Gongchepu was a widely used musical notation system in China, particularly in the south, where it served as a mnemonic aid for Cantonese opera singing and instrumental music. Using Chinese characters to record notes, it conveyed limited information and functioned more as a memory device than a detailed compositional tool (Chan 1999; Wu 2024). In the early twentieth century, this tradition came under pressure with the introduction of cipher notation. By the 1920s, newly published scores of Cantonese music in mainland cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Tianjin increasingly adopted the new system. In contrast, Yau Hok-Chau in Hong Kong published seven collections between 1916 and 1934 in which he consistently adhered to Gongchepu. His practice, however, was not a simple continuation of tradition. He modified the system by incorporating elements from Western notation and even developing his own symbols. This hybrid approach reflected both resistance to Western influence and the pressures of modernization, while also signaling his opposition to assimilation into the cultural policies of the mainland regime (Yu 2024). Gongchepu remains active in Hong Kong’s Cantonese opera circles today, standing apart from mainland practices (Chan 1999; 2020; 2022). This paper argues that Yau Hok-Chau’s accommodation of Eastern and Western notational systems, and the inconsistent application of scores in contemporary practice functioned as a deliberate negotiation of cultural identity. By situating Gongchepu within broader debates on modernization and resistance, I demonstrate how notation itself became a site of cultural contestation in the early twentieth century.

This paper examines the complex entanglement of sociolinguistic, religious, and cultural identities among Cantonese-speaking Protestant Christians in Hong Kong and its migrant communities in San Francisco and Toronto through their worship practices. It analyzes the recent phenomenon of Fukjamjyutkuk (福音粵曲 Gospel-themed Cantonese opera), a genre that sets Christian lyrics to traditional Cantonese opera music. Once shunned by the Chinese Christians, Cantonese opera music has been reappropriated as a vehicle for worship, devotion, and evangelism. My previous study has illustrated that Fukjamjyutkuk stirs its local elderly audience with nostalgic musical elements from their childhood and Biblical text to express their new faith. This paper further discusses how Fukjamjyutkuk balances sonic, literary, and spiritual priorities to foster collective identity formation in multiple Cantonese-speaking communities. My research employs multiple approaches - historical, ethnographical, musical, literary, and theological. It traces how nineteenth-century Chinese converts first discarded traditional opera music as they adopted new spiritual and cultural identities as Chinese Christians. After mainland Chinese churches relocated to Hong Kong in the 1940s, these identities transformed when new societal and spiritual concerns developed. The Cantonese topolect’s rise to prominence in the 1970s added sociolinguistic priorities that spoke new life to an old music repertoire. This is further developed as Cantophone congregations migrated overseas. By demonstrating how these communities, local or migrant, sonically navigate identity between traditional values and global Christianity, my study connects and expands on prior scholarship in ethnomusicology, Cantophone studies, and congregational studies. (Chong, 2011; Lam, 2022; Yeung, 2023)

This paper traces a fifty‑year history of Cantopop in Canada—a cultural presence that has remained largely undocumented despite its formative role in the lives of diasporic Hong Kong communities. Drawing on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Greater Toronto Area, including sixty interviews across immigrant generations and archival research in Chinese‑ and English‑language newspapers and radio programs, I examine how Cantopop has circulated, been consumed, and sustained cultural continuity since the 1970s. The paper demonstrates how popular music functions as a site of memory, sociolinguistic connection, and belonging within Hongkonger diasporic life. Scholarship on Chinese and Hong Kong diasporic musicking in North America has largely centered on Cantonese and Peking opera (Zheng 2010; Ng 2015; Rao 2016), taiko ensembles (Lau 2004; Wong 2004), and martial arts (McGuire 2014), with limited attention to popular music (Lum 1996; Wang 2018). Research on Mandarin and Taiwanese pop (de Kloet 2005; Jones 2020) similarly overshadows Cantopop, while umbrella notions of “Chinese popular music” (Lee and Wong 2017) obscure linguistic and political distinctions central to Cantopop’s meanings (Berger 2003). As a result, Hongkongers’ cultural practices remain underrepresented in diaspora studies, even as recent sociopolitical shifts intensify efforts to articulate identities distinct from “Chinese.” By recovering this overlooked history, I position Cantopop as a lens for understanding how cultural identity, belonging, and everyday forms of resistance are negotiated transnationally, and call for greater attention to popular music in Hongkonger diasporic communities.

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