He Liutang

He Liutang came from Shawan in Panyu, Guangdong, where his grandfather He Bozhong was famed for a 'ten-finger' pipa technique. He learned the pipa from his grandfather as a boy, passed the military licentiate examination at twenty, and then devoted himself to music, collating the family's manuscript collection of scores. According to Panyu local research, he wrote down He Bozhong's unnotated Longzhou jingdu, renamed it Sailong duojin, and revised it four times with He Yunian, He Shaoxia and others. His other pieces include Qixing banyue, Huiwen jin and Niao jing xuan. In the 1920s he moved to Hong Kong, teaching pipa and Cantonese opera at the Chung Sing Benevolent Society and performing and recording in Guangzhou, and in 1931 he published a lithographed pipa anthology. He died of lung disease in Shawan in 1933.