[Note 1: the major fusion] According to the historical records, before the introduction of the Persian Barbat (which was called Hu-pipa by Chinese people), the pipa Chinese musician performed with appeared to be like the pipa in Fig. [1] sometime referred to as qin-pipa. Then some musicians went to China through the Silk Road (around 5th century), bringing with them a kind of lute-like instrument, the Persian Barbat (or the hu-pipa). The latter didn't become popular until the early Tang Dynasty (around the 7th century) when a group of brilliant musicians were presented to the emperor. They were apparently amazing, as the emperor fell in love with their music immediately. Soon this foreign music became very popular in the Chinese capital Chang'an (today's Xi'an) and the hu-pipa became a fashion. Some Chinese musicians began to modify their instruments to conform more to the shape of the Hu-pipa, producing something that was called the Tang pipa (see [2] and [3]). At first the neck was kept straight, and then it was bent, while the sound body changed from being round to pear-shaped. The reason for the change may be that people have the tendency to follow fashion (which seems to be true even today). In the old times, the emperors were the biggest fashion stars. What they liked, everybody liked. Moreover, the Hu-pipa doesn't "sing" the Chinese songs the way Chinese people were used to, so the "voice" had to be changed. So were the playing techniques (or rather, they maintained the original finger nail techniques, instead of using a plectrum). Thus the sound body became shallower compared to the "Hu-pipa" in order to create a more crystal-like sound. And the development continued ... Until the middle of last century, the pipa tuning was still pentatonic, the strings were made of silk, and real finger nails were used for plucking the strings. The modern pipa has a complete chromatic scale (obtained by increasing the number of frets); steel strings have replaced the silk ones, and 5 finger plectra (faked nails) are used.

[Note 2: some common confusions] There are sometimes speculations in some recent pipa literatures that the name pipa might have derived from the Persian lute Barbat. This sounds more like a serious joke than a possibility, because (1) the name pipa appeared in historical documents much earlier than the arrival of the Barbat, (2) the pronunciation of barbat can hardly be associated with that of p'i-p'a, whereas for Chinese people, it is just natural, as in the everyday language, the phonetic use of the words such as "pi-pi-pa-pa" or "pi-li-pa-la" is very common in describing similar sounds from nature or humanly-made noise. (3) the Chinese characters were created intelligently according to some basic principles: for instance, the character(s) used as the name of an "object" should reflect the "image" of the object or/and indicate its meaning (in a self-explanatory way). Meanwhile, the pronunciation is by no means randomly given. It must be related to the object in one way or another.

In the case of pipa, for example, the two characters were written as or in the earliest documents, where the (wood) refers to the material the pipa was made of, and the is a symbol for "the hand/fingers", implying "action" with fingers (thus finger techniques), whereas the two symbols and on the left side of the characters are "borrowed" simply because of their pronunciations. In another words, they stand there in the formation of the two characters for the pipa simply because their pronunciation sounds similar to the two sounds produced by the two finger techniques on the pipa. Later on (around the third century), the written characters for pipa have been standardized as where the upper part of the characters is the common root for the names of the ancient string instruments qin and se.

There are also arguments based on the fact that most of Chinese instruments have one-syllable names such as qin, se, sheng, yu, zheng, ruan, xiao, xun, etc; whereas the instruments of foreign origin have two syllable names such as erhu, yangqin, suona etc. Needless to say, the origin of instruments are apparent even from the characters used for their names, as they are either self-explanatary ( such as erhu and yangqin) or simply phonetic translation (Suona).

But one cannot conclude that all instruments with two sylables are foreign origin! This statement cannot be true, because written Chinese and spoken Chinese were not the same. In written language, one character distinguishes from the other quite obviously, even if they have the same pronunciation (In Chinese, there are many characters which have the same pronunciation, but mean different things). In spoken language, people try to avoid using one-syllable words to name a thing, otherwise confusion would be inevitable. What we see in the historical documents are all written language. In the old times (say 2000 years ago) people wrote on bamboo strips or on silk. When they could note a thing with one character, they wouldn't care to use two (economy was a virtue). However, if they found one character was not enough, they would naturally use two or even more. Pipa requires two characters, because it refers to two techniques and two sounds. Moreover, even in written language, not all instruments with two-syllable names were of foreign origin. Examples are plenty, such as “bianzhong” , “paixiao”, "xiantao", "Konghou", etc. They are instruments from ancient China, even older than pipa.