How one man's effort made duxianqin popular

NANNING — A duxianqin musician only needs a single string stretched across an elongated sounding board and a feather-shaped rod to deliver a diverse repertoire, whether pop or classical, Chinese or Western.

In his folding screen-adorned Zen-style studio, Wei Qingbing, 39, sat on the bamboo mat-paved floor and plucked the string on his duxianqin — literally "a single-stringed zither" — with his right hand, in a vivid rendering of a melodic tune, his left hand sliding across the rod to heighten or lower the pitch and add vibrato to the note.

"Did you make this instrument yourself?" Since he first uploaded clips of him playing the single-stringed zither onto the popular social media platform Douyin in 2018, Wei, a freelance teacher and a PhD student of music who lives in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, started receiving many such questions and comments.