In a corner of crowded Zhongshan Road, one of China’s top 10 business streets in the 12th century port city of Xiamen on the East China sea, 40-year-old Sen Tham Yen Sho plays his electronic piano on a makeshift stage against the backdrop of a Chinese eatery.

Sen Tham’s self-composed scores are folksy, mostly traditional Chinese music set to modern disco beats. But not many in the crowd – mostly bemused Indian tourists who are cut off from the musician by cultural and linguistic walls – are willing to fork out $7 for his CD.

"I wish Indians could read Chinese and appreciate our country’s folk music.

I have heard that Indians love music," Sen Tham said in broken English, mopping his weather-beaten face with a kerchief after an hour-long recital.

But Xiamen and the adjoining island of Gulangiu – known as the land of 1,000 pianists because it has the highest population of piano players per family in the world – have other goodies to offer brand-hungry tourists from India armed with fat wallets.

Xiamen is one of China’s hottest "special economic zones" (SEZs) that the country has painstakingly built after the island was freed from Japanese occupation in the 1940s.

According to an estimate, the city, also known as Garden By the Sea, attracts close to 15 million foreign visitors every year.

Xiamen, which boasts one of the highest levels of foreign investments in China, was declared an SEZ in the 1980s. It traditionally dealt with leather, apparel, hardware, antiques and jades. It has 600 financial institutions and has trade links with as many as 162 nations, including India.

"But Xiamen is much more than just a business destination," says 20-year-old Mary Fan, a local. Mary, who dresses like an American in short skirts, tight blouses, high-heeled shoes and stockings, and is impeccably made up, says the islands live on music.

"Piano and string instruments like the cello and the violin are very popular here," she says. The album of the month, according to Mary, is a four-CD compilation of "Red Folk Music", a selection of folk instrumental numbers and a sentimental album by Liu Sanjie, a half-Japanese, half-Chinese crooner.

The Hua Cheng Music Company is home to at least 70 gleaming black and brown Hamilton and Baldwin pianos. Their prices range from $1,500 to $10,000 depending on the wood and the keys used.

The shop, one of the largest chains of music instrument retail outlets in Xiamen and the Gulangiu islands, is 60 years old.

"Most people here play the piano at leisure. Almost every family in the Gulangiu island has a pianist and Xiamen hosts at least 10 piano concerts every year featuring American, German and local piano sensations like Ying Cheng Zhon, who comes home from the U.S every four or five years to take part in concertos," says Xie, a piano historian posted in the shop. Hua Cheng Company sells more than 1,000 pianos every year.

According to Xie, the people of Xiamen and its neighbouring islands learned to play the piano from the Turk settlers and the early Protestant Christian missions.