In the 1990s, fresh out of a teaching college in Nujiang prefecture, Cui started writing her own music. But when she showed her compositions to her teachers, they told her bluntly that her songs had no Lisu characteristics.
"They said I needed to learn traditional Lisu music," she recalls.
Following the instruction, she went into the mountains, carrying small gifts of tea and cakes to the villages where the older people still remembered the traditional melodies. She sat by their fires and learned to sing the songs that had been passed down for generations.
"It was then that I saw it," she says. "The old tools and the everyday objects were just being thrown away."
As China's poverty-alleviation campaign transformed the remote prefecture — once one of the country's poorest — modern appliances and new homes replaced the old. Farmers traded their wooden plows for machines. Families moved from hillside huts into earthquake-resistant concrete houses. And the objects that had sustained Lisu life for centuries were tossed onto bonfires or left to collect dust.
"Development is a double-edged sword," says professor Gao Zhiying, a renowned ethnologist at Yunnan University who has studied Lisu culture for decades.
"It brought better lives, but some traditions couldn't be preserved," she adds.
Gao has watched Cui's collection grow from the very beginning. "When she started, she was a student of mine at the normal school," Gao recalls.
"She was so small — people say we look alike, but I'm 1.7 meters tall, and she's tiny. But in that small body, there's incredible energy, and I call it the spirit of the canyon women — once they choose a path, they never turn back."
