Note 14 — Chapter II · EXOTIC MUSIC[12]

What we may call modern Chinese music probably reached China through Bactria, a Greek kingdom, founded by Diodotus 256 B. C. Jesuit missionaries jumped to the conclusion that the Greeks borrowed the Pythagorean scale from the Chinese, but the ‘Chinese’ scale did not exist in China until two centuries after its appearance in Greece. Chinese literature on music goes back no farther than the ninth century of the Christian era, to which date may be assigned the Chieh Ku Lu, a treatise on the deer-skin drum, introduced into China from Central Asia, and evidently of Scythian origin. There are several important works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which the history and theory of music are fully discussed.