At the age of ten Zhu Xiao-Mei entered the Peking Conservatory where her brilliant studies were interrupted by the years of the Cultural Revolution. She was sent to a re-education camp on the border of Inner Mongolia for five years. On returning to Peking, she completed her studies and left China as soon as the regime gave its first signs of opening to the outside world. In 1980 she emigrated to the United States, settling in Paris in 1984. Zhu Ziao-Mei gives few concerts, appearing in public usually to perform demanding works: ‘mountains of the soul’.