Yang Yuanzheng is a specialist in the musical history of East Asia whose research interests extend from Bronze Age excavations of musical instruments in China to the reception of Chinese musical philosophies in Japan. He has been a Harvard-Yenching Scholar at Harvard (2019–20), a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge (2015), a University Fellow at Utrecht (2007), and a Research Fellow at Princeton (2006–07). He is the Chair of the ICTM’s Musics of East Asia Study Group and a former Council Member of the Ministry of Culture’s Kunqu and Guqin Research Institute. Issues connected to the rediscovery of ancient manuscripts and their relationship to canon formation and political undercurrents have long been a central theme of Yang’s work. In respect of the Song dynasty poet-musician Jiang Kui, he has unearthed an array of hitherto unnoticed manuscripts and published them in facsimile along with a monograph on the eighteenth-century reception of Jiang’s oeuvre in his book Plum Blossom on the Far Side of the Stream (2019). As a performer on the qin, Yang was entrusted by the Smithsonian Institution with the task of carrying out a full-scale scientific investigation of the entire collection of ancient qin housed at the National Museum of Asian Art. The results were published in Dragon’s Roar: Chinese Literati Musical Instruments in the Freer and Sackler Collections (2020). His current work relates to the cultural migration of the instrument into Tokugawa Japan and the effect it had on political and philosophical trends there.