During Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in 1958, Chinese citizens were encouraged to bang on pots and pans to drive the country's sparrows to death. Mao's thinking was that the tiny birds, along with rats, flies, and mosquitoes, were pests that ate grain seeds, which the people needed for food.
The sound of banging drove the birds from their nests to fly around until they dropped dead of exhaustion.
Colin Chinnery wants to record that sound. He also hopes to recreate—with the help of actors and sound technicians—the voices of the Red Guards shouting Maoist slogans during the Cultural Revolution, the wind whistling through the imported Canadian poplars that were planted in Beijing in the 1950s, and even the screech of the brakes on modern Beijing buses.
Chinnery’s Beijing Sound History Project seeks to preserve history in a city that is rapidly destroying its own heritage every day. "There’s a goldmine of information and stories" that come from seeking out the sounds of Beijing, from its pre-revolutionary days to today, Chinnery says.
-Saving the Clangs, Songs, and Shouts of Old Beijing
