The trees came first. In the 1960s a county official planted paulownia across Lankao, Henan, to stop the sandstorms; the wood turned out to be the finest soundboard timber in China. Today Lankao makes the soundboards for more than 90% of China's traditional instruments, the guzheng, guqin and pipa, and a village of former farmers tunes zithers for a living.
Lankao, in Kaifeng prefecture on the old course of the Yellow River, was for centuries wrecked by three disasters: sandstorms, floods and saline soil that drove people off the land. In 1962 the county's Party secretary, Jiao Yulu, led a mass campaign to fix the moving dunes, in part by planting fast-growing paulownia as windbreaks. He died of liver cancer in 1964, aged 42, and became one of China's enduring models of self-sacrifice; locals still call the trees “Jiaotong,” Jiao's paulownia. The wood was meant only to hold down the sand.
The accident was acoustic. Paulownia, the Lankao species especially, grows fast and tall, stays light, resists warping and cracking, and is porous enough to resonate freely, which makes it close to ideal for an instrument soundboard. By the 1990s the national light-industry ministry had formally designated Lankao a traditional-instrument county, and its boards now supply, by the higher estimates, more than 90% of China's instrument soundboards. The county holds something like six million paulownia trees, a forest planted to stop a sandstorm that became a raw-material monopoly.
The finished-instrument trade clusters in Guyang town, where a village of former crop farmers now builds guzheng, guqin and pipa. The pattern is the familiar one: a handful of families in the 1980s, then hundreds of residents leaving to learn the craft elsewhere and coming home to open workshops, until nearly every household was in it. Guyang now turns out around 700,000 instruments a year, better than 30% of China's finished traditional instruments, employing some 18,000 people; one village alone makes over 100,000 units worth well over 100 million yuan, exported to more than ten countries.
The human detail that locals tell is of a young maker who took up the guqin only after watching one played at the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening, then travelled the country to learn the craft; he now sells a few hundred instruments a year at tens of thousands of yuan each and livestreams performances with his wife, a craft that brought both a living and, for some in the village, romance. Lankao is now counted as one of China's three great folk-instrument centres, alongside Yangzhou and Dunhuang. Where Huangqiao and Wuqiang make the instruments of the West, and Zheng'an the guitar, Lankao makes China's own.