Fou: China musical instrument

The fou is an old Chinese percussion musical instrument that is made up of a pottery or bronze ware crock, jar, pot or analogous vessel that was struck with the use of a stick. The origin of the musical instrument is traced back to the Xia or Shang dynasties, where the instrument was used in ritual music. The fou later became a standard musical instrument in Confucian ritual groups.

The fou as a musical instrument was not confirmed until a discovery of almost 500 musical instruments in the tombs for Noble of the Yue State, Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province. Also found in the tomb were 9 other collection of musical instruments, this includes the Yongzhong and a qing from the central plain, chunyu, dingning, duo and a ling.

The musical instrument made its contemporary appearance in the 2008 summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. At the starting of the ceremony, 2,008 dancers and percussionists staged synchronized presentations, hitting a big square fou with glowing red sticks. Those musical instruments had a white square LED array that surrounded each of the drums, permitting the drums to manufacture both music and dazzling display that included Chinese orchestra characters and shapes produced in tandem.

The Chinese character ‘fou’ (缶 or 缻) is used to refer to containers. The character has been discarded in Chinese; meanwhile it is still very much in use and is called ‘cans’ in Japanese. Since the Xia and Shang dynasties, some types f those containers has been used as musical instruments called percussion fou. Since the publicity of the musical instrument, there have been some scholarly disputes on whether the fou used during the Beijing Olympics in 2008 were really musical instruments as they could be containers simply. In the Confucian ritual music of the republic of Korea, a similar musical instrument that is produced from clay pot known as ‘bu’ that is derived from the name ‘fou’ is being used.