Twelve Girls Band
band
12 Girls Band or Twelve Girls Band (simplified Chinese: 女子十二乐坊; traditional Chinese: 女子十二樂坊; pinyin: Nǚzǐ shí'èr Yùefǎng, sometimes abbreviated to 女樂 or 女乐) are an all-female Chinese musical group that initially consisted of twelve members before the addition of a thirteenth. Twelve Girls Band use traditional Chinese instruments to play both traditional Chinese and Western music. Formed on June 18, 2001, the women were selected by audition from more than 4,000 contestants. Each woman is classically-trained, and the band members come from various conservatories in the People's Republic of China (PRC), including the China Academy of Music, the Chinese National Orchestra, and the Central Conservatory of Music.
History
Chinese numerology gave Wang Xiao-Jing the idea for the Twelve Girls Band. When Xiao-Jing decided he wanted to create a female ensemble, he knew it needed 12 members. Per Chinese mythology it is the twelve jinchai (12 hairpins) representing womanhood. For the new project, the women were inspired by the art of the Yue Fang, the ensembles who played in the Tang dynasty courts during the years A.D. 618 to 907. He wanted to update traditional Chinese music for today's audiences.
The group debuted their modern compositions on ancient instruments in China and Japan during the Northern summer of 2003.
“Twelve Girls Band” enters the record as band. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Twelve, Girls and Band can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q476750. VIAF identifies the subject as 153959267. The Library of Congress control number is no2004084782. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Twelve Girls Band” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.