European musical explorers had China in their sights three centuries before the era of recording; prominent among them were Jesuit priests. And the influence of their discoveries could be far-reaching: by introducing the sheng mouth organ to Europe in 1777, Father Joseph Amiot paved the way for the invention of the harmonica and the accordion. Chinese musicologists, who beat their European counterparts in the race to solve the mathematics of equal temperament, were in many ways ahead.

The Jesuit project was to win souls for Christ, but in China they realised they would only achieve that by going native. One of the first of these explorer-missionaries was an Italian named Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who wore the traditional silk robes of the Confucian literati and was one of the first Western scholars to speak and write Mandarin; his intellectual feats included translating Euclid into Chinese, and mapping the world in Chinese characters. It was this cultural immersion that earned him the honour of being, in 1601, the first European allowed to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing. The clavichord with which he charmed the reclusive emperor Wan Li was his hook to engage the monarch’s interest in both Western music and the religion of which that music was the expression.

Ricci was an omnivorous diarist, and although he didn’t make a formal study of Chinese music he did observe it, even if his reaction was lordly disdain. While living in Nanjing he witnessed a rehearsal for a Confucian ceremony in which priests played ‘elegant’ music, as opposed to its raucous ‘banquet’ counterpart. ‘The priests who composed the orchestra were vested in sumptuous garments,’ he noted,