficient and too fragile. Still in 1893, Frazar was pessimistic about the export business and wrote to Edison “in regard to supplying phonographs for China & Japan, I think however it is a waste of time to write on the subject.”Footnote ¹⁶

Improvements to the technology eventually allowed the business to develop further. The representatives of the different gramophone companies enjoyed increasingly greater success, first in India, then also in China. Both countries were considered promising markets. With a population of 287 millionFootnote ¹⁷ in 1901, India had the potential of becoming a massive market for consumer goods and was considered a stepping stone to other Asian markets. The German electrical company Siemens, for example, sought to attract investors in its telegraph line to India by arguing already in 1867 that the country “with its enormous population and growing production” was not only one of the largest markets in the world but also a “gate for Europeans to the important markets of China, Japan, and Australia.”Footnote ¹⁸ More important, the political context made India very accessible. The British government had assumed control of the territories of the former East India Company in the Government of India Act of 1858. To govern India, the Act provided for a Secretary of State and a Council of India in Britain, both composed of British nationals. In India, the head of the British administration was the governor general of India in Calcutta, who after 1858 governed directly over the provinces of British India. He also indirectly governed the nominally sovereign native states, which were under the suzerainty of the British monarch. Anglo-Saxon property law and free trade policy in the British colony ensured a relatively open field for Western businesses regardless of their country of origin. Despite being under British control, India was “commercially . . . a country of equal opportunities for all the nations of the world,”Footnote ¹⁹ as an American consular report of 1915 highlighted.

China, on the other hand, had been forced into trade relations with the West by the so-called “unequal treaties,” the first of which was signed in August 1842 following the First Opium War. One of the results was that China had to open five treaty ports for international trade, and Hong Kong became a British colony. In the following decades, China’s government was pressed to open an increasing number of “treaty ports,” which developed into centres of Sino-Western commercial interaction, modern entertainment, and lifestyles. By the end of the nineteenth century, about a hundred treaty ports existed in China, of which Shanghai and Tianjin were the largest and most influential on the coast. In addition, foreign powers had begun to eagerly divide China into several “spheres of influence” and established colonies after China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1895). The conflict between foreign imperialism and anti-foreign Chinese nationalism reached its climax in 1900, when the so-called Boxer Uprising threatened the Western presence in China. The signing of the “Boxer Protocol” in September 1901 precipitated the start of a decade of anti-Manchu nationalist agitation and revolution that resulted in the downfall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.

As a consequence, both China and India were open(ed) to Western companies that up until World War I competed relatively freely for market share. In both countries, the import goods entered the markets through harbour cities and became increasingly available in more remote parts of the countries as well. Calcutta, Bombay (Mumbai), and Karachi were the first points of entry for Western commodities in India. In China, the gramophone first entered through the safe colonies and treaty ports, especially Shanghai, and then into those areas where foreigners and Chinese had the necessary means for musical entertainment and performances generally and for gramophones and records in particular.

In India, manufacturers brought gramophones into all the bigger cities, where the typical buyers—Westerners, Indian princes and nobles, large landowners, merchants, the Parsi community mostly in Mumbai, and some so-called “Anglo-Indians” often employed in offices and on railways—resided.Footnote ²⁰ Despite the large population, however, the purchasing power of most Indian consumers was relatively small. In 1915, American officials estimated that Indians on average bought foreign goods for less than US$2 per year. For this impending, new middle-class, only inexpensive articles had a chance to sell: “It is a question of not how good but how cheap,” concluded the 1915 American consular report.Footnote ²¹

India and China both had large populations and their respective “open door” policies turned them into interesting markets for Western gramophone manufacturers. In both countries, Western companies competed for the opportunity of serving a potentially huge consumer market, even if purchasing power remained low.

First Experiences in India and China

The first Western gramophone company to take a serious interest in India was the Anglo-American Gramophone Co. In July 1901, the company sent John Watson Hawd to open a branch office in Calcutta.Footnote ²² While Hawd was confident that a successful business could be done, he criticized the choice of recorded music on offer. The company’s initial strategy of selling English music in India—songs and dance melodies as well as English comical pieces—failed because local consumers showed little interest in Western music. Indeed, over the next decades, witnesses repeatedly confirmed that Indian music lovers were uninterested in foreign music and often “found most Western music a chaotic and intolerable noise.”Footnote ²³ Hawd shared these worries and reported back to the headquarters that “until we get native records we shall only be able to sell to Europeans and they are only 1 per 100 natives.”Footnote ²⁴ Therefore, his most urgent task was to amass a larger selection of native music. The Gramophone Co.’s first recordings of Indian music had been made in London in 1899 with artists who had no previous reputation in India. Hawd pleaded for a recording session to be organized in India. “You must however send one man to make records,” he insisted in October 1901.Footnote ²⁵

