Stone and Jade Qing

It can be easily imagined that the stone qing must have been one of the earliest musical instrument in China. During the Stone Age, the Chinese forefathers, working with stone implements, found out that certain sonorous rocks, when knocked, produced musical sounds and that, by knocking at rocks of different sizes, they could make music.

So the earliest manmade chime stones were born out of those natural rocks. In 1973 a Shang Dynasty(c.17th-11th century B.C.) chime stone was discovered from the ruins of that age in Anyang, Henan Province. It is greycoloured and has tiger patterns engraved on it, showing that it had been used by the imperial court.

The key step in the making of a chime stone is to give it the right note. Artisans learned long ago how to achieve this. If the pitch of a stone was too high, they would grind the two flat faces of the slab, making it thinner if the pitch was on the low side, they would grind the ends and make the slab shorter, until the right tone was arrived at.

The jade qing was made much later, following the same idea as for chime stones but using the more valuable jade as the material. In the Hall of Treasures of the Forbidden City can be seen a chime consisting of 12 iade qing.

They were made during the reign of Qianlong(1736-1795) of a precious black jade exquisitely finished on both sides with fold-painted dragons playing with balls. It is said that the twelve were chosen out of 160 pieces made at the time by the jade carvers of Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, involving 90,000 workdays and untold costs.