“Rest, Martyred Classmates” was composed frenetically through the night by the young poet Jin Sha and her musician friend Chun Hai, in time for the January 13, 1946 public Shanghai commemoration of martyred students in the “12.21” brutal KMT suppression of Kunming student and faculty protestors. An elegy written for a specific time and place and occasion – “Rest, Martyred Classmates” nevertheless finds its way through several other significant historical moments in the ensuing decades, and with each reiteration accrues as well as alters in its valence. Following the thread of its travels through the 1940s to the contemporary moment, and its various reappearances as PRC liberation anthem, “White Terror” Taiwan-period underground resistance musical handshake, soundtrack to martyrdom in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s films of the 1980s and 1990s, and now resurfacing as Republican nostalgia in contemporary Shanghai – I ask: what is gained, and what remains? “Songs connect, collect, and bring together. Even when not being sung they are attendant assembly-points,” says John Berger. “Rest, Martyred Classmates” remains stubbornly in the ear through multiple seasons and opposing ideological winds in the second half of China’s long twentieth century, and this paper explores the trace of the original voicing, and the stories that a song might carry within it, throughout its travels.