Sending out recording engineers to different European markets was a typical strategy to spot new talent and expand the company’s repertoire.Footnote ²⁶ One of the most talented recording engineers was Fred Reference GaisbergGaisberg (1873–1951) who had worked for the Columbia Phonograph Co. in Washington, D.C., before arriving in England in 1898. In the following years, he travelled extensively through Europe and Russia to record the most famous artists of the time for the Gramophone Co. In April 1902, he arranged the first recordings of the tenor Enrico Caruso in Milan, paying the extraordinary sum of £100 for ten songs. These records not only paved the way for Caruso’s career in England (1902) and the United States (1903), they also demonstrated the economic potential inherent in even just a single successfully-made recording.Footnote ²⁷ In late September, Reference GaisbergGaisberg, his nineteen-year-old assistant, George Dillnutt, and the businessman Thomas Dowe Addis embarked on a recording expedition to the Far East during which they visited Colombo, Calcutta, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Rangoon.Footnote ²⁸ According to Reference GaisbergGaisberg, the aim of this trip was “to open up new markets, establish agencies, and acquire a catalogue of native records.”Footnote ²⁹

Reference GaisbergGaisberg and his fellow travellers reached Calcutta in October 1902, where John Hawd awaited the crew. He arranged for a location for the recording sessions and got in touch with Amarendra Nath Dutt of the Classic Theatre and Jamshedi Framji Madan of the Corinthian Theatre, who established contact with local artists. Dutt was known to be interested in the technology of sound recordings and had earlier purchased an Edison phonograph, which he used to record dialogues and songs of the plays being performed. Madan also took an interest in the newly emerging sound and motion-picture technologies and owned a motion picture projector. The theatres were the main entertainment centres for the general public at the time.Footnote ³⁰

The first recordings, made on November 8, 1902, were of two so-called “nautch girls” who sang and performed a style of popular dance for the recording crew.Footnote ³¹ Generally speaking, Reference GaisbergGaisberg found it hard to understand Indian music. “We entered a new world of musical and artistic values. . . . The very foundations of my musical training were undermined,” he wrote in his travelogue.Footnote ³² However, the British staff of Gramophone’s local office had even less understanding for the music, according to Reference GaisbergGaisberg. “I soon discovered that the English, whom we contacted and who were acting as our agents and factors, might be living on another planet for all the interest they took in Indian music.”Footnote ³³

Reference GaisbergGaisberg recorded several artists, among them the renowned female singer Gauhar Jan, who at the time was a local celebrity.Footnote ³⁴ Public performance of women was considered a low-status and often disreputable profession. The nautch girls performed music and dance in front of their audience accompanied by male musicians, who also acted as their teachers. Nautch girls traditionally performed at the courts and often belonged to families with a long tradition of musical performance. As this patronage declined in the early twentieth century, music was more often performed in urban centres.Footnote ³⁵ While Gauhar Jan came from the tradition of nautch girls, she also represented a group of professional urban musicians who became more common after the turn of the century.Footnote ³⁶

Figure 1

Nautch Girl Dancing on Rug, ca 1914 Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.: LC-USZ62-133133.

Figure 2

Nautch Girl Dancing with Musicians, Calcutta, India, ca 1900Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.: LC-USZ62-35125.

During their six-week stay in Kolkata, Reference GaisbergGaisberg and his crew made over 500 matrices, finished records of which were manufactured in Hannover, Germany, and shipped to India in April 1903.Footnote ³⁷ The newly available recordings in combination with heavy press advertising increased the popularity of the gramophone in India significantly.Footnote ³⁸ Gramophone’s new agent in Kolkata, Thomas Addis, who took over from Hawd, observed the growing market closely. While he was satisfied overall, he echoed his predecessor’s concern over localization: “India is a peculiar country in regard to languages as if you go 300 miles out of Calcutta you would find a different dialect altogether. . . . Each particular district has its own local and popular singers male and female.”Footnote ³⁹ According to Addis, the better off middle class increasingly requested recordings of these local artists. In response, Gramophone instructed him to extend the catalogue by 2,500 records in order to cover the twelve languages that were considered most popular, without further specifications for musical genre or style.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, at the end of the year 1904, Addis was still dissatisfied: “We have taken records in various vernaculars, but we have not, in my opinion, gone far enough into this matter.”Footnote ⁴¹ Language became a proxy for the cultural and musical diversity that the Westerners could not grasp.

