萨克斯管 – saxophone


I find some of the best music at ridiculously late o’clock, and it always strikes me that if I had gone to bed just a few minutes sooner, I might not have happened to stumble on something, just like this.

The Chinese term for “saxophone” is “sàkèsī guǎn” (萨克斯管), which is less of a translation, and more of a loanword really. Sàkèsī is a phonetic for the word “sax”, an homage to the Belgian instrument maker that invented it in the early 1840s, Adolphe Sax; while guǎn simply refers to “tube”.