Introduction
The Archives are in possession of 716 aluminum discs that mostly contain the recordings of various dialects collected by early linguists Yuan-jen Chao (1892–1982), Fang-kuei Li (1902–1987), and Chang-pei Lo (1899–1958) while conducting surveys in the field. Contents include the reading of stories, conversations, the pronunciation of individual sounds and words, and folksongs. Some discs are also likely copies of recordings of music, speeches, or records labeled as foreign languages. The archival materials were originally categorized as follows: Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Yunnan, Jiangsu, Fujian, Hubei, Guangdong, Tibet, Shaanxi, Xinjiang, Siam, Arabia, folksongs, music and speeches, and other.
After becoming the head of the Linguistics Department at the IHP, Chao, supported by funds from the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, established a professional linguistic research center which used these aluminum discs along with other equipment mainly purchased from the United States beginning in 1933. To date, the Archives have successfully read some audio files from these aluminum discs, and if interested, we suggest listening to a piece of audio that is a recording of the Xiuning dialect in Anhui from 1934. The speaker is Liu Chengchang, who tells the story “The Fox and the Tiger.” In July of that year, Chao, Lo, and Shih-feng Yang (1903–1989) conducted dialect surveys in six counties of Anhui, which feature a rich variety of dialects in part because of inconvenient travels. Lo likelyrecorded this disc during that trip.
After becoming the head of the Linguistics Department at the IHP, Chao, supported by funds from the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, established a professional linguistic research center which used these aluminum discs along with other equipment mainly purchased from the United States beginning in 1933. To date, the Archives have successfully read some audio files from these aluminum discs, and if interested, we suggest listening to a piece of audio that is a recording of the Xiuning dialect in Anhui from 1934. The speaker is Liu Chengchang, who tells the story “The Fox and the Tiger.” In July of that year, Chao, Lo, and Shih-feng Yang (1903–1989) conducted dialect surveys in six counties of Anhui, which feature a rich variety of dialects in part because of inconvenient travels. Lo likelyrecorded this disc during that trip.