From India, Reference GaisbergGaisberg and his team travelled via Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Shanghai to Japan, where they recorded about 600 titles. In early March 1903, the group arrived back in Shanghai, and Reference GaisbergGaisberg contacted the centrally located British music house Moutrie, Robinson & Co. On March 16, he talked to the Chinese comprador George Jailing, whose task it was to select artists and repertoire. Xu Qianlin, as was his Chinese name (he was also known as C. L. Zeen), had worked since 1882 for Moutrie & Co. and was a Peking opera fan and lay actor (piaoyou), who was well-connected in Shanghai’s entertainment world.

Figure 3

Xu Qianlin (C. L. Zeen), Music Comprador, Moutrie & Co., ShanghaiWho’s Who in China, 3rd ed. (Shanghai: 1925), 338.

Two days later, recording began, challenging Reference GaisbergGaisberg in a particular way. “Their idea of music is a tremendous clash and bang,” he wrote. “On the first day, after making ten records, we had to stop: the din had so paralyzed my wits that I could not think.” Later, he wrote “Up to the 27^th March we made 325 records, of which we paid $4 each. To me, the difference between the tunes of any two records were too slight to detect.”Footnote ⁴² From Shanghai, the team moved to Hong Kong, where it experienced similar cultural encounters. After all, Reference GaisbergGaisberg succeeded in recording 470 matrices in China. These had been quickly sent to the pressing plant in Hannover, and by July 1903 were already advertised in Shanghai’s daily newspaper Shenbao.

The Gramophone Company’s internal correspondence suggests that there was a great demand for Chinese records, and the company was afraid of not being able to control the record transfer to China. Agencies in Brussels and Paris were advised to monitor the transfer and, upon being asked about the material, were told: “We can give you very little information as to the character of the records except to say they seem to be very fine reproductions of their kind.”Footnote ⁴³ This answer was clearly not satisfying, because a week later it was said: “We find that nearly all enquirers have asked definitely for either the Cantonese or the Mandarin dialect records, stating particularly that they had no use for the other dialects.”Footnote ⁴⁴ However, the representatives of the company were unable to distinguish between the dialects. In a letter of February 8, 1904, one correspondent confessed, “As far as we can tell there is little to distinguish one record from another, except the fact that some are instrumental and some vocal.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Still eager to enter the Chinese market, in 1904 Gramophone, supported by Victor, managed to publish its first Chinese record catalogue, splitting the repertoire into sections of Cantonese and Mandarin as well as male and female voices. The catalogue, the earliest surviving Chinese record catalogue, offered a combination of China’s most popular and commercially attractive musical genres of the time: Peking opera, Cantonese opera, and teahouse songs, the latter often sung by courtesans or prostitutes.Footnote ⁴⁶

Reference GaisbergGaisberg may have been irritated, but his music-comprador Xu Qianlin had made a good selection of popular and therefore commercially attractive artists. Among the recorded “stars” singing in Mandarin were established Peking opera actors such as Zhou Fenglin (1866–1917), Wang Guifen (1860–1906), Wang Hongshou (1850–1925), and Li Chunlai (1855–1924). Most “popular” (or accessible) were Liu Yongchun (1862–1926) and Lin Buqing (1862–1918), who recorded seventeen and thirteen records respectively, and the young rising star Feng Zihe (1888–1942), who made fifteen records on that occasion. The most popular female artists were Jin Xiaobao, Lin Guifen, and Lin Daiyu.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although it is difficult to speculate about sales at this early stage, some records seemed to have sold quite well and were re-issued nearly ten years later in a Victor (His Master’s Voice) catalogue.Footnote ⁴⁸

In summary, Gramophone was the first Western gramophone company engaging in a recording expedition in Asia, including both India and China. As first mover, the firm quickly realized that selling English music to local consumers was unsuccessful, and the staff on the ground repeatedly recommended that more native music be recorded. Neither the recording engineers nor the Western agents, however, had the necessary insights into local music culture to make a systematic selection of different musical genres or artists. They relied heavily on their indigenous contacts, mostly recruited from theatres and other entertainment places.

Language became a first, if often inadequate and poorly understood, proxy for musical diversity. In India, making records in many different vernaculars was one way of diversifying the portfolio and responding to customer demand. Gramophone representatives by no means had the necessary skills to judge musical quality and entertainment value but bet on diverse offerings and the selection of their local intermediaries. In China, even the retrospective identification of the different languages became a major obstacle. Nevertheless, the recording selections were both successful at the time and seem well-selected in retrospect, thanks to the intermediaries on the ground. The first mover was in many regards “flying blind” in an alien environment with a diverse and sophisticated musical tradition, which the recording engineers, trained in Western music, neither understood nor appreciated. Remarkably, in both India and China, early recordings included popular artists who were socially stigmatized (courtesans). These female voices were literally moved out of socially disrespectable contexts into private homes, indicating that the gramophone technology enabled the separation of music from performance, thus creating a socially unassailable consumption of different musical genres.

