Cai Wenji and Hujia Shibapai: a return home, and a poem of disputed authorship

A camp of the Southern Xiongnu, around the year 207. A Han Chinese woman is about to leave.

She has lived here for twelve years. She is the wife of the Left Worthy Prince, one of the highest nobles of the Xiongnu, and she has two sons. Today an envoy has come from the Han court, carrying gold and jade discs, to say that the chancellor Cao Cao wants her brought home. The carriage is ready, and the envoy is waiting outside the tent.

The younger of her sons runs up, throws his arms around her neck and asks: Mother, where are you going? They say you are leaving; will you ever come back? You have always been so kind to me; why are you so hard today? I am not grown up yet; why don't you think of me?

She gets into the carriage. When it has gone a long way she looks back, and the camp is already out of sight.

This scene is not invented. She wrote it herself.

The record in the Book of the Later Han

Cai Yan, styled Wenji, was the daughter of Cai Yong (133–192), the great scholar, calligrapher and qin player of the late Eastern Han dynasty (25–220) (on Cai Yong, see the Scorched Tail qin). The Hou Hanshu (后汉书, the Book of the Later Han), the official history of the dynasty compiled by Fan Ye in the 5th century, gives her a biography in its chapter on exemplary women. She was, it says, "widely learned, talented and eloquent, and skilled in music". The Tang commentator Li Xian quotes a lost biography of her with a small story. Cai Yong was playing the qin one night when a string broke, and his daughter, sitting nearby, said it was the second string. He broke another on purpose, and she said it was the fourth. The ear ran in the family.

Her first marriage was short. Her husband, Wei Zhongdao, died young, there were no children, and she returned to her father's house. Then came the years of chaos as the Han state disintegrated. The Book of the Later Han records:

In the Xingping era the empire fell into ruin and disorder. Wenji was seized by nomad horsemen and passed into the hands of the Left Worthy Prince of the Southern Xiongnu. She lived among the nomads for twelve years and bore two sons. Cao Cao had always been on good terms with Cai Yong and grieved that he had no heir, so he sent an envoy to ransom her with gold and jade, and married her again, to Dong Si.

The Xingping era was 194–195. The Southern Xiongnu were a nomadic people who had settled along China's northern frontier. Cao Cao, the warlord who by then controlled the Han court, had been an old friend of her father and was grieved that Cai Yong's line had ended, so he paid her ransom and arranged a new marriage for her.

Her two sons did not come back with her.

The history says only that she "bore two sons". It gives no names and says nothing of what became of them. The whole of those two children's lives, in the Chinese historical record, amounts to those three words.

The Poem of Grief and Indignation

At the end of her biography, the Book of the Later Han includes two poems by Cai Yan, both titled Beifen Shi (悲愤诗, "Poem of Grief and Indignation"), one in five-character lines and one in the older sao style of the southern songs. The five-character poem runs to 108 lines and is the first long autobiographical narrative poem by a named author in Chinese literature. It begins with the warlord Dong Zhuo's seizure of the capital in 189:

The Han in its last days lost its grip on power, and Dong Zhuo threw the order of heaven into chaos. Where they went, they cut down every living soul, and the corpses lay propped against each other. Men's heads hung beside the horses; behind the horses rode the captured women.

She was one of those women behind the horses. The poem goes on to her twelve years among the Xiongnu, the arrival of Cao Cao's envoy, and the parting:

My son came forward and clasped my neck, asking, Mother, where are you going? People say Mother must leave; will there ever be a time she returns? Mother, you were always loving and gentle; why are you now so unkind? I am not yet grown; how can you not think of me? Seeing this, my insides gave way; I was dazed as if gone mad. Weeping, I stroked him with my hands; about to set out, I hesitated once more.

These are the most direct lines on the parting of mother and child in Chinese poetry. There is no ornament, only what a child said and how a mother responded. The five-character poem is generally accepted as Cai Yan's own work.

Who wrote the Eighteen Songs

Hujia Shibapai ("Eighteen Songs of a Nomad Flute") is a different poem. The hujia was a reed pipe of the northern nomads. The poem is in sao style and divided into eighteen sections, each called a pai, a "beat". It follows the same story as the Poem of Grief and Indignation, from capture to return, with even more intense emotion. The first section opens:

When I was born, the world was still at peace; after I was born, the fortunes of Han declined. Heaven was unkind and sent down war and separation; earth was unkind and made me meet this age.

