I was given this set of Chinese Panpipes by a friend who visited Tianjin, China. She bought it for a good $30 SGD. I visited a Chinese instrument store in Singapore and was told it would sell here for about $120 SGD.
The Chinese name for panpipes is "Pai Xiao" (排箫). Pai means row, and Xiao refers to a vertical edge-blown flute. Put together, it simply means a row of vertical edge-blown flutes - in other words, a panpipe.
Panpipes have been found in various cultures ranging from Greece to the China, Europe to the Andes. They are made from various materials such as reeds, bamboo, different varieties of wood and even - more recently - plastic. They operate on the same principle. Each pipe is sealed at the bottom and is tuned by setting the length of the pipe and the column of air inside it. Blowing across the top produces the tone. A pipe with a wider bore and longer column will produce a lower note.
My set of panpipes sound quite nice. They're made of purple bamboo, which if I'm not wrong is of a more expensive variety than white bamboo that is more commonly used for horizontal Chinese flutes. The lowest note is E, but it's tuned to C major. It consists of 15 pipes starting with a low E and ending with a high E - a total of 2 octaves. They were broken just below mid C due to mishandling, but fortunately the shop I sent them to managed to repair them and they sound just as nice. It has a carving of a Chinese poem by the renown Chinese poet Li Bai (李白). I can't really read it though. I'm not too good with the panpipes yet, but hopefully I can post a video sometime soon.
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