Western Competition: Artists, Prices, and Localization

Gramophone Co. was not the only company that realized the opportunities related to the growing business in India and China. Almost simultaneously the American Columbia Record Co., the French company Pathé Frères, the German Beka Records, and others became active in Asia. The competitive and “colonizing” spirit of the times was captured in an interview with Charles J. Hopkins of Columbia, who remarked in 1904, “My little trip took me about 14 months from start to finish; little longer than Jules Verne’s ‘Round the World in Eighty Days,’ but then you see I was out after business and not globe-trotting for pleasure. . . . Yes, I think I may say that I opened up business for the Columbia to the ends of the earth.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Upon his arrival in Hong Kong in February 1906, Heinrich Bumb (Beka Records) realized how tense the situation had become and wrote, “we met with strong American competition in Hong Kong. The Columbia Graphophone Co. had only recently finished its new recordings, people were speaking of 1,000 pieces and a honorarium of 50,000 USD. The ‘Victor’, ‘Gramophone’, together with ‘Zonophone’ and ‘Odeon’, all were there.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In 1904, the firm Nicole Frère, originally founded in 1815 as a manufacturer of musical boxes in Geneva, Switzerland, sent its first recording engineer to Calcutta. The French company Société Pathé Frères, founded in 1896, also took an early interest in the Indian and Chinese market. In late 1900, Messrs Pathé Phono-Cinema-China Co. opened an office in Shanghai for the distribution of film equipment. Record production began officially with the establishment of the Compagnie Pathé-Orient in August 1907 in Shanghai. By the end of the year, another main office was opened in Calcutta in cooperation with Hemendra Bose, a local entrepreneur. Bose first represented Pathé’s interests in India, then started making home recordings and had them manufactured by Pathé in France in 1905 and 1906.Footnote ⁵¹ The industry became increasingly competitive.

Both the American Talking Machine Co. and the German Beka followed in the first-mover’s footsteps and went on their first expeditions in 1905. Beka owner Heinrich Bumb himself departed Germany on October 5, 1905. Together with his wife and a small crew he travelled from Berlin via Vienna and Budapest to Constantinople, from where the recording team basically followed the Reference GaisbergGaisberg route. One month after they returned to Berlin on June 17, 1906, the Phonographische Zeitschrift was proud to announce that the last of about 1,400 Asiatic records had recently left the pressing plant.Footnote ⁵² German trade journals celebrated Beka as the company that introduced German gramophones to Asia and that “entertained excellent relationships with Asian countries.”Footnote ⁵³

In India, Beka cooperated with the local firm Valabhdas Lakhmidas and Co., which arranged for artists to be recorded. The Beka recordings quickly became successful. “Their popularity is second to none in our territory,” reported Valabhdas in an American trade journal, and he announced that “800 to 1,000 records in all the principal dialects of our country” were to be made.Footnote ⁵⁴ Valabhdas became Beka’s sole agent for India under rather favourable conditions: Beka sent large quantities of goods on consignment, allowed the Indian agent to pay for them only when they were sold, and did not expect a minimum quantity of sales in a fixed time period. Moreover, Beka guaranteed Valabhdas the sole and exclusive rights to sell Beka products throughout the British Indian Empire.Footnote ⁵⁵ Unlike Gramophone, which worked with a number of mostly British agents, Beka and Valabhdas entered an exclusive relationship. In addition to musical recordings, Beka and several local entrepreneurs also offered political speeches on record, which in the increasingly politicized environment became a hot commodity, as we will see in the next section.

Gramophone considered the new competition inferior: “The ‘Beka’ Records (Native) are . . . poor stuff. No class whatever, and not to be compared with our Records.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Nevertheless, Gramophone took some countermeasures to guarantee its position as market leader. In November 1906, the London headquarters debated the option of reissuing records that had been withdrawn from the catalogue at a cheaper price “as a measure for the destruction of the Beka Agency.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Gramophone later went on a third recording expedition in 1906 with the mission “to furnish records for the natives and not for Europeans.”Footnote ⁵⁸

