Chinese folk music refers to the orally transmitted song, dance, and instrumental traditions of the many peoples living within China. It encompasses the Han majority as well as a vast range of ethnic minorities, resulting in exceptional regional variety in language, timbre, rhythm, and repertoire.
Core musical traits include pentatonic (five-note) modal systems (gong, shang, jue, zhi, yu), flexible and speech-like rhythms, and heterophonic textures in which multiple performers ornament the same melody differently at the same time. Typical instruments include plucked zithers and lutes (guzheng, pipa, ruan), bowed fiddles (erhu and regional huqin), flutes and double reeds (dizi, xiao, suona), free-reed mouth organs (sheng), and an array of gongs, drums, and clappers.
Vocal styles range from unaccompanied mountain songs (shan'ge) and work songs to narrative ballads and festival pieces. Themes often celebrate nature, courtship, migration, labor, local history, and ritual life, with performance contexts spanning marketplaces, weddings, harvests, temple fairs, and staged folk ensembles.
