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Oliver Chou

'What a lovely jasmine flower
What a lovely jasmine flower
Branches full of buds fragrant and elegant
Everyone praises you
Let me gather you 
and offer to those I love
Jasmine flower, oh jasmine flower'
For the past century or so, the song Jasmine Flower, or Mo Li Hua in Chinese, was the indisputable  unofficial national anthem for China, recognised  by billions of Chinese worldwide  and by many Westerners following  Giacomo Puccini's decision to feature it in his last opera, Turandot.
The beguiling, pentatonic folk song, just seven lines long,  was the first Chinese tune  to make an impact on the West when Turandot had its first performances in  the early  20th century. In turn, the opera  had its own impact on the East.
Despite the enormous changes that China has undergone over the past 200 years, the song has survived  and grown from strength to strength,  reaching a pinnacle at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where every medal ceremony came with the Jasmine Flower tune.
Then came a sharp about-turn by the Chinese authorities three months ago,  when the song was performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo. 
The song's fate in the land where it was born and beloved for over two centuries now seems sealed with the  populist movements  that are reshaping  the Arab world. Leaders that were viewed as all-powerful and firmly entrenched in their palaces have been suddenly thrown from power in what have been termed 'jasmine revolutions'.
In 1804, the score and lyrics of Jasmine Flower  were published in Travels in China by John Barrow, a staff officer with the British delegation  to China headed by Lord Macartney (yes, the Britons who refused to kneel to the emperor). 
Though  the  1792-1794 mission to China was a failure, the song remained deep in Barrow's memory and he published it a decade later in his book, along with the following remarks:  'I never heard but one single Chinese who could be failed to sing with feeling or plaintiveness. Accompanied with a kind of guitar, he sings the following air in praise of the flower Moo-lee, which it seems is one of the most popular songs in the country.'
One reason for the song's popularity in China at that time was the  Zhuibaiqiu, an anthology of Chinese  plays published at that time. In it was a scene from a local 'Flower Drum' opera from which  the first lines of the Jasmine Flower lyrics came. But the origin of the melody remains  vague - more than 40 versions  exist, encompassing different lyrics and music.
The fact that the first published scores in Chinese traditional notation came from Yangzhou  in Jiangsu province  back in 1821, meant it was generally believed to have originated in the area.  But some musicologists say their research suggests the  melody was originally a Buddhist chant from Wutaishan, a  heartland of Buddhism  in northern Shanxi  province. 
They believe that it was through the Buddhist monks that the melody was spread all over China. 
Another school of thought holds that  the melody came from the Flower Drum  tradition of Fengyang, in Anhui  province. 
It was probably on the basis of this theory that President Hu Jintao, an Anhui native, on hearing a rendition of the song  during his 2006 state visit to Kenya, responded: 'This song, Jasmine Flower, is a famous song from my home province.'
Hu's claim does not seem to  tally with that of his predecessor Jiang Zemin  - a Yangzhou native, who reportedly asked the song to be played  at the Hong Kong handover ceremony in 1997.
But there would never have been so many claims on the song  had it been just a local folk tune,with an obscure origin, possibly based on a  Buddhist chant and praised by a Western imperialist.
It was made into a gem by the great Italian composer Puccini in his   final and arguably most glamorous opera, Turandot. 
Premiered in 1926, two years after the composer's death, the three-act opera about a tyrannical princess in the Forbidden City in old Peking uses Jasmine Flower over and over  again in various forms. 
It is first heard in Act One sung very softly by the boys' choir: 'Over on the Eastern Mountains the stork sang. But April did not bloom again, the snow did not thaw.' 
The melody is later picked up by the orchestra, which ends the Act  played and sung fortissimo by  orchestra and  chorus. 
It is heard again in Act Two just before the fearsome princess enters. This time the young voices sing against a backdrop of mesmerising strings and harp. 
Puccini died before he could finish the opera. His use of Jasmine Flower as the motif for Princess Turandot throughout the work indicated his great fondness for the song, but he never got the chance to see audiences embrace it too.