One year later, a second German competitor, the Talking Machine GmbH of Berlin, entered the Indian market. The company was known for its Odeon record label with the logo of a classical dome. Shortly after the expedition, Odeon released a South Indian catalogue and became a big importer of both machines and discs. Beka, too, dispatched another expedition to India focusing successfully on vernaculars that had not been previously recorded. By 1908, Beka had approximately 1,000 titles to offer Indian consumers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Among these were recordings by famous classical singers, such as Kherati, Purshottam, and Mereilal, but also unknown singers, such as one Kolkata-based artist described mockingly in a German trade journal as an “excellent bawler.”Footnote ⁶⁰

As competition increased, Gramophone struggled with its agents to assure the exclusive sale of their products. The company’s agent, Messrs Mullick Bros, was caught selling Beka records in two of their retail shops in 1907. Questioned about it, the agent claimed to keep only a few Beka records in store that were not available from Gramophone’s list, and he was reluctant to give up this business.Footnote ⁶¹

The growing competition also led to price pressure. The Indian market had a large demand for cheap gramophones, whereas the high-end machines rarely sold. However, Gramophone made little attempt to penetrate the mass market and left the low-end machine business to German competitors. The bestselling gramophones in the two decades before World War I cost about 40 INR, around US$13, which equalled two months’ wages for a skilled blacksmith or carpenter. The high-end models, in which Gramophone specialized, cost between 225 and 800 INR (72–260 USD.) The cheapest machines from Germany were available for 9.25 INR, or 3 USD.Footnote ⁶² German manufacturers were able to sell cheaper machines because many inventions intended to lower the price of production originated in Germany.Footnote ⁶³ Just before World War I, the intense price competition led to a situation in which gramophones were available in native bazaars for such low prices that musical instrument dealers gave up on the low-end gramophone business because the profit margins were too low, often less than 0.30 USD per machine.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gramophone records sold for between 3 and 6 INR (1–2 USD). Beka and Odeon records were slightly cheaper, selling for 3 to 4 INR (1–1.3 USD). Faced with this competition, Gramophone dropped the price of its records twice, in January 1907 and again in January 1908.Footnote ⁶⁵

As previously agreed upon, Victor did not interfere in the Indian market but concentrated on China, which was considered a promising though contested and unstable market that consisted primarily of the treaty ports and colonies. In contrast to India, where Gramophone established a local pressing facility in 1908, the Chinese market remained an import-export business until around 1919–20, when Pathé started to operate China’s first record pressing plant in Shanghai.

Already around 1905, gramophones were used in public places to attract audiences and listeners; they were also used to advertise certain products on the streets, especially in the treaty ports. The machines had entered the homes of wealthier Chinese, and the industry was convinced that increased business lay with cheaper machines and the production of “native records.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The increasingly competitive discourse is reflected in the following quote from The Talking Machine News of September 1911:

Despite all its potential, the Chinese market remained problematic, and China was evaluated as “still only a small buyer of talking machines” by April 1912.Footnote ⁶⁸ To successfully produce “native records,” however, the companies had to establish a good relationship with a Chinese comprador who was musically minded, business-oriented, and well-connected in the entertainment world.

Frederick Reference GaisbergGaisberg had worked with Xu Qianlin, the comprador of Moutrie & Co., Shanghai’s largest music house, with sub-offices in Tianjin, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Moutrie & Co. was selling musical instruments, especially pianos, yet the gramophone trade became increasingly important. The Victor Talking Machine continued this collaboration, relied on Moutrie’s network, and also worked with another comprador, about whom we find a rare and extraordinary positive characterization in the Talking Machine Reference GeWorld in 1906:

Figure 4

Mr. Yuen Sing Foong, Music Comprador, Moutrie & Co. and VictorTalking Machine World 2:6 (1906): 35.

The article underscored the importance of the Chinese comprador, whose responsibility it was to “secure the best talent in China.” In the early days, and until the late 1920s, these experts were strongly connected to the Peking opera scene and often active as piaoyou. The term describes “music fans,” activists who came together in clubs and organized performances and sometimes even became professionals. The “piaoyou-scene” was big, and they were all studying and learning the styles of their preferred actors. Musical records provided a new tool to study the original, which also explains why these students eagerly supported the new business from the beginning. They did have the expertise to discuss with the artist the selection of a “popular” two- to three-minute aria for recording, selected from a several hours-long opera.

Meanwhile, since this was a time when the overall consequences of the new business were largely unknown, the opera world and its piaoyou organization also provided the basis for (in today’s terms) “illegal” and rather destructive recording practices. A well-known example of the early days concerns the Peking opera actor Tan Xinpei (1847–1917), was the most highly acclaimed actor of his time, both in Beijing and Shanghai.

Figure 5

Beijing Opera Actors Wang Yaoqing and Tan Xinpei Moutrie & Co., Victor-Katalog, ca 1913.

