ZHENGZHOU, Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- Wang Jinwu picks up a violin and points to the patterns running across its back. He taps the instrument, listens to its sound, and then walks visitors through his workshop.
Wang, 54, runs a violin-making company in Xiaowangzhuang Village in Queshan County, Henan Province in central China.
Around him, workers continue their tasks in small, precise movements.
Liu Ziming, 30, is bending thin pieces of wood into the curved sides of a violin, joining them to form the body before attaching the top and back plates. Nearby, Xiong Jinduo, a mother of two in her late 30s, applies glue to thin wooden purfling and presses it into grooves along an instrument's edge.
Violin making, a craft steeped in centuries of European tradition, has found an unexpected home here in Queshan, a rural Chinese county with no history of making musical instruments.
Once a poverty-stricken county, Queshan has developed a full violin production chain, from timber treatment and component carving to painting and finishing. More than 2,600 local people now work in the industry, producing about 400,000 violins a year, according to local industry figures. About 80 percent of the violins produced in Queshan are exported, while most of the timber used for making them is imported, according to Jiang Baolin, secretary-general of the Queshan Handmade Violin Makers Association.
The story of how the industry took root here begins not with timber or a port, but with people.
Since the 1980s, villagers from Queshan began leaving for Beijing to learn violin making. Some eventually built their own workshops and businesses there. Then, from around the mid-2010s, the flow reversed, with many Queshan-born violin makers in Beijing returning home, encouraged by local incentives to develop the industry. They brought with them skills, customers and connections built over decades.
Wang was one of them.
He entered the trade almost by chance. With little schooling at the time, his initial goal was simply to work hard enough to earn a living.
Wang left Henan for Beijing at 16 or 17 and apprenticed at a violin factory. After six or seven years in factories, he began working independently in the mid-1990s. His first workshop made only four or five violins a month. Over time, he built a business and developed overseas customers.
One U.S. wholesaler has worked with him for nearly two decades. The customer now buys more than 2,000 instruments a year, roughly two-thirds of Wang's annual output.
Wang moved his factory from Beijing to Tianjin in 2017, then brought it back to Queshan in 2023. "I felt more settled once I came back home," he said.
By then, he had already built an overseas customer base, and trade fairs had become an important way to find new buyers. His company has taken part in musical-instrument exhibitions in China, the United States, Germany, Japan and Italy.
About 90 percent of his sales now go to the United States, he said, with smaller volumes shipped to countries including Italy, the Czech Republic and Finland.
A violin takes about a month and a half to complete, Wang said. The process is divided into six broad stages and many smaller tasks. Varnishing alone may involve more than 20 rounds of application, drying and sanding.
Much of the work depends on judgment that is difficult to reduce to a formula. Workers learn one stage at a time, often taking two or three months to become proficient, while mastery takes years.
Wang describes each violin as a work of art rather than a commodity.
The growth of local suppliers and supporting businesses has also shaped how the industry operates in Queshan.
Rather than relying entirely on large centralized factories, production is divided among workshops and households. Some workers specialize in a single stage and are paid by the piece. Others can take components home and arrange their own hours.
For Xiong, who also farms, that flexibility matters. She can make violin parts while staying close to her family. Liu, who has worked in the trade for nearly a decade, likewise values working close to home.
The model has helped turn a craft once learned in distant factories into a source of rural employment.
But it also exposes some of the industry's limits.
Wang said he recruited more than 10 young people after returning in 2023, but only a few stayed. Violin making requires long periods of repetitive, focused work, and some young workers prefer jobs that let them move around.
In his view, the skills themselves are not easy to standardize. Experienced makers rely not only on measurements but also on an eye and a feel honed through years of practice.
Maker Xiong Kaifeng returned to Queshan after years of making violins in Beijing and now focuses on performance-grade handmade instruments. He makes only around 20 violins and 10 cellos a year, along with fewer violas.
For makers like him, the focus is on improving quality and building recognition for Queshan's handmade instruments.
Queshan is now planning an industrial park and facilities for training, research and instrument appraisal. Local authorities also want makers to develop their own brands and move beyond contract production.
Wang is pursuing a similar direction in his own company. He wants to use better-selected timber, refine plate thickness and produce more instruments with consistently high sound quality. With what he describes as a weaker market, he is now making about 2,000 to 3,000 instruments a year, compared with more than 4,000 at one point.
One instrument Wang remains particularly proud of is a cello he made that won first prize at the First National Violin Education Equipment Exhibition in 2019. It was later sold at auction to a teacher for 80,000 yuan (about 11,838 U.S. dollars).
Returning home has not meant turning inward.
In September 2025, Wang traveled to Cremona, Italy, home to famed violin maker Antonio Stradivari, to attend the Cremona Musica International Exhibitions and Festival, an international trade show for musical instruments. During the trip, he visited local violin workshops to observe makers and study their techniques. He found that the violin-making process was slower at every stage than in his own factory, with higher standards for timber selection.
"Italian violin making has a much longer history," he said, "and there is still much for us to learn."
That may be the clearest picture of Queshan's violin industry: a craft learned elsewhere, brought home and adapted to a rural economy, while its makers continue to look outward for customers, knowledge and new ways to improve. ■
