Even more difficult was finding people who would sing in the Muya language, for people there were very shy.

"When I first reached Bamu's home, a dozen people in her family except Bamu fled. Only when I was not at the dinner table, they would return furtively to see if I had finished the food," Yang says with a smile.

In the end, Yang could only record Muya music when there were performances in a public square, such as during the Spring Festival in 2011. Otherwise, even during the holiday, people were too shy to sing in front of a stranger.

Since 2011, Yang has stayed in Bamu's home each winter, traveling all over the area and recording hundreds of folk and pastoral songs.

In 2012, Yang made an album with seven folk songs of the Muya people sung by Bamu. "I dreamed of bringing Muya music out of the mountains. Now with the album, more people can listen to it," Bamu says.

In December that year, Yang and her colleagues organized a chamber concert of the Muya music in the Sichuan Conservatory of Music.

That was a first for any conservatory, according to Song Mingzhu, dean of the department of composition at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music.

To help preserve the unwritten language, Yang says, "I came up with the idea of launching an audio dictionary. I started with the Chinese words whose pronunciation begins with 'a' in pinyin. I have recorded all the words from A to Z."

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