Panjiayuan antiques market

Aside from chops, Panjiayuan is a great place to browse for jewellry-making bits - findings, beads, pearls, books of all shapes and sizes (complete bilingual Chinese-English collection of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid for 50 rappen per book), even new-fangled hang-like musical instruments. In classic Chinese style, the “changs” looked cute as a button - they came in different colours and one of the stalls even had a musician attracting passers-by and showing off their resonant sound (kind of a cross between a xylophone and a gong) by playing a few simple tunes by the sidelines. However, upon closer inspection, we realized that the small sized changs could only play five or seven pitches - even the full, large sized changs only covered the diatonic major scale plus one second interval above and below.Read more