That’s called Xun.
Xun is one of the oldest wind instruments in China, with a history of about 7,000 years.
According to legend, Xun originated from a hunting tool called "stone meteor". In ancient times, people often tied a stone ball or clay ball with a rope and threw it to hit birds and animals. Some spheres are hollow in the middle, and they can make sounds when they are swung around. Later, people thought it was fun and blew it, so this stone meteor slowly evolved into Xun.
At first, Xun was mostly made of stone and bone, and later developed into pottery. There are also many shapes, such as oblate, oval, spherical, fish-shaped and pear-shaped, among which pear is the most popular one. shape is the most common.
The xun has a mouthpiece on the upper end, a flat bottom, and a sound hole on the side wall. The earliest Xun had only one sound hole, and later it gradually developed into multiple holes. It was not until the late third century BC that the Xun with six sound holes appeared.
The emergence of the nine-hole pottery Xun marks that the ancient Chinese Xun has regained its vitality. Soon after, another student of Professor Chen Zhong, Zhao Liangshan of the Hubei Provincial Song and Dance Troupe, developed a ten-hole xun out of mahogany, which solved the problem of the xun being difficult to play high notes.
Xun has been mainly used in the court music of past dynasties in the history of Chinese music. In court music, Xun was divided into two types: Song Xun and Ya Xun. Songxun is smaller in shape, like an egg, and has a slightly higher sound; Yaxun is larger in shape and has a deep and deep sound. It is often played with a wind instrument made of bamboo. In the Book of Songs, China's earliest collection of poems, there is a sentence such as "Bo's blows the xun, Zhong's blows the chi", which means that two brothers, one blows the xun and the other blows the chi, expressing the brotherhood of harmony and goodwill.