CHAPTER 3: History to 1800

3.5 - The Baroque, Rococo and Classical Periods, 1600-1800

3 The Far East

The story of the dulcimer's arrival in the Far East amounts to little more than folk-lore; most writers quote 'a local tradition' as maintaining that it came to Korea in 1725, from India according to Marcuse (151), and to China by sea from Europe or Turkey, in about 1800. Sachs seems to be the recent European source for such writers (152), and of course, he did not quote his own sources.

It seems that Eckhardt's Koreanisches Musik (Tokyo, 1930) and Moule's 'List of the Musical Instruments of the Chinese', J.N China branch of Royal Asiatic Soc., xxxix, (London, 1908) might be of help if they were a little more readily available.

Jean Jenkins, on the other hand, asserts that its path was via Uzbekistan and Chinese Turkestan into China, and from there to Korea, but she does not give dates or sources, or acknowledge that there is another view. (153)