In China, music instruments are classified according to the material, not according to the generated sound or the construction method like in the West. Traditionally, there exist eight different types of instruments. Already during the late Warring States period, but especially during Han Dynasty, the theory of the Five Phases or Elements (wuxing 五行) and correlation of beings and appearances was very popular. The correlation also includes music instruments. Bamboo flutes are used when the spring begine, summer is the time of string instruments (silk), bronze bells are the instruments of the autumn, and in wintertime, drums are sounding.
Historically, wooden and earthen instruments were of course the first music instruments in China, like elsewhere in the world too. The high standard of bronze casting during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties was also adapted to create different kinds of bronze bells. Sounding stones, pending on a rack, were also popular during the Zhou Dynasty, used for official ritual events, like the big drums. Some drums were even totally made of bronze, equal to the famous bronze drums of Northern Vietnam. Flutes of different materials must have existed from the earliest times. A Chinese speciality are the few music instruments made of a gourd. But the most famous Chinese instruments did not originate in China. Many plucked and bowed string instruments came from the West, from Arabia or Inner Asia. Only bronze bells, sounding stones and drums were allowed during the ritual performances. All other instruments are used for daily entertainment, either at the court or among the people. Since the 20th century, many Western instruments (piano gangqin 鋼琴 "iron lute", violin xiaotiqin 小提琴 "lifted lute", guitar jita 吉他 - or translated as "six string lute" liuxianqin 六弦秦) came to China and are very popular to perform classical or pop music.
1 Bamboo instruments
The most important bamboo instruments are the flute xiao 簫
, also in the shape of a cluster of 16 to 20 pipes, bound together in a row, the flutes di 笛 and yue 龠, and the traverse flute chi 箎.
2 Wooden instruments
Most wooden instruments are idiophones, sounding by themselves, like wooden drums, clappers (ban 板) or rattles (yu 敔). Buddhist monks use to clap their muyu 木魚 "Wooden fishes", hollowed out wooden globe of different seizes, during the sutra recitation.
There are only two woodwind instruments in China, and both are only employed during festivals among the people, never at the court. The first is the suona 嗩吶, a kind of simple oboe with a metal bell at the top. The second is called guan 管 and is also a primitive kind of oboe, but quite short and without bell. Both are probably not of Chinese origin (the suona is definitely borrowed from the Turkish zurna).
|  |  |  |  |  |  |
| Xiao | Muyu | Suona and Guan | Bianqing | Sheng | Morinchuur | Bone trumpet |
3 Silk instrumentsThe strings of these instruments are made of silk, not of hair or gut like in the West, so that we must assume that at least a part of these music instruments originated in China. Especially the zithers
qin 琴 (
qin is also a general word for string instruments),
se 瑟 and
zheng 箏, are of Chinese origin, and there are many proofs for their existence in
early Zhou China. Mythical tales explain the origin of these instruments as inventions of the
Yellow Emperor or of his ministers. The huge long
zheng or
guzheng 古箏 zither, comprising 20 to 25 strings, is still very popular today and was transmitted to Japan as
koto and to Korea as
Kayagum (although the proud Koreans state that it is a native invention of the state of Kaya). The word
qin serves to describe all different kinds of zithers, like the trapeziform dulcimer
yangqin 洋琴, that came to China from Persia probably during the
Tang Dynasty. The lutes came to China already during the
Han Dynasty, but especially during the time of north-south division when the cultural and economical relations with the Inner Asian people were very intense. One of the first string instruments coming to China from the West was the lute
pipa 琵琶 (see the
history of the pipa in the encyclopedia Tongzhi). Its smaller brother is the
liuqin 柳琴 "willow lute
", and there is a cousin named "moon guitar"
yueqin 月琴. These lutes are not handled like in the West, but are held vertically on the knees. The
pipa was even traded to Japan with the name
biwa, and there is a late
Yuan theatre play named "The Lute" (
Pipaji 琵琶記)
. The
pipa lute is quite similar to the Western lute, but it has only four strings and a very flat corpus. The moon guitar has a big round resonance body - hence its name - and a short neck, stabilizing three to four strings. The resonance body is flat at the back. A bigger type of this lute or guitar is the
ruanxian 阮弦, with a resonance body that is also flat like that of the
yueqin, but deeper, and it is the only Chinese string instrument with holes in the resonance corpus. Both
pipa and
yueqin resonance bodies show no holes like the Western violins, lutes or guitars.