Tan was invited to perform for the Empress Dowager Cixi in the Forbidden City, and was chosen to act in China’s first film production in 1905. Recording companies had eagerly asked him to sign a contract, but he hesitated because he believed that the new technology was stealing his voice, or, in other words, that with every recording he would give away a part of his voice.Footnote ⁷⁰ Due to his fame, there were many piaoyou learning and imitating his Tan-style and singing techniques. Far away from Beijing and his “real audience,” Xu Qianlin therefore asked several piaoyou to record Tan’s famous opera pieces and later sold them under the name of the great actor. While laypersons may not have heard the difference, news that Tan Xinpei had made records quickly spread among insider circles but were finally denied by the master himself. While this practice had a strong negative impact on HMV’s reputation, other record companies, like Columbia and Beka, acted similarly.Footnote ⁷¹ Circulation of these recordings continued often unnoticed, but remained irritating and disturbing for professionals. China’s most famous opera star of those decades, Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), criticized this as late as 1961.Footnote ⁷²

Within this competitive environment of the early years, Beka left a rather obscure image of its activities. The records made by Heinrich Bumb were advertised abroad in five dialects in The Talking Machine World Reference Geandin The Talking Machine News in 1906 and 1907 respectively. However, neither a catalogue was printed, nor were the records promoted in any known Chinese journal or newspaper. Despite this lack of promotion, Beka “Grand” records were obviously well received. Organizing the China business via its London agent Otto Ruehl (who also covered Hong Kong and the colonies), Beka sent its recording engineers again to China in 1907/08. This time, as we can read from Reference Du JunDu Jun Min, the company also followed the aforementioned “bad practice” and produced lip-synched records: “For example, a few records were labelled with Tan Xinpei … as the singer, but the recordings were in fact sung by others.” Footnote ⁷³ Shortly thereafter, Beka (1911) and Odeon (1910), both active in China, merged with the Berlin based Carl Lindstroem AG. Together with the new Lindstroem Parlophon label they continued their China business until the outbreak of World War I.

In this period, however, French Pathé established itself as the most successful recording company in China. In 1907, the Compagnie Pathé-Orient officially opened its bureau in Shanghai and one year later its first recordings were advertised in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao. In 1910, M. E. Labansat (?–1939) joined the company, after having established branch offices for Pathé in India, the Straits Settlements, Indo-China, and Hong Kong. Probably due to his experience, under his tutelage the company quickly introduced its new Chinese name Baidai and began a very fruitful cooperation with the piaoyou Zhang Changfu. The latter was well connected in Beijing’s opera world and, through his contacts to several amateur clubs in Peking, Tientsin (Tianjin), and Shanghai, helped Pathé to record the famous actors of the time. We can assume that he was upset when he had heard of the “fake” Tan Xinpai recordings and used all his competence to coax Tan into the recording studio. The company succeeded in producing two record sides, due to an honorarium of two pieces of opium worth fifty liang of silver.Footnote ⁷⁴ This was a high salary to be paid on the spot, but one that followed the “blockbuster logic” of the recording business and quickly paid off. The record catalogue published in 1908–1909 not only included, as was custom, several famous “girls” (guniang) of its time, but also advertised Tan Xinpei’s records on its first page, together with a handwritten comment by Tan himself to prove their authenticity.

Figure 6

Female Artists “Girl Yu Bao” and “Girl Xiao Cui”Pathé-Catalogue, Shanghai, ca 1910.

Obviously satisfied with the result, Tan recorded a second set of twelve sides in 1912. For Pathé this was a clever move, because Pathé and Victor were strong competitors in China, manifested also in the fact that people were talking about the fight between “(American) dog and (French) rooster.” Knowing that Tan Xinpei’s real voice testified to the company’s reputation, his records remained on the catalogue’s first page until the 1930s.

In an increasingly growing market, French Pathé-Orient soon became very successful. “The gramophone and phonograph, writes our representative, has made surprising headway in China and the Far East,” reported Talking Machine News in 1914. “Among the wealthier classes there seems to be hardly a home without its ‘talker.’ What, however, is wanted is the proper handling of records. Native music is much in demand.”Footnote ⁷⁵

In both India and China, Western manufacturers entered into a fierce competition based on selection, cooperation with the most knowledgeable local experts, and price. The competitors imitated the basic strategy of sending recording engineers to cooperate with local entrepreneurs (compradors) and spot local talents. Learning from Gramophone’s previous experience, they paid particular attention to the challenges of localization. In India, the two German manufacturers achieved relative success because they offered a cheaper product and put an emphasis on local responsiveness; however, Gramophone remained the market leader. In China, the French Pathé had the edge over competitors and was the first to open its bureau and maintain close contact to the opera and music scene via its comprador. Reliability, good connections, and cooperation with the most famous actor of that time added to the reputation of the company. The competent local expert and a strong continuous relationship determined success and failure in the respective market.

