Chinese Music is Older than Chinese Characters

Historically, music,both at home and abroad,appeared earlier than Chinese characters.Ancient Chinese literature typically attributed the origin of Chinese music to Emperor Huangdi who lived more than 4,000 years ago.It is said that Emperor Huangdi once asked a necromancer surnamed "Lun" who was good at music to develop a regular sound system that was later called“Lü" by identifying high and low-pitched sounds.Then,Lun found bamboo pipes in farway places and carefully listened to the singing of male and female phoenixes, the divine birds in the eyes of ancient people. He made the bamboo pipes into 12"'Li" pipes and called them"12 Lüis" ever since then.Current archeological discoveries show, however, a batch of bone flutes, unearthed from the site dating back to the Neolithic Age located in Jiahu Village,Wuyang County,Henan Province in 1986-1987,were the world's earliest musical instrument known so far. 

With a history of more than 8,000 years, they were reputed as "China's earliest flutes" and were witness to the highly developed prehistoric Chinese music civilization; clay xuns (a type of ancient musical instrument) were discovered at the Hemudu Site in Zhejiang and Banpo Site in Xi'an also have a 6,000-year-plus history. All these marked a big step forward in Chinese music history.