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hi!
i will be in shanghai this summer.
i would like to buy a guzheng, a traditional chinese harp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guzheng

i know it will be VERY complicated... so i'm looking for informations...

1) does anyone from shanghai know WHERE i can buy it?? is there some traditional music instrument shop in the city??

2) the trickiest part: how do i bring it home, without spending 1.000 $ ??? i would also opt for a cargo shipment to italy, even if it takes months. but i'd like to be sure that it will come back home! do you know how to do it and a rough price? do you know any service in shanghai i could look for? i tried DHL and UPS websites but found no anwers!
the most practical option would be to bring it back by plane, as oversized/overweigth baggage. any ideas about a medium cost with the EU companies??

thanks a lot!

After reading your post I was googling around looking at beautiful Chinese instruments & I discovered that one of the old masters of making these, Master Xu is based in Shanghai and still makes stunning hand built instruments with his son. Their shop is in Shanghai but their website states that they sell the instruments through a place in Hong Kong - guzheng.hk.

Master Xu's website - http://www.masterxu.com/about.html?lang=en-us

The guzheng specialists that sell Xu's instruments - http://www.guzheng.hk/shopping/instrume ... od=airmail

I love the ones made with Zi-tan wood, but they are very expensive.

hi!
i found that shop too... i tried to send an email but never get an answer.
but maybe those ones are too pricey for me!

I bet you can get one for a tenth of that price over there if you take the high speed train to a rural area. I envy you both for the trip and the harp.

Accidently, our theatre group is doing a eastern version of Midsummernight's dream, and we have three traditional musicians in the play. One is playing the pipa, another some sort of violin (I always forget it's name...) and another plays the guzheng (although she says it's not a guzheng but zheng, very complicated at times, communicating with chinese people ).
I could ask her anything you want to know on friday and report to you after the weekend. I'll be off tomorrow at none...
We'll be playing in Enschede, Utrecht and Dordrecht, should there be any interested Dutch Pulsarians.

http://www.froefroe.be/
look for english>productions>midsummernightsdream and you can see some fotos, some with the musicians...

cheers,
Andy

thank you for your interest!
it would be interesting to know how is a fair price for medium-priced guzheng in china (shanghai or beijing)

the violin is probably an erhu. very nice instrument! i have one and learn to simply play it by myself in about 2 months...

with pleasure!

btw, it could be erhu (I'll ask Kamil what his instrument's called), but his instrument has a different body, more like a small sitar. The neck seems about the same.

cheers,
andy

Hi,

Sorry for the late answer...
Typical, language barriers, he. 'Liling, is that a 'gutsjeng'?' 'Nono, that completely other instrument, I have 'goodjen'!'
To keep things short, she indeed plays the gu zheng. She is from Taiwan, and her husband (who plays pipa) is from Beijing, but they have been in Sjanghai, and there is one big street with nothing but instrument shops which should be easy to find. They have heard about master Xu, but had nothing special to report on him.

A study instrument would cost you around 200 Euros, for about 600 Euros, you should have a more than decent instrument. Prices of course go up with more exotic artwork and premium parts.
If there is no price tag on an instrument, always negotiate when they name the price.
Check if the case is included in the price! Also ask for the fingerpicks and stands.

Liling said to just take it on the plane as extra luggage, it won't set you back that much.
When exporting, take off the strings and bridge.

That's about it.

It's a beautiful instrument that can produce a wide range of atmospheres from eerie magical stuff, to the darker dissonant moods. Play on either side of the bridge, bend strings with your left hand... I think it can get pretty deep to master...
I'll try and record some parts if I find the time later this week.

The other instrument is not an Erhu, but Gedjek. It's an instrument that is typical to the region of Urguria (occupied by China, comparable to Tibet, and now called Xin Sian (?)) and can only be bought there (as it should say on the bottom of the attachement, only written wrong... me trying to speak chinese, and they trying to write dutch... )

thanks again
i will try to find that beautiful street...

no problem!

did some recordings today during soundcheck and threw some snippets in ableton... god, it's a beautiful instrument. recording excellent musicians on good instruments is so inspirational.

little maintenance update: don't remove the strings, but loosen them during transport, take away all the brigdes (each string has it's own bridge) and write down, on each bridge, which string it belongs to. use little stickers for this. it is very important!.
you fine tune the instrument through sliding these bridges around. The 'coarse' tuning is done with metal pegs hidden beneath a panel at the right side of the instrument. This is for newer instruments. The older ones have wooden pegs at the other side (if i understood correctly )