# Marian Anderson at Zhongshan Hall: a 1957 Taipei bill with the State Department's name on it

A Chinese-English poster for a Marian Anderson recital in Taipei on 1 October 1957, presented with the American National Theatre and Academy and the State Department President's Fund, with the Far Eastern Travel Service as local sponsor. Filed with U.S. Information Agency posters, catalog date 26 August 1957 (NAID 6948897).

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      Marian Anderson contralto concert poster (Chinese-English poster distributed in Taipei)

      Marian Anderson at Zhongshan Hall: a 1957 Taipei bill with the State Department's name on it
      1957 Chinese-English bill for a Marian Anderson recital in Taipei, credited to ANTA and the State Department President's Fund. NARA RG 306, NAID 6948897.

## Techniques named on the archive record

Transfer
      DateAugust 26, 1957Made byU.S. Information Agency (predecessor: State Department International Information and Educational Exchange Program), Propaganda Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East seriesMediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeEisenhower AdministrationNARANAID 6948897; Record Group 306SourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceU.S. National Archives (NARA), RG 306, Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America, Middle East , retrieved October 4, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government work; NARA RG 306) U.S. Information Agency / Department of State, August 26, 1957. National Archives, Record Group 306 (NAID 6948897, 306-PPB-74).
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  A Chinese-English poster for a Marian Anderson recital in Taipei on 1 October 1957, presented with the American National Theatre and Academy and the State Department President's Fund, with the Far Eastern Travel Service as local sponsor. Filed with U.S. Information Agency posters, catalog date 26 August 1957 (NAID 6948897).

## The bill

Orange and black, with a profile photograph of the singer. The English block gives her name, her voice, the date, the hall, and three sponsors. The Chinese block gives the same facts, with the hall named as Zhongshan Hall where the English says City Hall.

MARIAN ANDERSON / Contralto

PRESENTED IN COOPERATION WITH THE AMERICAN NATIONAL THEATRE AND ACADEMY AND STATE DEPARTMENT PRESIDENT'S FUND

LOCAL SPONSOR: FAR EASTERN TRAVEL SERVICE

October 1, 1957 8p.m. / City Hall

時：十月一日下午八時 / 地：中山堂

English block and Chinese date line, FRAME transcription; a designer's mark is illegible. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NARA RG 306, NAID 6948897, local id 306-PPB-74.

## Whose name is on it

This one says who paid. The State Department's fund is printed in the English block, and the Chinese heading carries a sponsor line of its own. FRAME classes the source as openly sourced, which it does for only a minority of the agency's sheets in the snapshot. A ticket buyer in Taipei could see that a foreign government had a hand in the evening.

The National Archives files the bill in Record Group 306 with the U.S. Information Agency's posters for Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, catalog date 26 August 1957, five weeks before the recital.

## How to read it

FRAME's tag is transfer: an admired artist's standing is lent to the government program that co-sponsored the evening. That is the mechanism, and the bill does not hide it. The singer was real, the recital was real, and an audience that bought tickets heard her sing, not a description of her singing.

The bill is about an evening, not about America, and the record attached to it says nothing about how the tour or the repertoire was chosen. A reader can still ask the fair question of any state-backed tour: who picked the program, the artist or the agency? The same file holds a 1959 Beirut bill for Louis Armstrong that raises the same question with no sponsor printed at all.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, Marian Anderson contralto concert poster (Chinese-English poster distributed in Taipei), catalog date 26 August 1957.

- U.S. National Archives, Record Group 306, Posters Distributed in Asia, Latin America, Middle East, NAID 6948897 (306-PPB-74), catalog.archives.gov, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/marian-anderson-contralto-concert-chinese-taipei-1957/