When I was seven, my parents asked my school to teach me the accordion as they thought it would help me concentrate on my academic work. The music teacher thought it would be too heavy for a young girl, so she put me into a guitar group she was starting.

To be honest, when my parents told me about the guitar group, I didn’t know what a guitar was, but my first teacher was very good, encouraging the kids to enjoy playing it, so I fell in love with the guitar pretty much immediately.

Xuefei Yang with her Greg Smallman guitar. Photo © Neil Muir

At first, I was playing it as a hobby, but to cut a long story short, I was told by the foreign guitarists I met at festivals that I had a talent and could be an excellent professional guitarist. 

The only way to become a professional musician in China is to enter a conservatoire, but there was no conservatoire that had a guitar faculty! I got the chance to enter the middle school attached to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing – but as an unofficial student. My parents didn’t want...