This study focuses on the ongoing disappearance of low tone breathiness in Shanghai Chinese. In the change from a voicing contrast to a tone register contrast in Sinitic languages, the ancient voiced series was characterised by a breathy voice quality, which remained as a secondary and redundant cue of low tones in Shanghai Chinese. This study, using transversal production data from 12 young and 10 elderly speakers, shows that low tone breathiness is better preserved by elderly than young speakers, and by male than female speakers. We predict a future loss of this secondary cue, which is speeding up due to the interference with Standard Chinese. We also found that the disappearance is more advanced in female speakers, which might be explained by female speakers' stronger adherence to Standard Chinese as the prestigious form. Indeed, our young female speakers reported more frequent usage of Standard Chinese than Shanghai Chinese and higher competence in Standard Chinese than in Shanghai Chinese, whereas young male speakers were more confident in their usage of Shanghai Chinese. Loss of low tone breathiness in Shanghai Chinese (1) *-V(N). > 平 ping 'level tone' *-ʔ. > 上 shang 'rising tone' *-s. > *-h. > 去 qu 'departing tone' There was another coda type, *-p|t|k., which is preserved in Middle Chinese and some Modern Chinese varieties such as Cantonese, and which forms another category that is traditionally counted as a fourth tonal category 入 ru 'entering tone'. The second tonal development, which occurred around 1000 CE, and which is known as the 'tone split' process, consisted in a transphonologisation from a two-way onset voicing contrast into a two-way tone register contrast, as shown in (2), where stands for any voiceless stop onset and stands for any voiced stop onset. (2) *.P-> 陰 yin 'high register' *.B-> 陽 yang 'low register' It is very likely that the voicing contrast in early Middle Chinese was accompanied by a voice quality difference: voiced stop onsets were produced with breathy voice while voiceless ones were produced with modal voice. It was probably the combined effect of voicedness and breathy voice that led to perceptible pitch lowering before its phonologisation. Evidence of a voiced breathy series in Middle Chinese can be found in historical records of descriptions of consonants and tones of that time. Voiced stops are traditionally labelled as 濁 zhuo 'muddy', in contrast to voiceless ones that are labelled as 清 qing 'clear', which might convey an impression of different voice qualities. According to a description of Chinese tones from the early eighth century composed by Annen, a Japanese monk, "the level tone was level and low, with both the light and the heavy [allotones]" (cited in Mei 1970, 98) my emphasis). According to Pulleyblank (1978), 'heavy' and 'light' described originally different voice qualities associated to tones, as far as the level tone was concerned, at least. Furthermore, as suggested by Annen's descriptions, voice qualities, originally associated with onsets, were la...