Songs and Folk Tunes · Songs of Tibet and the Northwest Peoples · SE10111

In That Faraway Place

A song from the Jinyintan grassland

Introduction

A northwestern folk song arranged by Wang Luobin from a Kazakh melody, first heard in Xining in 1940

In That Faraway Place is a northwestern folk song arranged by Wang Luobin from the Kazakh folk song The Fair Brow, and the accompaniment of the common version was written by Chen Tianhe. Wang's tombstone dates it to the summer of 1939, while other accounts give 1940 or 1941, and its story is tied to Zheng Junli's filming of the documentary Long Live the Nation on the Jinyintan grassland near Qinghai Lake. The melody first appeared as I Would Be a Shepherd in the opera Song of the Desert, staged in Xining in 1940, and it was first printed under its present title in a 1946 anthology of Chinese folk songs. Hu Ran made the earliest known public recording around 1947, and Yu Yixuan sang it in 1951 as Grassland Love Song. Later singers such as Lou Qiangui and Tian Ming'en recorded it in turn, and the song has been sung ever since.