A different type of plucked string instrument is the long neck guitar
sanxian 三弦 with three strings (that is also just its name) and a very small resonance body, often covered with a snake skin. Its Japanese counterpart is the
shamisen 三味線.
The most popular bowed string music instrument or fiddle is the
erhu 二胡 with two strings. It is very similar to the
sanxian and has an extremely small corpus, similar to a little drum with a leather resonator. The thin and long neck ends in two pegs that are standing seriell, not obstinate. There is also a four string type of this fiddle with two parallel resonance strings. The
sanxian and
erhu are instruments employed by professional musicians and storytellers on the street, and in the Chinese opera.
 |  |  |  |  |
| Pipa | Yueqin | Sanxian | Erhu | Se, similar: Zheng |
 |  |
| Qin | Yangqin |
4 Earthen instruments
The only earthen music instrument is a kind of ocarina called
xun ˴.
5 Metal instrumentsThe group of these instruments comprises all different kinds of bells from the
Zhou Dynasty. Most of them were pending from a rack and organized as chimes (
bianzhong 編鍾). They were an integral part of Zhou ritual music. There were the types of
zhong 鍾 (the regular word for "bell"),
fu 鎛,
chunyu ëÞ¤_,
nao 鐃, and some others with only minimal differences to each other. In recent years, some bronze bell sets have been excavated from
Warring States tombs and were reconstructed and reemployed in official performances. Bells were also used during the war, like trumpets in the West, to indicate attacks, redrawal, and other formations.
Gongs (round, or in the shape of a cloud), gong chimes and cymbals (
yunluo 雲羅) have also be mentioned here. They are instruments of war, of popular festivals, or are used for an opera orchestra.
A metalwind instrument not yet mentioned is the
laba 喇叭, a kind of trombone used during festivals and probably introduced from Inner Asia or Tibet, where the monasteries still today employ huge, some ten to fifteen feet long trombones to announce Buddhist festivals.
During the Zhou Dynasty, bronze drums were casted especially in the southern regions.
 |  |  |  |  |
| Bronze drum | Bronze drum | Zhong | Chunyu | Nao |
6 Stone instrumentsIn the West, stone instruments are unknown. Sounding stones
qing 磬, pending from a rack and each stone with a different tone, are a native Chinese invention (the whole rack is called
bianqing 編磬). The stones have a special shape, best described as rectangular and bend short before the middle, in a sharp angle, but not up to 90 degrees like the letter "L". The stones are hung up at the tip of the angle.
7 Leather instrumentsThere exist dozens of types of drums
gu 鼓, from small handy drums to such types bound to the hip and clapped with two hands, to the huge drums that are drummed with a long stick, or with two sticks. Like many Chinese instruments, also the big drum was transmitted to Japan and Korea as
taiko 大鼓 where it is played during some festivals.
8 Gourd instrumentsThere is actually no reason to classify the "mouth-organ"
sheng 笙 as an instrument made of a gourd, although the first types of this music instrument obviously used a gourd as resonance corpus. The ball-like bottom of the
sheng is held with both hands, just before the face. Blowing into a tube, the breath makes swinging some tongues made of bamboo (or metal, in the modern version). Out of the half-ball bottom, up to 36 reeds of different length and tonal height come out vertically. It is necessary to cover a hole on a reed to make it sounding. A smaller type of this instrument is called
yu ¬ò, that looks like an upside down pan-flute. Both instruments are not Chinese, but they come from the southwestern hill tribes. Similar instruments are in use among the hill tribes in Laos, Thailand and Myanmar.
The most famous music instruments of the national minorities in China are probably the
Mongol horse head fiddle (Morinchuur), the huge
Tibetian bronze trumpets, and the
Tibetian bone trumpets, made of human femur bones.
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