Shanghai Daily news

The art of making violins by hand is less than 70 years old in China but the country is now the world's leading manufacturer of the instrument.

On a humid July afternoon, Wang Mengmeng is carefully applying a yellowish-brown lacquer to a violin, the second one he has made by hand. The 30-year-old former violinist prefers brown as the color for his violins while his 25-year-old classmate, Xue Peng, favors a red-wine tone.
They are seated in a large, sunny classroom dotted with scarred wooden tables, odd-looking knives and piles of grindstones. Honey-colored lacquers are nearby in a rainbow of glass bottles which formerly contained Sichuan pepper sauce, fruit juices or pickled pears. Pictures of priceless Stradivarius and Guarnerius violins made in the 17th and 18th centuries hang on the classroom's old walls.
Both Wang and Xue have taken violin making as their majors at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, one of only four music conservatories in China that have the course. The others are Beijing, Shenyang, Liaoning Province and Chengdu, Sichuan Province.
The Shanghai Conservatory of Music's present vice president, Hua Tianren, was one of the first six students to take violin-making as a course when it went back on the curriculum in 1978.
"Technologically speaking, with violins there are no secrets any more for us and Chinese names now appear frequently when prizes are being awarded at violin-making competitions around the world," says Hua, who has also studied violin making in Munich, Germany. "Made-in-China violins have taken the market by storm, thanks to the improvements in quality and lower prices, as well as that some beautiful woods have been found in the forests of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces which are ideal for making violins."
Guess which country in the world produces the most violins today? Italy? America? No. Believe it or not, the answer is: "China." More than 500,000 violins are now produced every year in China.
Hua says the first Chinese to make a violin was Situ Mengyan who handcrafted the instrument in the United States in 1910. He had studied under Polish-American violin maker W.S. Goss. Tan Shuzhen, an earlier vice president of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, made the first violin in China in 1937 and established violin-making as a major in 1951. The course was later closed to students but was reopened in 1978 in time for Hua to enroll.
Tan was filmed by Murray Lerner as a "quiet hero" in "The Gentleman from Shanghai," the third documentary in the "From Mao to Mozart" series.
Born in 1907 to Christian parents, Tan studied the violin under a German teacher and became the first Chinese to play in the Shanghai orchestra in the early 20th century. Due to a shortage of violins, he worked with local craftsmen to learn how to make and repair violins and went on to establish the violin-manufacturing industry in China.
Tan's first violin used to be hanging in the conservatory's violin-making classroom as an example for the current crop of students.
"Even by today's standards it's still a very outstanding violin and it was later played by Tan's niece," says Hua. "In addition to violin making and repair, Tan asked us to study the history of string music, musicology, violin performance and even German. He always stressed the importance of communicating with Western violin makers since the violin is a Western instrument. I benefited so much from being able to speak good German when I later went to study in Munich."
Hua makes most of his violins from Chinese wood. "Chinese wood is very pretty and high-quality so my dream is to create the best violins out of Chinese wood," he says.
Hua adds that most of the students who have done the violin-making major have gone on to work overseas or have opened their own violin-making workshops. One of his students established what may be the world's biggest bow factory which now produces 10,000 bows of all types.
"It's become an industry in China but as my teacher Tan used to say, it will always remain an art, a charming art," says Hua. "It's great to turn a piece of wood into a beautiful instrument with a heavenly sound. It's a process of artistic creation that you do all by yourself from beginning to end and one which reflects your taste and artistic skill. And the final result can be so unpredictable. The violin can change dramatically after five, 10 or even more years. That's what makes making violins so attractive.
"When I make a violin, I concentrate totally on it and in my mind there is room for nothing else," Hua continues. "I enjoy it so much and I get in a mood where I want only to achieve perfection in my violin. Like master Tan I have a workshop at home which occupies all my spare time. No matter whether eating or sleeping, I cannot help thinking of my violins - I'm sometimes like a crazy man."
Along the road from the conservatory is the shop of Ling Zhenhua who also makes his own violins. Unlike Hua, Ling flies to Europe at least twice a year to buy wood in Cremona, Italy, the hometown of the legendary early 18th-century violin maker, Antonio Stradivarius.
Ling has 10 employees who make around 15 violins every month. They work in a bright workshop in one of the two houses he bought in Shanghai's suburban Qingpu District.
"I strictly follow the Western way of violin making and they have very nice workshops," says Ling who serves green bean soup every afternoon to his workers. "Good violin making is a work of art which can only be performed in a good environment. But I don't allow them to chat during work. Concentration is crucial."
Driven by a passion for the instrument, Ling studied under Chinese violin maker Liu Guozheng and founded one of the first private violin-making factories in China in the mid-1980s. After 10 years of mass production he decided to concentrate solely on making instruments of the highest quality.
Mainly following the methods described in Simone F. Sacconi's "The Secrets of the Stradivari," Ling has trained his team to work with streamlined coordination and he personally controls the finishing of each instrument. Each violin made at Ling's workshop is sold between 10,000 (US$1234,57) yuan and 20,000 yuan. In addition to violins, the workshop also produces cellos. The quality he guarantees and the competitive prices have won him many foreign customers.
Because of the increasing demand, Ling plans to build a larger workshop in Songjiang District. He also intends to establish and sponsor a chamber music ensemble in September made up of the top students from the Shanghai Conservatory all of whom have played his violins.
Looking at the breathtakingly beautiful pictures of the instruments made by Stradivari and Guarneri on the wall, students Wang and Xue say they have no ambitions to start a big money-making business of their own or become celebrated violin makers after they graduate.
Perhaps too much ambition is the last thing that a quiet, young violin maker should have. But who knows - maybe one day one of their names will be seen on a priceless brown or wine-red-hued made-in-China violin years and years from now.