Tug At China’s Heartstrings

Music for plucked instruments is music for an ensemble of various plucked instruments and is an integrated part of traditional Chinese (or China’s national) instrumental music. China is a country with 56 ethnic groups of which the ‘Han’ (known to the westerners as Mandarin) is dominating in population size. The Chinese plucked instrument world represents all ethnic groups living in China today?among which instruments like pipa (Chinese lute), ruan (a fourstringed instrument with a round sound box and fingerboard with frets), qin (a seven-stringed instrument with a flat oblong soundboard), gu zhen (Chinese zither with many strings (normally with 21 strings), san hsian (three-stringed instrument with a long fingerboard and a drum-shaped sound box at the fingerboard bottom), yang qin (Chinese cymbalo) and liu qin (Chinese mandolin).