In a dry corner of Hebei, the county of Wuqiang makes Western wind and brass instruments by the hundred-thousand: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, clarinets, tubas. A village of farmers called Zhouwo became one of the country's notable makers of the instruments of a Western orchestra.
Wuqiang sits in Hengshui, on the flat North China Plain in Hebei, with the village of Zhouwo at its centre. It is one of China's important exporters of Western musical instruments: 63 instrument firms, more than 10,000 people in the trade, over 400 types of instrument, sold to 80-plus countries, with county industry revenue of about 1.9 billion yuan in 2022. The range is the full Western orchestra, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, flute, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, tuba, plus violins and guitars on the side.
The story starts the same way as the others. In the 1980s a Zhouwo villager, Chen Xuekong, came home with instrument-making skills learned elsewhere and started the county's first factory. It grew into the Jinyin Group, founded in 1989 from a workshop of twenty-one untrained farmers; today it employs thousands, runs the full wind-and-string range, and ranks around 131st among the world's top 225 musical-instrument and audio suppliers. Around it, dozens of smaller makers clustered, some relocating in from Harbin and Zhejiang to be near the anchor firm.
Wuqiang had no musical tradition at all; what it had was geography. The climate is dry, and wood instruments hate humidity, which makes the North China Plain a better home for them than damp Guangzhou. The county sits near two ports, Huanghua about 140km off and Tianjin around 220km, with cheap inland land and labour. That is enough: China overall is among the half-dozen countries that make some 90% of the world's musical equipment, and its exports of Western instruments were already worth $1.66 billion back in 2013. A dry, well-connected farm county was a logical place to put a chunk of that.
In 2012 the county turned the village itself into the product. Zhouwo Music Town reworked 80-odd courtyards into B&Bs, cafes and instrument-experience shops, with a museum holding 1,500 instruments; it was rated a national 4A scenic area in 2022. Per-capita income in the village rose from around 3,000 yuan to 25,000, and a few farmers became guitar salesmen and bandsmen. The factory cluster reinvented as a tourist “music town” is the local version of moving up the value chain. Wuqiang sits in a small family of instrument towns: guitars from Zheng'an, violins from Huangqiao, and Chinese zithers from Lankao.