This, he says, seems to indicate that he brought a scale of five tones with him from Asia. And this same scale you will find in the scale of the _Sheng_. I gave all this evidence respecting the scale of the _Sheng_ more than twenty-five years ago, to Mr. Ellis; but it was a long time before he could bring himself to believe that Amiot and other leading writers had given altogether misleading statements. He went and pored over the big folio volumes of Amiot’s “Mémoires des Chinois” (1780), utterly confused; and only in later times, when investigating for his work of marvellous patience, “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” did he see that truly the tetrachord was the basis of Asiatic music as it was of Greek music. How was it that Amiot, living with the Chinese, gave a wrong drawing of the free reed used in the _Sheng_? How came he to say with authority that its thirteen pipes were a succession of semitones? How came he to select _f_ as the tonic of the scale? Engel falls into the same notion of thirteen pipes giving the same octave of semitones as ours, but says that the _e_ and _b_ were exceptional notes, only used occasionally. [Illustration: ORDER OF THE PIPES AS THEY STAND IN THE SHENG. _Fig. 30._ _The illustration gives the series of holes into which the pipes are fitted on the top of the covered bowl. Pipes 1, 9, 16, 17 are mutes, only placed for symmetry. Be careful in references not to confuse the numerals as to order of pipes with those of the sequence and scale._] [Illustration: SCALE OF THE SOUNDS OF THE SHENG. _These numbers indicate the sequence in evolution of pipe lengths by the process described._] The scale really comprises one octave and a fourth and the _master pipe_ is the _e_♭, it being so marked on every instrument I have handled, as shown in the illustration at pipe 14. This is the pipe giving the note corresponding in pitch to the imperial standard pipe, yet it is one fourth less than that in length, because, though both are cylindrical, the one is whistle or flute blown and the other reed blown—such is the law of these reed pipes—whilst the real standard length standing beside it, No. 15, gives a sound a fourth lower, and is the lowest in sound in the scale.