Scholars of Chinese music have identified numerous methods of engaging the past from archaeological (Furniss 2009) and transcribed archival sources (Jones 1989; Lam 1994). Studies entirely of poetry and related lyrical content present a particular challenge for understanding musicality of the distant past (Allen 1992). Poetic text still resounds meaning today, however, if ethnomusicologists and historians identify ways for it to co-resonate with other archival sources using methodological innovations. With the emergence of sound studies, insights into sonic—rather than simply musical—worlds offer tremendous potential. Steven Feld (1982) pays attention to knowledge production through human to non-human interaction within acoustic environments. For those who study sound within archives, Ana María Ochoa Gautier (2014) advances listening as shaped by writing and how the voice (re)makes the world of the living. Ana Hofman (2015) further identifies the affective labour of musicians as imperative to understanding the cultural, historical, and geographical conditions in which musicians operate. Taking these works as inspiration, this paper suggests productive ways to studying the musicality of Chinese historical texts as sonic, spatial, affective, and laboured. To illustrate these methods, we evaluate Shan’ge within the geographical setting of the Grand Canal in the late Ming Dynasty. We use Joseph Lam (2017)’s method of ‘eavesdropping’ into these archival materials to evaluate the social relationships embedded into them. Rather than focus on literati practice, however, we listen beyond them to the sonic relationships with vernacular musical practice that gave shape to Shan’ge. In so doing, we highlight the labouring sounds and lives of non-literati musicians along the waterways and routes that cross this dynamic region of sounded Chinese geography and history.