[File photo]

Making music

Bamboo is indispensable to many traditional Chinese musical instruments, including the flute, sheng, zheng, jinghu, erhu and banhu. China's first national bamboo orchestra has a great variety of bamboo musical instruments, such as a dozen kinds of bamboo flutes, bamboo dippers, a bamboo percussion instrument composed of five or six drums of different sizes, and the huge dragon drum made of the world's thickest bamboo.