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Chinese New Hymnal


The Chinese New Hymnal ( in simplified Chinese: 《赞美诗(新编)》; traditional Chinese: 《讚美詩(新編)》) was published during the early 1980s and is the predominantly most used hymn book at the worship of the Protestant churches in the present-day China.

The Chinese New Hymnal was bugun being edited in 1980 when persecution against religion, especially against Christianity, during the Cultural Revolution subsided and public Christian worship restarted, with the intention to collect both domestic and overseas hymns. Its "Simple notation (in simplified Chinese: 简谱; traditional Chinese: 簡譜; pinyin: jianpu) version", using the numbered musical notation system, was published in 1983 and "staff musical notation version" 1985. The former version is predominantly used in the present-day China.

The Chinese New Hymnal includes 400 hymns, with the addendum of 40 "Short Songs". In addition to the songs from Europe and the Americas, special effort was made to collect the songs written by the Chinese people. It was printed by Amity Printing Co. and published by China Christian Council. "The English-Chinese Bilingual New Hymnal" was later published, in 1998, but is hard to obtain.

This hymnal features two indexes. The first one arranges hymns according to the first notes in the melody and the second one to the first line of text.

The Protestant churches in the present-day China almost exclusively select the worship songs from this hymn book. A new printing of the Chinese Union Version Bible by the Amity Foundation in 2004 also incorporates this hymnal under the same volume. Some of the Chinese-written songs have been adopted by the hymnals of other countries.


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