Dong Tinglan: the great player of the High Tang, and 'who under heaven does not know your name'
Gao Shi's farewell couplet, 'do not grieve that the road ahead holds no one who knows you; who under heaven does not know your name', was written for a qin player. Dong Tinglan was the most celebrated player of the High Tang: Li Qi and Gao Shi wrote poems for him, and the chancellor Fang Guan was his patron and lost his post on his account. His life, the Hujia he played, the Shen and Zhu schools of his day, and why a player could leave his name in Tang poetry.
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Translated from the Chinese original.
The Tianbao era (742–756), a winter day in north China. The sky is yellow, the clouds are yellow, the sun is dimmed by dust. A north wind is blowing, geese are heading south, and the snow is falling hard.
Two men are about to part here. Both are poor, so poor that, as one of them puts it, "today we meet and have no money for wine": they cannot afford a single farewell drink. One is a poet in his thirties, still without an official post, wandering in search of a career. The other is around sixty, and he plays the qin, the seven-string Chinese zither.
The poet writes him two poems. The last two lines of the first have been used by Chinese people to see off their friends for twelve hundred years:
Do not grieve that the road ahead holds no one who knows you; who under heaven does not know your name?
One of the most famous farewell couplets in Tang poetry was written not for a poet, not for an official, but for a man who played the qin.
Parting from Dong Da
The poet was Gao Shi (c. 704–765), and the two poems are known as "Parting from Dong Da". The first in full:
A thousand li of yellow cloud, the white sun dimmed; the north wind drives the geese, the snow falls thick and fast. Do not grieve that the road ahead holds no one who knows you; who under heaven does not know your name?
"Dong Da" means "Dong the Eldest": the man was Dong Tinglan, first-born among the Dong brothers. The second poem describes their situation:
Drifting on tired wings, I pity myself; ten years and more since I left the capital. A man of worth should not mind being poor and humble, yet today we meet and have no money for wine.
The two poems belong together. The second says where the two men stand: both poor, both unrecognised. The first is the consolation spoken from inside that situation. A penniless poet telling a penniless player "who under heaven does not know your name" is not politeness. It is a statement of fact. Dong Tinglan, in his own time, really was famous.
No qin player after the Tang ever had a reputation like it.
Who Dong Tinglan was
Dong Tinglan came from Longxi, in what is now Gansu province. He was born around the end of the seventh century and lived into the middle of the eighth. As a young man he studied the qin with Chen Huaigu, learning the "Shen family sound" and the "Zhu family sound", the two main schools of the High Tang, named after the Shen and Zhu lineages. His signature piece was Hujia (胡笳, "The Nomad Flute"), the music built on the story of Cai Wenji, the Han-dynasty noblewoman carried off to the steppe and ransomed back twelve years later (see Cai Wenji and the Hujia).
Little is recorded about his early life. One source says he "did not sit the examinations", travelled widely, and lived by his playing, at times in great hardship. At sixty he still "had no money for wine"; Gao Shi was not exaggerating. Most Tang qin players lived this way. The qin was a gentleman's accomplishment, but anyone who made it a profession ranked low, somewhere between an entertainer and a household hanger-on.
Li Qi's poem
The most detailed poem about Dong Tinglan is by Li Qi (c. 690–751), titled "Listening to Dong Da Play the Hujia, with a Message for Gentleman Fang of the Secretariat". It is also the Tang poem that describes the content of a qin piece most concretely. It opens:
Lady Cai long ago made the music of the nomad flute, one playing in eighteen stanzas. The nomads wept, their tears wetting the border grass; the Han envoy's heart broke before the woman going home.
Then it describes Dong Tinglan at the instrument:
Master Dong, in touch with the spirits, draws the sprites of the deep hills to eavesdrop. Slow phrases and swift ones alike answer his hand; going forward and circling back, as if with feeling.
Then the sound itself:
In the empty hills a hundred birds scatter and gather; over ten thousand li the drifting clouds darken and clear. A hoarse cry, a fledgling goose lost from the flock at night; a broken sob, a nomad child who cannot leave his mother.
These lines retell the plot of Hujia. The lost fledgling and the child clinging to its mother are the scene of Cai Wenji's return, when she had to leave behind the two sons she had borne among the nomads.
The ending is a message for Fang Guan:
This great talent has shaken off fame and gain; morning and evening he waits for you to come with your qin.
"Gentleman Fang of the Secretariat" is Fang Guan (697–763). When the poem was written he held the middle-ranking post of jishizhong; a few years later he would be chancellor.
Put Li Qi's poem next to Gao Shi's. One says he is famous, one says he is poor; one describes his music, one tries to find him a job. Among the poets, Dong Tinglan was genuinely liked.
Fang Guan
In his later years Dong Tinglan attached himself to Fang Guan as a retainer, a kind of house guest who lived on a patron's generosity. Li Qi's message, it seems, had its effect.
