Everywhere I go, the talk is of piano playing. Executives in Shanghai tell me they have to rush home to supervise practice. With a one-child policy in force, mothers cannot afford to let their son or daughter fall behind. On a bullet train to Huangzhou, I meet a five-year-old Manchurian boy who is on his way to an international piano contest. A young woman in music administration tells me that, by taking up the piano as a child, she had fulfilled a parental frustration. "Both wanted to study music but in those times it was not possible," she confides.

"In those times" brings you up against a bedrock of mass trauma: the Cultural Revolution. It is 47 years since Chairman Mao and his Gang of Four unleashed a state pogrom against the educated urban classes. Teachers were beaten up, musicians had their fingers broken, couples divorced to save their child from being snatched by Red Guards and transported to paddy-fields. It was a reign of terror that lasted ten years.

I remember the day it stopped. I was in Hong Kong at a conference of TV news producers when, flicking channels in my hotel room, I glimpsed through a snowstorm of interference on Central China TV, a symphony orchestra in full fig. A conductor came on and gave the downbeat to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. It was March 26, 1977, the 150th anniversary of Beethoven's death. Running down the corridor yelling "The Cultural Revolution's over!", I burst into the bar, where seasoned China hands looked pityingly up from their drinks at the overheated news cub and poured a few shots of firewater down my inexperienced gullet. 

That week, I saw no press reports of the concert. But a history of China's engagement with Western classical music that I am given in Shanghai confirms that my callow hunch was right — and that the whole of China's engagement with Western culture flowed from this moment. The conductor of the Beethoven concert, Li Delun, was chosen by the Party soon after to escort Seiji Ozawa on an emotional return to his Manchurian birthplace. Ozawa would return with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, paving the way for Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin to make limelight tours.

None of these trailblazers was, please note, a pianist. It is widely believed that China's piano boom stems from the success of a pair of pop-idol performers, Lang Lang and Yundi Li, each with posters ten storeys high. But the piano revolution began, in fact, outside the classical spectrum. The instrument of enlightenment was a million-selling French salon pianist, Richard Clayderman.