At Jinyintan, the story of “At That Faraway Place” is attached to a film crew and a highland grassland, but published accounts give different dates. The Wang Luobin Music Art Museum’s online history places Wang’s visit with director Zheng Junli’s Minzu Wansui crew in spring 1940 and dates the song to that trip. A CCTV feature instead dates Wang’s arrival to June 1939 and the film team’s stay to July. A 2022 essay by writer Gan Jianhua, drawing on a 1980 letter from Wang, says he compiled folk songs in spring 1939; it separately places Zheng’s filming visit in July that year. The accounts differ on chronology while linking Wang’s music and the film project to Jinyintan.
From the journal
A Song’s Journey Through Jinyintan
The Wang Luobin Music Art Museum preserves photographs and manuscripts tied to Jinyintan. Accounts place the song’s creation in spring 1939 or spring 1940, while connecting its story to the grassland.
A song attached to a place
A layered public memory
The Wang Luobin Music Art Museum opened in Haibei in 2009. Its published description lists photographs, objects and more than two hundred song and opera manuscripts, arranged in five exhibition chapters. The chapter titles trace a public story through the “music sanctuary,” Wang’s musical pursuits and the transmission of western music. The National Development and Reform Commission’s 2021 account places the song among the landmarks of Xihai’s public history, alongside the former nuclear research base. At the museum, manuscripts and photographs offer another way to encounter Jinyintan: through the materials gathered around a song whose chronology is told in more than one way.