Bells peel back 2,400 years of Chinese history

The sound of 65 bronze bells ringing out in the Cultural Centre tonight will transport listeners back 2,400 years to China's Warring States Period.

They are a complete replica of the largest set of bianzhong, as the instrument is known, in existence. When it was unearthed from the royal tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Suizhou , Hubei , in 1978, it was dubbed "the eighth wonder of the world".

A recording of the original bells, which are preserved at a museum in Wuhan , was used in composer Tan Dun's Symphony 1997, which commemorated the handover. But the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra's season-opening concert tonight marks the debut of the complete replica of the Marquis Yi bianzhong in the city.

"The bells have been on tour in China and around the world, but never all 65 performing as the feature instrument in a given concert," said Zhang Hongyang, director of the Chinese Chime-bells Orchestra of Hubei.

The bells are not easy to take on tour. The set, made in 2006, weighs 6.7 tonnes.

"Tonight's concert will be a record for the 65 bells. It's the first time the set has been beyond the mainland and featured in a concert with works specially written for it, backed by a full Chinese orchestra," Zhang said.

"It's also the bells' first encounter with their Western counterpart: the grand organ. It is a dialogue between the court music of China and the sacred sound of the West."

The bells hang in tiers from an L-shaped wooden frame, and they're played by up to nine musicians at a time. The biggest bell weighs over 200kg - it takes three musicians alone to strike it.

"Each bell can produce two different tones depending on where it's struck - we call it 'one bell, two tones'," Zhang said.

"The whole set has a range of five octaves with a complete 12-tone scale. And that was over two millennia before Bach's authoritative works on tonality," he said.

Yan Huichang, principal conductor of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, said it was the musicians' duty to keep the instruments alive, even if no musical scores for the bells had survived.

"What we have here is not a theory, but actual instruments capable of full tonality for melodies. These bells represent China's ancient culture," he said.

"It would be my dream for a set of bianzhong to stand side by side with a grand organ in the future West Kowloon concert hall, making Hong Kong the first hall in the world to have both grand instruments of the East and West," he added.

The commissioned works for tonight's show are by John Howard from Britain, Robert Zollitsch from Germany and the orchestra's former music director Kuan Nai-chung.