Yueqin
traditional Chinese string instrument
The yueqin (Chinese: 月琴; pinyin: Yuèqín; Japanese: 月琴, romanized: Gekkin; Korean: 월금/月琴, romanized: Wolgeum; Vietnamese: Nguyệt cầm/月琴 or Vietnamese: Đàn nguyệt/彈月), also called a moon lute or moon guitar, is a traditional Chinese string instrument. It is a lute with a round, hollow soundboard, a short fretted neck, and usually four strings. It is an important instrument in the Peking opera orchestra, often taking the role of main melodic instrument in lieu of the bowed string section.
The instrument was invented in China in the 3rd to 5th centuries AD, during the Jin dynasty. The ruan, another Chinese instrument, is the ancestor of the yueqin. The name yueqin once applied to all instruments with a moon-shaped soundboard, including the ruan; however, "yueqin" now applies to a separate category from the ruan family.
Etymology
The word yueqin is made of two characters, yuè (月; "moon") and qín (琴; "stringed instrument, zither"). Its name in Korean (wolgeum), Japanese (gekkin) and Vietnamese (nguyệt cầm) mean the same thing, and are Sinoxenic words, meaning they were borrowed from Chinese, but pronounced in the local way.
History
The yueqin originated from the ruan, a similar stringed instrument that may have been invented as early as the 2nd century BC, during the Western Han dynasty. It grew popular during the Jin Dynasty (265–420), and has been known by its current name since the Tang dynasty.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yueqin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.