Sheng , mouth organ with bamboo pipes.
The sheng is a mouth organ associated with the Han cultures of central and northern china, where it is played both in orchestras and as a solo instrument. The arrangement of the pipes is traditionally considered to represent the folded wings of a phoenix. In the Chinese Bayin, the world's oldest written musical instrument classification system, the sheng is described as a 'gourd' instrument, as this was the material then used for the wind chamber. Today, the wind chamber is usually made of metal or occasionally, as in this example, of wood. The design of the sheng has undergone few other changes in its long history, and the configuration of the seventeen pipes was probably standardised during the T'ang dynasty (AD 618-907).
