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Discovery Of The Dako Tape Piles
- How Fan stumbled into a tiny store overflowing with hundreds of foreign tapes and bought as many as he could carry.
- He discovered that each cassette had a quarter-inch cut and later learned these were discarded 'cut-outs' from the West.
Professor Ye At The Recycling Warehouse
- Professor Ye found mountains of damaged cassettes at a plastic recycling center in Heping and heard music still on the reels.
- He realized the tapes could be repaired and began the painstaking splicing and rewinding work that birthed the 'daco' scene.
Trash Shipments Became Cultural Imports
- Millions of cut-up cassettes arrived in China as plastic scrap after Western labels destroyed surplus stock.
- Those discarded tapes unexpectedly became a primary vector for Western music into China in the early 1990s.