The small Konghou with a long history is simple in structure, beautiful in appearance and easy to use. It has been circulated in the court and the people for a long time, but it was lost in the Qing Dynasty.

In the early 1930s, the Shanghai Datong Concert, a well-known ethnic music society in my country, with the purpose of promoting my country's long-standing music culture, initiated and produced 143 ancient and modern ethnic musical instruments, and made reform attempts on 20 musical instruments, among which There is Xiao Konghou.

The form of this small Konghou is quite unique. It is not only different from the "Shape of a Wood Comb" in "Dream Lianglu", nor does it have a tie-beam below it, but an angular curved wood that extends downward in an arc. , into a semi-circle, the appearance seems to be added to the bottom of the phoenix head Konghou, and it looks like a multi-stringed bow with a handle.

The strings are stretched in the middle of the bow-shaped curved wood, and the pitch is adjusted according to the length of the strings. The outermost one is the low-pitched string, and it is modeled on the "Continued Literature General Examination of the Qing Dynasty": the vertical Konghou, one string by the handle has ten frets, when playing the high-pitched string, the left fret and the right string are played, and the accompanying drawings are on the innermost side. At the high-pitched strings, a fret fretboard is set to expand the range of the small Konghou's high-pitched area. It is a pity that this small Konghou made by Datong Music Club has not been preserved due to the war or other reasons over the years.

In the early 1980s, my country successfully developed a variety of small Konghou with different shapes. On the basis of the Yanzhu Konghou made in 1980 by the No. 1 National Musical Instrument Factory of Suzhou, in 1982, it successively developed two kinds of small Konghou with different shapes. The first is a hand-dial-style small Konghou designed by Wang Xiang and made by Jiang Baisong, with a phoenix head carved on the head of the qin.

This qin is included in the large-scale picture book "Chinese Musical Instruments Guide"; the second is a small Konghou designed by Zhang Zirui and made by Jiang Baisong, which absorbs the shape of the ancient vertical Konghou. These two small Konghous are frame type, with piano columns, 115 cm in height and 60 cm in width. The sound box is a three-dimensional double-sided lute shape, covered with a paulownia wood panel. The upper bentwood has metal pegs on both sides. On the panels on both sides, there is a column horse under each string, which can move up and down and are arranged in a geese line, so it is also called a geese column, which is the conductor of the vibration of the strings. Zhang has two rows of strings on the left and right, a total of 54 strings. Range A1-e3, up to four and a half octaves.

In August 1983, Zhang Kun, one of the designers of Yanzhu Konghou, was invited by the Shaanxi Classical Orchestra to design a small Konghou imitating Tang Yanzhu for the group's large-scale music and dance program "Imitation of Tang Dynasty Music and Dance". The scene shape and temperament are coordinated and unified, reflecting the grand music and dance of the Tang Dynasty and the charm of the Tang capital.

This small Konghou, due to the fineness of the qin column, has a vivid appearance and an angled Konghou "shaped like a half-edge wooden comb". The height is 130 cm, the width is 70 cm, and there are 56 double-row strings. Its structural principle is the same as that of the Yanzhu Konghou, but all parts of the qin have been simplified, and its shape is like a phoenix about to fly. The vocal range is from A1 to a3, up to five octaves, and it can also be transferred to four main relative tones.

Zhao Guangyun of Shenyang Conservatory of Music also successfully designed and produced a portable non-tuned small Konghou in July 1990.