How Chinese people practice folk musical instrument pipa. (cr 男人鱼，小佟，星星醒来了，西红柿炒巧克力，宝姨，子子曦)
There were long-term and profound cultural exchanges between China's Tang Dynasty and the Eranshahr/Sasanian Empire, namely Pārs/Persia, present-day Iran. Pārs music and dances had a deep influence on both Tang courts and ordinary people in that era. The Tang Dynasty pipa琵琶 was originally derived from the Pārs barbat. The Chinese name for Persia is 波斯 (bō sī), which derives from the word Pārs instead of Persia. Just as the Chinese people call Greece 希腊xī là instead of using the English name Greek, this name derives from how the Greeks people refer to their own land as Hellas. The title bō sī was officially recognized by the Sasanian Empire via diplomatic interactions back then. It originally referred to one of their major provinces Pārs, just as Chang'an was used to represent China in Tang dynasty.
Chinese traditional yangqin扬琴 came from the Pārs santur. The bili筚篥 originated from the Pārs wind instrument baru, which later developed into the suona唢呐. Apart from them, many Pārs instruments were introduced to China in a complete system. Only a few of them are still common nowadays, and the rest are rarely seen.
During the Wei, Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties (220–589 CE), envoys, merchants and Zoroastrians from the Sasanian Empire already came to China. The Sui Dynasty also sent diplomats to Pārs, yet all these exchanges were quite sporadic. Official diplomatic ties were only formally established in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). The Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE) rose and fell while China was still in the midst of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period (770–221 BCE). The two sides had no idea that each other existed, so there was zero contact at all.
In the Tang Dynasty, the plectrum used to play the pipa was a wooden strip held in the hand, not the modern style attached to fingernails. They were mainly made of hard wood, while high-grade ones in the courts were crafted from ivory, bone, horn, jade and tortoiseshell.
Wars broke out throughout the Central Plain of China in the late Tang Dynasty, destroying countless artworks, especially ancient musical instruments. To this day, no complete Tang five-string pipa has been unearthed or preserved in China. Yet during the prosperous peak of the Tang Dynasty, the Kaiyuan and Tianbao periods (713–756 CE), Japanese envoys took pipas bestowed by the Tang emperor back to Japan, including one five-string pipa and three four-string curved-neck pipas. They are well-preserved in Shōsōin, Nara, Japan, being the finest intact Tang pipas in the world.
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