Before the performance began, five guzhengs stood at the centre of The Social at Aviva Studios, surrounded by audience seating on all four sides. One o’clock sunlight slanted through the high windows and fell across the strings, forming blocks of light that closely resembled the rows of bridges.
The audience sat quietly discussing the five guzhengs, which were objects of intrigue even to those familiar with the instrument. One was visibly longer than the others, and even its stand was different. Later, when I met Belle backstage, she had just finished checking each of her artificial fingernails. I asked the question on the audience’s behalf.
She said the real challenge was not the number of instruments, but the tunings.
A standard guzheng has twenty-one strings and is built around a pentatonic scale. But some of the songs in the programme—Can’t Help Falling in Love and Always with Me, for example—use seven-note scales and cannot be played properly on a standard instrument. The specially made forty-three-string guzheng had been brought in for that purpose. Those two songs alone required twenty-five of its strings. It also required a particular type of stand.
She explained it all very matter-of-factly, as if she were simply talking me through the practicalities.
How long had it taken to put everything together? Finding the right stand for the 43-string zither, and arranging for all five instruments to be brought over from China, had taken three months. Then there was the rehearsal-space hire and the process of testing the sound of different guzhengs. She owns more than five, but deciding which instrument suited which piece meant trying them one by one. There were thirteen songs printed in the programme, but behind them were countless possible tuning arrangements.
Once she sat down, there was no introduction. She simply raised her hands and played four notes.
They were the opening of The Drums Echo at the Temple Fair: low, heavy notes that chimed like bells. Belle described them as the sound of temple bells calling people to gather. But there was another reason she had chosen the piece to open the programme. She wanted the audience to understand immediately that this was a guzheng performance. It began with tradition, just as her own musical training had.
When the fourth note faded, the whole room became still. The people turning through their programmes stopped, as did the people taking photographs.
Thirteen pieces travelled from dusk to dusk, one every two hours, divided into five themes. Traditional guzheng music sounded at the beginning and around dawn. Cantonese songs were placed at dusk and in the afternoon. A Japanese anime soundtrack occupied the depths of night, a K-pop song arrived at midday, and Oasis closed the circle at dusk.
Heard live, the order made perfect sense. The opening established the instrument: this is the guzheng. Then, at dusk, Who Resonates with Me? established the performer: I come from Hong Kong.
The piece was dedicated to Leslie Cheung. When Belle spoke about him after the performance, her pace slowed slightly. Leslie had been gone for twenty-three years, she said, but he remained one of the reasons she felt proud to be from Hong Kong.
In the afternoon, she played another Cantonese song, Fate Above Us All. It was the theme from an old Hong Kong television drama that had recently resurfaced following the release of a sequel. The two Cantonese songs—one near the beginning and one close to the end—formed a pair of brackets around the programme.
She did not need to say much, Belle explained. The music had already made it clear where she came from.
The closing piece was Oasis’s Half the World Away: a song by a Manchester band, in the city of Manchester, played on the guzheng by a young woman from Hong Kong.
She saw the piece as a reflection of her own journey from Hong Kong to the UK—from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere, across half the world. Sitting in the audience, listening as the sweeping strokes of the guzheng met the familiar Britpop melody, you realised this felt all too natural.
The pre-dawn section was the darkest part of the performance. The lights dimmed for two Mandarin songs, The Wind Rises and Curse of Beauty, both built around descending melodic lines.
The former was treated acoustically, with long vibratos drawn out across the middle and lower registers. Belle had deliberately included the latter because it was a rare example of a Mandarin pop song written with the guzheng as its principal instrument.
Throughout that section, she kept her head lowered, her eyes fixed on the strings to the left of the bridges. Her left hand pressed deeply downwards, and as the strings returned to tension, they produced overtones that came close to the sound of a human voice breaking into a sob.
Someone in the audience wiped the corner of their eye. The person beside them did not turn to look, but the room was so still that the faint metallic resonance of the strings could be heard as they sprang back into place.
The midday performance of Golden was the most difficult piece in the programme to arrange. A K-pop hit from 2026, it covered too wide a range for a single guzheng. Belle had tested countless tunings before finding one that worked.
To perform it, she operated two guzhengs at once. Her left hand held the harmonic framework on one instrument while her right swept out the melody on the other, with moments when both hands had to cross over the strings.
Someone in the audience drew a sharp breath— the movement was very difficult, and she had pulled it off.
When we discussed the piece after the performance, she smiled. In the programme notes, she had written, with an emoji, that she felt she had managed it. The happiness behind that expression, she said, had been genuine.
Even without her explaining it, it was possible to imagine everything concealed behind that smile: the tuning plans, three months of shipping, and the choreography of a stage surrounded on all four sides. She had to move from one end of the platform to the other, sit down again, raise her hands again, and travel constantly between five instruments.
The act of changing guzhengs had itself become part of the performance.
Why place so many songs from different languages and different eras into a single programme?
Belle said it was deliberate. No matter what language the audience spoke or how old they were, she wanted each person to recognise at least one song. Even one familiar piece was enough to create a connection and after that the rest was easy.
After the performance, I met a man from Hong Kong in the corridor. He had lived in Manchester for twelve years.
He said he had not heard Who Resonates with Me? for a very long time. When the music reached the line, “In the stillness of the night, I ask who resonates with me,” he had almost stood up.
He did not stand but he remained by the door for a long time, only turning to leave when the next audience member emerged. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders leaned slightly forward as though he were still listening to the music that had already stopped.
The performance lasted only an hour. Five guzhengs, thirteen pieces, one complete journey from dusk to dusk.
During our conversation, Belle said something that stayed with me: when you truly and completely believe in yourself, the world will always find a way to support you.
Heard in that room after such a performance it was hard not to feel her words were vindicated. The shipping, rehearsals, tuning and mistakes had all come first. Then she sat down among the instruments and handed everything over to the strings.
Though The Social was empty after the five guzhengs had been carried offstage, the air disturbed by the strings had not yet completely settled.
Something lingered, listening like the man with the hunched shoulders.
By Mark Millar
