In 1978, Hé Bǎoquán (何寶泉) from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music created the Butterfly Zheng, (dié shì zhēng, 蝶式筝). Still produced today, it has 49 strings in an amazing arrangements of fixed bridges and moveable bridges.

While far more versatile than the 21-string zheng, allowing players to pick from a wide variety of scales without retuning anything, all that versatility led to complication. A player  had to relearn hand patterns and adjust their spatial memory of where different notes were found. It has yet to reach the popularity of the 21-string guzheng.

Image Source: HKzhengart.com Used under Fair Use exceptions of US and China Copyright law.

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Similar to the Butterfly Zheng, the W sought to offer greater versatility without changing tunings. Dr. Mei Han attributes its creation in 2000 to Pan Haixin and Pan Haiwei from Hebei province. It has one side arranged in a diatonic scale, and one side in a pentatonic scale. This makes more sense to me than the Butterfly, but time will tell its popularity. I do not yet grasp how vibrato techniques would work on this. I'm not sure how many strings it has or even how to count them... possibly 29?

Image source: guzheng58.com Used under Fair Use exceptions of US and China Copyright law.

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The Multi-tonic Zheng 多聲弦制箏 (Duō shēng xián zhì zhēng) or Duō shēng zhēng for short (多聲箏) seems to have been made in 2011 by Professor Lǐ Méng (李萌), though my sources are not good.. It's effectively two zhengs combined; there are 21 strings tuned to the diatonic scale for the right side, with 16 additional strings tuned to the pentatonic scale on the left side. The range of the two sides is roughly the same, with the 21-stringed side having a deeper A and the 16 string has a higher D. The one in the picture is from manufacturer Dunhuang, model number 697-1.

Source: Taiwanese store stmusic.com.tw.

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