In 757, with the An Lushan rebellion (755–763) at its height, Fang Guan was made chancellor, and Dong Tinglan followed him into the centre of power. That was also the source of his trouble. The Old Tang History (Jiu Tangshu, the official history compiled in the tenth century) says in its biography of Fang Guan that he "consorted with the qin artisan Dong Tinglan and others". Dong, trading on Fang Guan's influence, was accused of soliciting bribes and was impeached. Fang Guan defended him, angered Emperor Suzong, and was shortly afterwards dismissed from the chancellorship.
Du Fu, then holding the post of Reminder of the Left, a junior remonstrance official, submitted a memorial on Fang Guan's behalf, arguing that "the fault is slight, and a great minister should not be dismissed for it". For this he was banished to Huazhou. So the chain of consequences runs: a qin player took money, a chancellor fell, and the greatest poet of the dynasty was driven from court.
Whether Dong Tinglan really took bribes cannot be established; a retainer accepting money is the most convenient lever against his patron. But the Old Tang History's wording is telling. It calls him a "qin artisan", qingong, and gong means a craftsman, a manual worker. To the historians, a chancellor keeping company with an artisan was itself improper.
Dong Tinglan's own end is not recorded. He probably died around the time of the rebellion, aged about seventy.
The position of a Tang qin player
One word recurs throughout Dong Tinglan's story: poor.
This was the normal condition of a qin player in the Tang. The fashionable instruments of the age came from Central Asia along the Silk Road: the pipa (a pear-shaped lute), the bili (a reed pipe), the jiegu (a waisted drum). The court's "ten divisions of music" were dominated by this foreign music, and the qin had no place in them. The poet Liu Changqing wrote "I love the ancient tunes myself, but few people play them now", and Bai Juyi wrote "the ancient sound is light and without flavour, and does not suit the feelings of today". Both are complaining about the same thing: the qin was out of date (see The qin in Tang poetry).
A man who made his living from the qin in such an age had two options: teach, or attach himself to the powerful. Dong Tinglan did both. He taught many students; the players named in the Qin Jue (琴诀, "Essentials of the Qin") by the later Tang writer Xue Yijian include his pupils. And he found a patron in Fang Guan. The second path ruined him, not his life but his name. The only thing the Old Tang History records about him is that he "solicited bribes".
Gao Shi's poem rescued him. Because of that line, later generations remember a famous musician, not a retainer who took money. Poems travel further than histories.
What he played
Apart from Hujia, did any of Dong Tinglan's music survive?
Almost all Tang qin notation is lost, and none of his pieces survives directly. There are indirect traces. Some of his students compiled his fingering into books, and Song-dynasty qin writings still cite a "Dong Tinglan score". The Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, "Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries", 1425), the earliest surviving printed collection of qin music, includes a Da Hujia ("Greater Hujia") and a Xiao Hujia ("Lesser Hujia"), and its preface to them says they were "composed by Dong Tinglan of the Tang". That cannot be verified, but it shows that in the early Ming players still linked these pieces with his name.
A player of Da Hujia today plays a Ming score under a Tang name.
The Shen and Zhu sounds
The two "sounds" Dong Tinglan studied were the named schools of the High Tang.
Earlier, the early Tang player Zhao Yeli had described a north–south division: "the sound of Wu is clear and graceful, like the Yangzi flowing broad and slow, lingering and unhurried, with the bearing of a gentleman of the realm; the sound of Shu is urgent and hasty, like breaking waves and rushing thunder, also a hero of its moment." Wu is the lower Yangzi region, Shu is Sichuan. By the High Tang the Shen and Zhu lineages each had their own transmission, and Dong Tinglan, who studied both, was considered the man who "united the two families' sounds".
Not a single piece from either school survives. We know the names, not the music. For the schools of later centuries, see The schools of the guqin (in Chinese).
Why him
He was not the only famous qin player of the Tang. Xue Yijian wrote the Qin Jue; Chen Zhuo's fingering was quoted by later handbooks again and again; Zhao Yeli was honoured with the title "the way of the qin". But the only one whose name survives in Tang poetry is Dong Tinglan.
He lived among poets: Gao Shi and Li Qi were his friends, Fang Guan his master, and Du Fu was demoted indirectly on his account. A player's fame lives not in the handbooks but in other people's poems. It is the same principle by which Bo Ya needed Zhong Ziqi, and Xi Kang needed the anecdote collection Shishuo Xinyu: the player leaves no sound behind. The listener does.
What Dong Tinglan's Hujia sounded like, no one knows. The Hujia Shibapai ("Eighteen Stanzas of the Nomad Flute") played today comes from scores of the Ming and Qing. But Li Qi's lines, "in the empty hills a hundred birds scatter and gather; over ten thousand li the drifting clouds darken and clear", may stand as a distant echo. Twelve hundred years ago, in a yellow winter, someone heard that sound, and wrote it down.