Urna Chahar-Tugchi

Urna was born into a family of herders in the grasslands of the Ordos Plateau in Inner Mongolia, a society where song was a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Her first musical training was learning to play the yangqin—Chinese dulcimer—from a Shanghai Conservatory of Music professor who was visiting Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. Then, at the age of 18, she moved to study at the Shanghai Conservatory, a challenging step since she had no knowledge of the Chinese language. She now performs...