The Cultural Geography Of Pipa In Han And Tang Dynasties

There are lots of different opinions about the origin of pipa which has been being popular in China for thousands of years. Based on the relative materials of paralleling and analyzing, this article will propose a new system of interpretation:There are the crooked pipa classifying to the type of Han form which was rebuilt from qin, zheng for playing on the horse back; the direct entry pipa classifying to the type of combining both Qin and Han forms which was rebuilt from xiantao, and the ruanxian classifying to the type of Jin which had been forgotten since the disastrous events of Five Minority Nationalities'Migrating Inland and Court Removing Southward during Yongjia and rediscovered until the early Tang. Through the textile researching on pipa's geographical distribution in Han-Tang times, the author has summed up the propagating roads of those medieval pipa as follows:The crooked pipa had been imported from Wusun via Qiuci to Kang(Samarkand) and Tianzhu(India) since Han, and had gone back to China during the ruling periods of both Formal and Later Liang and Northern Zhou. Meanwhile the direct entry pipa and ruanxian had developed and spread continuously in Zhongyuan and the bordering districts. As for barbat, we would be better to consider it in the opposite way if we want to tell from what was its beginning because its earliest time of being seen was far later than that of pipa. In a word, this article will be expected that it could provide a more exact explaining structure about pipa, the musical instrument by the way of observing and describing its historical origin and involving branches in a'modern' view.