SMG (Shanghai Media Group) City Channel, Docu China, May 27 to May 29, 2025.
As part of the documentary series “The Appearance of Happiness” (Season 3), “Sound of Shanghai” was featured in a special segment broadcast on the City Channel of SMG (Shanghai Media Group) on May 29, 2025. Co-produced by the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions and SMG, the series presents deeply human stories that echo across the cultural fabric of the city.
In this episode, Marios Joannou Elia, creator of “Sound of Shanghai”, meets Qian Yuefang – a national-level inheritor of Gu Embroidery, an exquisite art form dating back to the late Ming Dynasty and deeply rooted in the poetic traditions of Jiangnan. Together, they explore the acoustic subtleties of embroidery: the gentle friction of silk threads, the quiet precision of the needle and the meditative silence surrounding the act of creation.
“It felt like the sound of a silk thread…
so refined, so peaceful,” says Qian Yuefang.
As Elia listens and records, he reflects:
“Gu embroidery is so soft and gentle, and this is a contrast to the life we are living in the modern cities.”
Their encounter reveals a deeper harmony between tradition and modernity, stillness and motion, intimacy and urban intensity. In this rare dialogue, embroidery is no longer silent – it becomes a soundscape, a cultural bridge.
A delicate thread of sound, spun from silk and memory, carrying Shanghai’s intangible cultural heritage into the world’s listening imagination.
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