Jarre in China

Twenty-three years after becoming the first Western musician to perform in China, Jarre returned to Beijing to open the Year of France in China.

On 10 October 2004 he played two back-to-back concerts: the first at the Forbidden City, the second at Tiananmen Square.

The scale was unusual even for him. Around 260 musicians took part, including the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, the Chinese National Orchestra, the Beijing Opera Chorus and a number of Chinese rock musicians, with erhu soloist Cheng Lin among the featured players. Some 15,000 people attended in person; CCTV broadcast the event by HDTV satellite to an audience in the hundreds of millions. The set ran from the familiar catalogue through to pieces with a direct line back to 1981 — "Souvenir of China", "Fishing Junks at Sunset" — alongside "Voyage à Pékin" and a closing "Tiananmen".

It was Jarre's first concert recorded and broadcast in 5.1 surround, arriving the same year as AERO; the two projects share an argument about how music should be heard.

Released in 2005 as a box set: DVD1 carries the complete THX-certified Forbidden City concert (105 min), DVD2 the Tiananmen Square concert plus In the Footsteps of the Last Emperor, a 51-minute documentary following the event across nearly three months, a short "Freedom of Speech" piece and a photo gallery, with audio commentary from Jarre in French and English throughout. A CD of the concert is included in some editions.