Political Imperatives on the Gramophone Market

Local adaptation was not restricted to finding popular artists and compradors. In addition, both the Indian and Chinese market came with distinctive political challenges, which directly affected the gramophone business.

In India, Western manufacturers initially enjoyed a competitive advantage due to their first-hand access to technology. However, Indian competitors quickly caught up. Since 1905, local entrepreneurs benefitted from an upheaval of nationalism, the so-called swadeshi movement, which opened up a profitable niche for them. The swadeshi movement—swadeshi meaning “from one’s own country”—called on Indians to consume indigenous goods, rather than imported ones, claiming that foreign imports stalled national economic development. Swadeshi ideas were known since approximately the mid-nineteenth century, but the movement experienced a major push in the wake of the anti-partition campaign in Bengal in 1905. The viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, decided to partition the province of Bengal, which he allegedly considered too large for effective governance. Lord Curzon’s plans were met with deep resentment and the partition led to a surge of Indian nationalism, during which activists called for a boycott of foreign imports.Footnote ⁷⁶ “Terrible oppression has commenced . . . the remedy for this state of things lies in giving up entirely the use of foreign goods and in using country-made goods,” argued a nationalist newspaper in 1906.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indian manufacturers in different industries saw that the swadeshi agitation increased the demand for their goods.Footnote ⁷⁸ The impact of swadeshi was greatest in the province of Bengal and triggered the founding of a number of Bengali enterprises.Footnote ⁷⁹

In this context, Bose refocused his record business. While he had previously imported blanks from Pathé Frères, by 1907 Bose manufactured his own blank cylinders in Kolkata. As a Bengali businessman, Bose advertised his records as “the only real swadeshi records.” He also specialized in nationalist music and speeches, which sold increasingly well. Stirring swadeshi sentiments among his customers, Bose declared: “The manufacture of these records . . . points out most clearly that the Indians . . . not only compete fairly with other nations, but in some cases beat them.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Famous Bengali artists, such as Rabindranath Tagore and Dwijendra Lal Roy, supported Bose’s business, while declining to work with the Gramophone Co. The impact of the swadeshi movement on Western gramophone firms is hard to quantify because turnover and profit data is largely unavailable. Qualitative sources suggest that Indian nationalism, at least temporarily, presented an obstacle to Gramophone in the region. In June 1906, the company stated “Bengali Trade [that is, trade in Bengali Records] is practically at a standstill. The Bengalis are boycotting us as much as possible.”Footnote ⁸¹

Swadeshi activists promoted the consumption of indigenous goods over all foreign imports. However, British goods were most strongly rejected; cooperating with foreigners from other countries was a matter of pragmatism.Footnote ⁸² For this reason, swadeshi posed a problem for Gramophone, the market leader, in two respects. The movement called for a boycott of Gramophone’s products and favoured not just local but all non-British alternatives. “We are boycotted practically, and our trade is entirely done by Mohommedans [sic] and a few Europeans,” Gramophone’s India office reported to London in 1906.Footnote ⁸³

As country of origin developed into a competitive advantage, different strategies emerged. The French Pathé and the German Beka successfully cooperated with the local elite, even with swadeshi activists, which allowed them access to the growing market for nationalist music and speeches. Bose had a long relationship with Pathé, which became important for him when discs increasingly overtook the popularity of cylinders. Starting in 1908, Bose made his recordings available on disc by cooperating with Pathé and re-releasing earlier recordings as “Pathé/H. Bose’s Records” discs.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although Bose again became partly dependent on the technology of a Western manufacturer, he managed to sustain his image as a local swadeshi businessman because his Western partner was French, not British.

Gramophone, on the other hand, did not have that option and invested instead in its first manufacturing facility in India, one mile east of the commercial centre of Kolkata. The first Indian discs were pressed there in June 1908. Gramophone also established permanent recording studios in Kolkata, Mumbai, and Chennai. The Indian facilities had a number of advantages for the company. Manufacturing and transportation costs as well as delivery times decreased. Due to the political context, it was also an advantage that Gramophone could hereafter advertise: “Our Indian, Burmese and Ceylonese records are now made at our Calcutta factory—using Indian materials—by Indian workmen,”Footnote ⁸⁵ thus presenting themselves as a swadeshi-conscious business. By December 1908, the factory was pressing 1,000 discs per day.Footnote ⁸⁶

