Re: Daily Almanac - August 22

[Pat Missin <pat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It may also be worth adding that today is the feast day of the
semi-mythical Chinese Empress Nu Qua, who is credited with invention
of the sheng some five thousand years ago.

Her name is also often rendered as Nu Kwa, or Nyu Kwa. Sadly, someone
once misspelled it as Nyn Kwa and thanks to the wonders of the copy
and paste culture, this misspelling is now widespread over the
internet. I also suspect she would be very disappointed to find out
that quite a few sites have transformed her from an empress into an
emperor.

Despite it being very unlikely that she literally invented the sheng
(it's by no means certain that she even existed and the invention of
the sheng has also been credited to other semi-mythical characters,
such as the Emperor Huang Ti) and despite my feeling that the status
of the sheng in the history of free reed instruments has been somewhat
overstated (it is not reasonable to describe it as THE ancestor of the
harmonica, nor is it the original free reed instrument, as many seem
to claim), I decided to honour her feast day by uploading another
chunk to the history pages on my web site. 

Those of you who are interested in such matters can read it here:

http://www.patmissin.com/history/eastern.html

 -- Pat.