The violin sales have plummeted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lu Zunfei (left), a luthier, and his colleagues start live broadcast to promote domestic sales. [Photo by Qin Bin/For China Daily]

He believes that the production of violin is comparable to artistic creation, in which the most important thing is quality rather than quantity. The production of violins takes many processes, such as panel jointing, scraping, engraving, fitting, painting, etc, and it often takes more than two months to produce a good violin. Liu and his colleagues have also independently developed the use of natural plants and Chinese herbal medicines, such as shellac, gardenia, lavender oil, and have them refined into alcohol-free and oily pigments that avoid the hazardous benzene chemicals. They replace the original violin outer chemical paint with the pure plant pigments that are harmless to both the environment and workers.