General
Instruments
Music & Dance

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Britannica.com
if you click on 'images' you'll find a picture of a lute

Chinese Music
This page has pictures of old instruments. It's found in Regent Tour China

Musical instruments were brought down from dynasty to dynasty and from other parts of the world. Most instruments were played in royal courts for entertainment and dancers and singers were usually accompanied by their sounds.

• Bronze bells were mainly found in temples or courts.
• Instruments such as the lute and reed pipe came from Turkestan.
• Stone chimes were considered sacred. They were pieces of limestone shaped like triangles that were hung from racks. In order to make sound with these, one used a baton.
• Stringed instruments were not considered as important as instruments such as drums, bells or flutes, except for the 'zither', which was a type of stringed instrument that created music made for meditation.
• The zither was called Qin and was founded nearly 2,000 years ago.
• The sheng was a mouth organ that originated in Indochina. It later went to Europe and influenced the creation of organs, accordions and harmonicas.

  Turkestan had a great influence upon music, especially in the Tang dynasty. They not only brought new instruments to Tang, but they introduced new ways of playing them as well, such as playing several instruments at once in harmony rather than one solitary instrument (which was how Chinese music had traditionally been played).