Sixteen Beats

The melody of Sixteen Beats grew out of Eight Beats with added ornaments, and is played by an ensemble of huqin, pipa, sanxian and zheng. The Eight Beats tune spread in every direction, with more than a thousand variants, and Sixteen Beats is counted the finest of them. It passed among folk string players for a long time before it was included in the Xiansuo Beikao in the nineteenth year of the Jiaqing reign of the Qing.

Translated by AI from the Chinese game text. It is replaced automatically when the official English text ships.