huqin

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One of several types of huqin, or Chinese spike fiddle.
Courtesy of Chinese Classical Music Association

Wade-Giles romanization hu-ch'in any of a group of Chinese fiddles. Huqin are generally spike fiddles, as the narrow cylindrical or hexagonal body is skewered by the tubular neck. Most have two strings, although some three- or four-string variants exist. The instruments are held vertically on the player's lap, and their music is marked by slides and vibratos as the left hand moves quite freely along the strings. Typically the horsehair of the bow passes between the strings and the arched wooden stick remains on the outside; the bow is thus not separable from the instrument.

The name huqin appears in China during the Song dynasty (960–1279); however, bowed instruments apparently entered China from Mongolia centuries earlier. Notable among the variants are the erhu, the small jinghu, and the four-stringed sihu. Similar bowed fiddles are also found in Southeast Asia, Korea (see haegum), and, less prominently, Japan.

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	More from Britannica on "huqin"...


5 Encyclopædia Britannica articles, from the full 32 volume encyclopedia
>	huqin any of a group of Chinese fiddles. Huqin are generally spike fiddles, as the narrow cylindrical or hexagonal body is skewered by the tubular neck. Most have two strings, although some three- or four-string variants exist. The instruments are held vertically on the player's lap, and their music is marked by slides and vibratos as the left hand moves quite freely along the ...
>	jinghu Chinese two-stringed fiddle that is the principal melodic instrument in jingxi (Peking opera) ensembles. The smallest (and therefore highest-pitched) of the Chinese spike fiddles (huqin), the jinghu is about 50 cm (20 inches) in length. Its body is a bamboo tube, covered at the playing end with snakeskin. Pegs at the back of the slim bamboo neck hold the strings, which ...
>	erhu bowed, two-stringed Chinese vertical fiddle, the most popular of this class of instruments. The strings of the erhu, commonly tuned a fifth apart, are stretched over a wooden drumlike resonator covered by a snakeskin membrane. Like the banhu, the erhu has no fingerboard. The strings are supported by a vertical post that pierces the resonator.
>	banhu bowed Chinese fiddle, a type of huqin (Chinese: “foreign stringed instrument”). The instrument traditionally has two strings stretched over a small bamboo bridge that rests on a wooden soundboard. (The sound box of most other Chinese stringed instruments is covered by a snakeskin membrane.) Its two lateral pegs are situated on the same side of the peg box.
>	Lutes from the stringed instrument article Probably the most widely distributed type of stringed instrument in the world is the lute (the word is used here to designate the family and not solely the lute of Renaissance Europe). The characteristic structure consists of an enclosed sound chamber, or resonator, with strings passing over all or part of it, and a neck along which the strings are stretched. The player ...