In China, on the other hand, and as mentioned earlier, the gramophone companies arrived in a decade of turmoil and transition as well as anti-Manchu and anti-foreign nationalism. Reference GerthKarl Gerth speaks of an ethic of nationalistic consumption, which from 1905 onwards culminated in a range of anti-imperialist boycotts.Footnote ⁸⁷ Influenced by European and Japanese ideas and cultural practices, these trends and sentiments were also reflected in intellectual and artistic circles. In “new plays” (xinju) and “new theater” (xinxi) a new generation of artists wrote plays with contemporary themes of political or social critical content that enjoyed popularity among young urban audiences. In this context, musical records may have been recorded with political messages, for example via anti-Manchu Peking opera plays, yet this is still a blind spot in China’s early record history. Deliberate production of records for political messages surely thrived during the 1920s, notably the 1924 recordings of speeches by Dr Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary first president and founding father of the Republic of China.

While there is no proof that the gramophone business was a particular target of the boycotts, one outstanding example of this period is the conflict about trademarks that Victor had to deal with regarding the logo for “His Master’s Voice,” which depicted a dog listening to a gramophone. The background to the conflict was an anti-American movement and boycott in 1905–1906. Around that time, about 100,000 Chinese were living in the mainland United States, threatened by a strong antipathy for Chinese immigrants manifested in racism, abuse, and mistreatment. The first Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) reflected this rejection, but two decades and a series of more severe exclusion acts later, China had become confident to resist. The immediate cause was the return of a Chinese with American citizenship to the United States, after he had visited his family in China. The story of his severe and inhumane treatment by immigration officials quickly reached China and escalated into a nationwide movement. Organized by the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, the boycott is often seen as the first expression of mass nationalism in China.Footnote ⁸⁸

Supported by merchants, students, and artists, popular anti-American propaganda also affected Victor’s China business, with the famous logo of the dog “Nipper” listening to the voice of his master via a gramophone coming in for special criticism. The trademark had been widely used in the United States since 1902 and it soon circulated globally. Chinese consumers, however, began to read the image as an insult, which in this politically sensitive period forced Victor to temporarily change its label for the Chinese market. As the Washington Post reported in late 1905,

Figure 7

Victor Record Labels, ca 1905Courtesy of Du Junmin, Dalian, China.

With the outbreak of World War I, the market for gramophones and records fell into turmoil. The German gramophone companies completely lost their position in the Indian market and all of their assets were expropriated as “enemy property.” For the most part, American, Swiss, and Japanese competitors managed to take over the market share, but the war also created a favourable environment for local goods because it interrupted imports into the country. In 1919, the total value of the import trade was only half that before the war, and the British share had declined from 70 to 50 per cent.Footnote ⁹⁰ Gramophone, freed of some of its biggest competitors and with a local production site, nevertheless remained the clear market leader in India.

In China, with the outbreak of World War I, foreign record companies started engaging in war production at home and for that reason left China. Pathé-Orient, however, grasped the chance and managed its Shanghai office during the war years. The Talking Machine News commented in November 1915, “As showing the world-wide extent of the Pathé business, we might mention that Mr. Hunting [recording director for the Pathé interests abroad] has gone on a special recording mission into China, with which vast country the eminent Paris house does a very large business.”Footnote ⁹¹ In China, Pathé was competing with Japan, whose gramophone companies used the opportunity to enlarge their business in Asia. Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who spent most of his sixteen years in exile in Japan (1895-1911), probably also realized the political potential of the recording technology during WWI, and in 1917 he proposed the establishment of a national Chinese record company with Japanese support.Footnote ⁹² For the moment, however, only Pathé maintained old and established new contacts, selected and supported talents, and finally built China’s first record plant. The company had its booming years during the 1920s before it was taken over by the British Columbia in 1928 and later became part of EMI London.Footnote ⁹³

In summary, nationalistic sentiments and events pushed gramophone manufacturers to further localize products and production processes in both India and China, though to different degrees. The Indian swadeshi movement called for a boycott of foreign products but lobbied most urgently against British imports, pragmatically accepting some cooperation with other Westerners. Chinese anti-Americanism instead forced Victor to revise its famous global trademark, which damaged the universal brand image but gave Victor more legitimacy in China, where the image of a dog listening to the gramophone was seen as a cultural, even racial insult. While direct economic results of the nationalistic protests may have been limited and are certainly hard to measure, the fear of the potential consequences of Indian and Chinese nationalism drove Western manufacturers towards stronger localization. In both countries, World War I served as a trigger for the fierce competition between different manufacturers to temporarily end. In both India and China one market leader emerged, albeit different ones.