In the early decades of the twentieth century, German music conservatories and universities nurtured young talents from East Asia. What kinds of cultural exchanges took place in Berlin and Leipzig? In what ways did the East-Asian students interact with important figures in music and various academic fields? To what extent did those fields overlap with and transform each other? Against the backdrop of Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon (13 editions, 1882–2012) with an evolving entry on Chinese and Japanese music, this talk draws on diverse archival findings and presents some ideas about historiographical strategies based on the focal point: ‘China-Europe-Japan triangle’.