The thirteenth section is the farewell:

I never thought that in my broken life I would return; I hold my nomad sons in my arms, and my tears soak my clothes. Each step takes me further, and my feet will hardly move; my soul is gone, my shadow lost, and love is left behind.

The poem first appears in Song dynasty (960–1279) collections, Guo Maoqian's anthology of ballads, the Yuefu Shiji, and Zhu Xi's Chuci Houyu, attributed to Cai Yan. But the Book of the Later Han does not include it and no source before the Tang quotes it, so doubts were raised as early as the Song. The fiercest modern round of the debate came in 1959, when the writer and historian Guo Moruo published article after article insisting that it was Cai Yan's genuine work. Most scholars consider it a later composition written in her name, possibly in the Tang dynasty (618–907). One reason is that its geography and its picture of the north fit Tang imaginings of the frontier more closely.

The debate has reached no conclusion, and it has never stopped the poem from being loved. Whoever wrote it carried a mother's dilemma as far as it would go: to leave is to go home, to stay is to keep her sons. The eighteen-section form is itself like eighteen breaths, each one an attempt to recover, and after eighteen she still has not recovered.

The qin pieces

There were already qin pieces with Hujia in the title in the Tang. Li Qi's poem "Listening to Dong Da Play the Hujia, also sent to Supervising Secretary Fang" begins:

Lady Cai long ago made the music of the nomad flute, one playing of eighteen beats. The nomads wept onto the border grass; the Han envoy was heartbroken before the departing traveller.

Dong Da was Dong Tinglan, the most celebrated qin player of the High Tang (see Dong Tinglan), and his Great Hujia and Small Hujia were famous pieces of the day. So by the eighth century at the latest, qin players had already linked Cai Wenji's story with the "eighteen beats". Li Qi goes on to describe the playing: in the empty mountains a hundred birds scatter and gather again; ten thousand miles of floating cloud darken and clear. It is probably the oldest surviving account of what it felt like to hear the Hujia.

Zhu Quan's Shenqi Mipu ("Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries", 1425) of the Ming dynasty preserves a Great Hujia and a Small Hujia as instrumental pieces. The qin song Hujia Shibapai, sung to the eighteen sections of the poem, appears in several handbooks of the late Ming and early Qing, and the versions most often played today are based on them. In eighteen sections, it counts as one of the long pieces of the qin repertoire and takes around twenty minutes to perform. It is not in the standard tuning but usually in huangzhong diao (黄钟调), in which the third string is slackened, which gives it a darker colour.

Dong Tinglan's Hujia was lost after the Song, and the Hujia Shibapai played today is probably not the same music. But the effect Li Qi describes, the nomads weeping onto the border grass, is what players have kept reaching for.

In painting

The story of Cai Wenji also entered painting. A Southern Song (1127–1279) work, Wenji Returns to Han, attributed to Chen Juzhong, shows the moment she looks back from horseback. Later painters returned to the subject again and again, and the picture always includes the nomads' felt tents, the Han envoy's carriages and horses, and a woman on horseback who does not know which way to look.

The painters all chose the same instant: after she has mounted, before she sets off. They do not paint her capture, nor her life after returning, only that backward look. It is the same instant as the line in the Poem of Grief and Indignation, "about to set out, I hesitated once more". For a thousand years poets, qin players and painters have all stopped at this moment.

Why qin players keep playing it

Most qin pieces depict landscapes or states of mind; very few are about a particular person or event. Hujia Shibapai is one of the few with a clear protagonist, and that protagonist is a woman and a mother, which is extremely rare in a musical tradition centred on scholar-officials. A player performing Guangling San is taking the part of the assassin Nie Zheng; a player performing Hujia is taking the part of a mother.

It has survived because the dilemma has not dated. "Returning to Han" later became an expression for going back where one belongs. Cai Yan's story reminds us that going back is also a kind of loss. Cao Cao ransomed her because Cai Yong had "no heir", so that a dead father might have descendants. What she lost for it was two living sons. The poems keep this account precisely; the official history does not mention it at all.

The piece is not included in the graded list in the guide to classic repertoire (in Chinese), because it is too long, too difficult and too heavy. But if you want to know whether the qin can tell a story, this is the answer.