China’s piano fever

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

Petroc Trelawny visits the world’s largest piano factory in the country where under Mao it was dangerous to play the instrument

As my plane makes its final approach into the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, the mountains give way briefly to green paddy fields, and then industry takes over. Beneath are hundreds of vast blue-roofed sheds and smoking red-brick chimney stacks. The landscape is mapped with railway marshalling yards and lorry parks; heavily laden barges crawl along the creeks of the Pearl River. With a massive economy that’s now larger than that of nearby Hong Kong, Guangdong Province deserves its title as the factory of China.

I’ve come here to visit a company that last year made 100,000 pianos — that’s almost one instrument for every minute of the working day. The Pearl River Piano Company management says it’s now the world’s largest. Three thousand staff work eight production lines; it feels more like a car factory than a place making things as delicate and tactile as pianos. Walking around the plant, the smell of wood and varnish hangs in the air, the noise of sawing and drilling mingling with the resonant sound of hammers striking strings, and instruments being tuned over and over again. The company representative tells me not to photograph any of the machinery without checking with her first; industrial espionage, she says, is something the company is very aware of.

A basic Pearl River piano costs about £800, a fortune to many Chinese, but well within the budget of the country’s burgeoning urban middle class. Their new wealth, combined with a desire to see their offspring have a better childhood than they did, has led to an obsession with the piano in China. Conservative estimates suggest that 30 million Chinese children are currently learning the instrument; many reckon the figure is much higher. One academic told me the country was in the grip of a ‘piano fever’.

The evidence is all around. Looking for a Pearl River piano in Shanghai, I was told to head for Jin Ling Dong Street. I stopped counting after I’d passed 35 independent shops selling pianos and other instruments, none of them short of customers. In Best Friend Music, the largest, a power-station worker and his wife were selecting a model for their ten-year-old daughter. ‘I never had the chance to learn music,’ he says. ‘She will grow up a better person, a more rounded individual.’ ‘The discipline will be good,’ his wife adds. ‘It will make her concentrate.’ In Beijing I visit a branch of the Jiang Jie piano school, housed in a building above a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. A spiral staircase rising up six floors is lined with tiny piano studios, 120 in all. Business is so good that there is a waiting list for potential students, and the company has had to recruit a dozen teachers from Russia. This is not an isolated success story — there are 14 other branches of the Jiang Jie school in Beijing alone.

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