Mr Yin was the piano accompanist at the first public concert

Mr Yin was the piano accompanist at the first public concert. “The young singers gave a better performance than the older ones who were shaking so much they could not sing very well,” he remembered. “The wives of the missionaries were very good music teachers. So they taught the local Chinese.” As Gulangyu developed as a Western enclave, scores of wealthy overseas Chinese also started to drift back, and built themselves stately European-style mansions, faced with exquisite art deco stonework and stucco decoration.

And with them came more pianos.Even when the Japanese invaders came in 1938, the music played on. There is the ferry building, which is shaped like a piano; and the island’s concert hall, shaped, you guessed it, like a piano.The history of the piano on Gulangyu is the history of the island itself. “In the second half of the 19th century the Western missionaries came here and brought the music,” said Mr Yin A tradition was quickly established. And the one-square mile “Piano Island”, as it is called by the 20,000 inhabitants, is determined to live up to its reputation. Across the harbour sat verdant Gulangyu, and that was where the interlopers were enticed by the scenery to set up home. A dozen foreign consulates were soon established, and with them came the missionaries – and lots of pianos.”We have many pianos from Britain, because the climate here is damp so British pianos are better,” said 59-year-old Yin Chengdian, who runs the island’s music school.

Can this really be China?
Gulangyu offers that rarest of commodities on the Chinese mainland – peace and quiet. The British had an eye for the island’s potential as a comfortable repose when in 1842, after the first Opium War, they forced China to open Xiamen on the south-east coast as one of the foreign treaty ports. Around one corner, a pretty white church sits in landscaped gardens. The air is clean, and not one smokestack chimney can be seen.

This is the only place in China where pianos outnumber bicycles. On Gulangyu Island there are more than 330 pianos – and no bicycles No cars, either. As one walks along the pedestrian-only roadways, it is music and birdsong that filter through the banyan trees, not traffic noise or pile-drivers. Ivy-covered wrought-iron gates open on to vast colonial-style shuttered mansions.

The US is also marginally reducing aid to Israel and giving more to Jordan.. The Israeli Central Board of Statistics say the true figure is about 12 per cent, which confirms the basic American point.Israeli political observers note that the secret survey of Jewish settlements and the leaking of the results is the third time in as many weeks that the US has punished Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister. Earlier in the month an official in Washington leaked information about an Israeli spy in the US administration. Two Palestinian land dealers have been killed this month and a third has disappeared.Controversy is still continuing over the United States government claim, leaked to the Israeli press, that 26 per cent of the houses in Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza are empty, and the expansion of settlements is therefore unnecessary. He said that a Palestinian living in the West Bank towns of Hebron or Nablus, could not buy land in Israel. Ariel Sharon, the Infrastructure Minister and an opponent of Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, is proposing that Israel declare its sovereignty over as much as 50 per cent of the water resources on the West Bank. A likely effect of the proposal is that Israel would pull back from a smaller proportion of the West Bank than is demanded by the Palestinians.
Mr Arafat, in an interview with the daily Yediot Aharanot, said yesterday that Palestinian land agents who sell to Israelis were “a few traitors and we will apply what has been determined by law against them”.