Huge Chinese drum

[u/Worrynotmuch]

I've recently been trying to find traditional Chinese music on youtube (harder than I expected), and this brought to mind something I saw a long time ago which I'd like to ask about. When I was doing research in the rare books room of the University of Washington in St. Louis Art and Architecture library about 20 years ago, by coincidence I came across a photograph taken by Westerners in the 1910s or 1920s. I don't remember the exact context, but it was either right after the 1911 Revolution or a few years later when Emperor PuYi was deposed and kicked out of the Forbidden City. At any rate, it was a time when the Forbidden City was vulnerable and people could go in and take stuff, and some Westerners were on hand taking photos of stuff being looted from the palace. (I don't know whether the Westerners were doing the looting or not). One of those photographs shows by far the biggest drum I have ever seen, not a typical Asian drum (like a Japanese taiko drum) but was instead like a Western-style circular, flat bass drum, the kind used in marching bands, carried vertically with straps and played with pad-tipped sticks. However, it would have taken Sun Wukong to carry this drum like that. Some men were standing beside it, propping it on its side for the photo, so I could gauge its size fairly well. It looked about a meter deep (maybe a little less) and about three full meters in diameter. It was a truly monstrous instrument, significantly taller than the people posing with it; I wouldn't be surprised if it, and others like it which the imperial court must have been using for centuries, are the largest drums that have ever been made in all of world history.

That photo didn't have much to do with my project, and as graduate students are always in a rush, I just gawked at the picture for a moment, thinking to myself, "whoa, that's the most massive drum I could possibly imagine ever existing", and then I moved on. But I've wondered about that huge instrument ever since. Does anyone on this reddit know anything about such drums and their usage?

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