If you Google the name for this two stringed instrument, you may find the same name is used for girls names and a railroad that runs between Beijing and Shanghai. Jing is for the capital and Hu for Shanghai.
Since Chinese is a tonal language, each word is pronounced in a different tone. The word is also written differently in Chinese when used for a girl’s name or the railroad.
京胡
for the musical instrument
京沪
Beijing-Shanghai
The Jing-Hu I’m writing about is a two stringed instrument often used with Beijing Opera. The Jing-Hu first appeared during the Qing Dynasty. At that time, the strings were made of silk. Today, they are often made of steel or nylon. The Jing-Hu is the smallest of the Chinese fiddles and is related to the larger Erhu.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves.
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I enjoy your comments but wish I were younger to remember them. I am 86 yrs. old.