When talking about his craft, the normally soft-spoken master Tong becomes visibly more animated and verbose. Shuffling over to his workstation, he demonstrates the precision required in making a good erhu, explaining that all six pieces of wood used to piece the body of the drum together need to carry the same tone. He clinks on pieces of sandalwood that he has already sorted by tone and begun shaping, showing how they all emit the same pitch when struck. “When you make an erhu with wood that has the same tone, the sound it produces will be especially beautiful. If the wood doesn’t have the same tone, it’ll sound harsher, like a singer with a sore throat.”
Throughout the conversation, Tong drops in bits of knowledge on erhu making as they spring to mind. Each time he goes off on a slight tangent, a nugget of information is revealed, such as how the interior of the drum needs to be as smooth and polished as the outside, so the sounds won’t be absorbed by the wood before being emitted, how bigger snakes have better skin, and how each section will yield different kinds of skin, which all affect the eventual sound of the erhu. Tong’s pearls of wisdom are unpolished and totally organic in how they are presented as suddenly as he remembers them—a reflection of how organically he himself discovered these very pearls through the years.
With how detail-oriented and almost scientific Tong is in his approach to instrument crafting, it’s easy to forget he is entirely self-taught. He is understandably proud of his accomplishments, and at having received recognition from professional master players at the quality of his work. He tells us how he has signed up to this year’s Chinese Music Expo in Guangzhou, where he wants to “showcase Hong Kong’s local works, and let people see that we’ve also made top-notch musical instruments.” Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the expo has been postponed to August, but Tong is still hopeful.