The song was probably the inspiration, too, for the moral behind the opera: love will conquer all - even the most obstinate.  
Following its great success at La Scala in Milan under the baton of legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini, Turandot became a  staple at opera houses from Paris to New York. It even reached the socialist Soviet Union in 1931. 
In 1979, during an historic visit to Beijing, the Berlin maestro Herbert von Karajan raised the issue of staging Turandot in the Forbidden City. His protege, Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa, followed suit and filed a request to the Ministry of Culture. 
But it was not until 1998, nearly 10 years after von Karajan's death that Turandot was performed next to the walls of the Tiananmen imperial palace (above, left) in a  collaboration between  Indian conductor Zubin Mehta and Chinese film director Zhang  Yimou. For the first and, as yet, only time, Jasmine Flower was heard at the very spot  that was at the heart of the setting for Puccini's last opera.  
A year before its Tiananmen premiere, Jasmine Flower was played on an even more momentous  occasion: the 1997 handover ceremony marking the return of Hong Kong to  Chinese sovereignty.  The song that the People's Liberation Army band played just before midnight on  June 30 to salute  the  leaders of China and Britain  was none other than Jasmine Flower.
Award-winning composer Tan Dun, an Oscar laureate, commemorated the occasion in his grand Symphony 1997. 
In the first movement, entitled 'Heaven', the New York-based composer alternates  the tuneful melody between children's voices and the cello of  Yo-Yo Ma.   
Into the 21st century, and Jasmine Flower's popularity grew along with China's wealth and status. It was the de facto  number one national song on stately occasions. 
At the 2004 Athens Olympics, the song was sung at the closing ceremony, and was featured in virtually all promotional materials in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. 
Also in 2004, China launched its first Confucius Institute in Seoul. It now has 322 such institutes around the world  disseminating Chinese culture, and Jasmine Flower is of course one of its favourite mediums. It was at a Confucius Institute in Nairobi  that  Hu  heard the  teachers and students sing Jasmine Flower in 2006 and even joined in.
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Jasmine Flower beat 4,000 other songs in the running to become the choice of music  for the 302 medal ceremonies. 
Even before that, the song made it to the Vatican and was played in the presence of Pope Benedict. Deng Rong, third daughter of the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, led the China Philharmonic Orchestra  and the Shanghai Opera House Chorus on the tour and was personally received by the Pope after the historic performance.
It was the first time that the Chinese melody had been  sung by Chinese performers on the  soil where Puccini turned it into a worldwide phenomenom.  
Two years after the combined forces of the orchestra and chorus  rendered  Jasmine Flower  so exuberantly, the same tune  was reduced to a melancholy solo violin voice. At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in December, Jasmine Flower was played to a global audience  by American-Chinese violinist Lynn Chang in  its darkest timbre, making it sound almost like a funeral song mourning the dead.
Now, for the first time in its long history, the 1.3 billion Chinese people living on the mainland have been banned from listening to Jasmine Flower.
'I have no enemies,' was the title of a speech by Nobel laureate Liu. The theme spoke of the very essence of Puccini's  Turandot, that is, how the power of love can  move even the most hard-hearted. But that is a long way from the reality of what is happening.
With the unfolding of the so-called jasmine revolutions in the Arab world that toppled two regimes, the word 'jasmine' has become sensitive and references to it in  internet search engines and microblogging services on the mainland are censored.
On his state visit to the US in mid-January, Hu no longer heard or sang his hometown song.  
Bloggers have been quick to link  Jasmine Flower with the protests and, in turn,  with Hu singing away in Africa.
One blogger went so far as to put in new lyrics for the song. The first few lines go: 'You can't find jasmine flowers in China. If you have one in your hand, public security will arrest you.' 
The future of the song is uncertain  but  it seems Beijing is determined to nip any form of  dissent in the bud.



From nation's favourite to populist poison