Turning Anji's green transformation into music

For a long time, I thought I knew my hometown, Anji county, in Zhejiang province. I grew up surrounded by its mountains and bamboo forests. The phrase "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets" was familiar to me, too.

But familiarity is not the same as understanding.

That began to change in 2017, when a school visit took me to Yucun village, whose transformation from mining to greener development would later inspire my musical, True to the Green Mountains.

As I walked through the village and listened to those who had lived through its changes, those familiar words gradually became something I could hear, see and, eventually, put into music.

True to the Green Mountains follows village Party secretary Wen Chunming, who leads his once-poor community to prosperity through mining and cement production, only to confront the environmental cost of that success. His daughter Wen Tingting, a television reporter, exposes the village's pollution, setting off a conflict over livelihoods, development and the future of their home. After failed attempts to find another path and a fatal mining accident, the villagers ultimately decide to shut down the polluting industries and pursue a greener future.

One question stayed with me throughout the creative process: What should Anji sound like?

My teacher Qiu Xiaoliu gave me an important piece of advice. She encouraged me to think about how music could convey Anji's distinct cultural and geographical identity. With that in mind, I began to search more consciously for the sounds of my hometown, incorporating the Anji nursery rhyme The Carpenter's Song, a musical motif from the folk song Visiting the Young Woman, and timbres associated with Anji's bamboo culture into the score.

I was also inspired by Professor Guo Ming's orchestral work Listening to the Wind in the Bamboo Sea, which uses the marimba to evoke the atmosphere of Anji's bamboo forests. It made me think about how I might reinterpret the sounds of local bamboo instruments through a contemporary musical language.

Because the pitch of bamboo drums can be affected by temperature and humidity, which makes consistent sampling challenging, I experimented with digitally processed marimba tones to create a more stable timbre while preserving much of the bamboo drum's texture.

The search for Anji's sound was also part of a much more personal journey.

The musical began as a family project. My father, Dou Guosheng, worked on the script. I composed the music. My mother, Zheng Hongqin, used money she had earned from running her bookstore to support the production and my dream.

Of course, a family trying to develop an original musical on its own was bound to face doubts, financial pressure and uncertainty. There were many moments when we did not know how far the project could go.

But something gradually changed. More and more people began to notice what we were trying to do. Teachers offered advice. Artists and theater professionals joined the creative team. Directors, designers, actors, students and supporters from our hometown contributed their time, experience and energy.

What had begun around our family dining table slowly grew into a work carried forward by many hands.

After years of development, the musical reached audiences in 2025.

This November, it will begin a new round of touring, starting in Hangzhou before traveling to other cities.

During rehearsals, as I watched the characters and their conflicts take shape onstage, the larger idea of ecological civilization became increasingly human to me. I saw it in a daughter struggling to understand her father, in villagers afraid of losing their livelihoods, and in people gradually discovering a different relationship with the land beneath their feet.

Through this process, my understanding of "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets" also changed. To me, it is no longer simply a statement about protecting the environment. It is about the choices ordinary people make, sometimes difficult ones, and about the possibility of finding a way for development, daily life and the natural environment to sustain one another.

As we prepare to take the production on the road, I keep thinking about a question my teacher asked me: "Can people from Anji hear this music and recognize something of themselves in it?"

I hope the answer is yes. But I also hope that when the music travels beyond Anji, audiences elsewhere can recognize something of their own lives in it — their attachment to their hometowns, the uncertainty that comes with change, and the hope that another path is possible.

For years, I have been trying to find the sound of the mountains where I grew up. Now, supported by all the people who helped this work grow, I hope that sound can travel a little farther.

Written by Dou Xinyuan, 25, producer and composer of True to the Green Mountains, a musical supported by the China National Arts Fund (CNAF) under its 2026 funding program.