China makes most of the world's musical instruments, and they don't come from everywhere. Each instrument has its own town: a poor farming place that learned one craft and now supplies the planet with it. These four cover most of the range, from the guitar to the guzheng.
Put the four side by side and the same story runs through all of them. Each was a poor farming place with no musical tradition whatsoever. In each, one or a few people learned the craft somewhere else, a returnee from a state violin factory in Shanghai, a villager back from a workshop in another province, a young man who travelled the country to study the guqin, and carried it home. The skill then spread house by house until the whole town made the thing. It is the same export-the-skill-then-bring-it-home arc as Zheng'an's guitars, run four times over.
And each is now making the same climb. They began as anonymous makers of cheap student instruments and are working their way up toward handcraft, brands and the middle-to-high end, the budget fiddle becoming a hundred-thousand-yuan handmade one. Each has built a “music town” for tourists out of its own workshops, and saturated the local schools with instruments, so that the children of assembly-line workers grow up playing what their parents glue together.
The thread even runs into the wood. The same paulownia that gives Lankao its guzheng soundboards, light, resonant, slow to warp, is the timber that Caoxian a province away carves into most of Japan's coffins: one tree, two trades, two towns. The atlas is full of these material throughlines, which is the real reason to map the towns one at a time, then step back and look at them together.