In China, music instruments are classified according to the material, not according to the generated sound or the construction method like in the West. Traditionally, there exist eight different types of instruments. Already during the late Warring States period, but especially during Han Dynasty, the theory of the Five Phases or Elements and correlation of beings and appearances was very popular. The correlation also includes music instruments. Bamboo flutes are used when the spring begine, summer is the time of string instruments, bronze bells are the instruments of the autumn, and in wintertime, drums are sounding.

1 Bamboo instruments
The most important bamboo instruments are the flute “xiao”, also in the shape of a cluster of 16 to 20 pipes, bound together in a row, the flutes “di” and “yue” , and the traverse flute “chi”.

2 Wooden instruments
Most wooden instruments are idiophones, sounding by themselves, like wooden drums, clappers or rattles. Buddhist monks use to clap their “muyu”, "Wooden fishes", hollowed out wooden globe of different seizes, during the sutra recitation.There are only two woodwind instruments in China, and both are only employed during festivals among the people, never at the court. The first is the “suona”, a kind of simple oboe with a metal bell at the top. The second is called “guan” and is also a primitive kind of oboe, but quite short and without bell. Both are probably not of Chinese origin.

3 Silk instruments
The strings of these instruments are made of silk, not of hair or gut like in the West, so that we must assume that at least a part of these music instruments originated in China. Especially the zithers “qin”, “se” and “zheng”, are of Chinese origin, and there are many proofs for their existence in early Zhou China. The word qin serves to describe all different kinds of zithers, like the trapeziform dulcimer “yangqin”, that came to China from Persia probably during the Tang Dynasty. The resonance body is flat at the back. A bigger type of this lute or guitar is the “ruanxian”, with a resonance body that is also flat like that of the yueqin, but deeper, and it is the only Chinese string instrument with holes in the resonance corpus. Both pipa and yueqin resonance bodies show no holes like the Western violins, lutes or guitars.

4 Earthen instruments
The only earthen music instrument is a kind of ocarina called xun.

5 Metal instruments
The group of these instruments comprises all different kinds of bells from the Zhou Dynasty. Most of them were pending from a rack and organized as chimes. They were an integral part of Zhou ritual music. There were the types of zhong, and some others with only minimal differences to each other. In recent years, some bronze bell sets have been excavated from Warring States tombs and were reconstructed and reemployed in official performances. Bells were also used during the war, like trumpets in the West, to indicate attacks, redrawal, and other formations.

6 Stone instruments
In the West, stone instruments are unknown. Sounding stones qing , pending from a rack and each stone with a different tone, are a native Chinese invention. The stones have a special shape, best described as rectangular and bend short before the middle, in a sharp angle, but not up to 90 degrees like the letter "L". The stones are hung up at the tip of the angle.

7 Leather instruments
There exist dozens of types of drums gu , from small handy drums to such types bound to the hip and clapped with two hands, to the huge drums that are drummed with a long stick, or with two sticks. Like many Chinese instruments, also the big drum was transmitted to Japan and Korea as taiko where it is played during some festivals.

8 Gourd instruments
There is actually no reason to classify the "mouth-organ" sheng as an instrument made of a gourd, although the first types of this music instrument obviously used a gourd as resonance corpus. Out of the half-ball bottom, up to 36 reeds of different length and tonal height come out vertically. Both instruments are not Chinese, but they come from the southwestern hill tribes. Similar instruments are in use among the hill tribes in Laos, Thailand and Myanmar.