Guo Chuwang and Xiaoxiang Shuiyun: the clouds that hid the Jiuyi mountains

Hunan, in south-central China, where the Xiao River flows into the Xiang. A man from somewhere else stands on the bank, looking south.

He has come from Lin'an, the Southern Song capital, with a chest of qin scores. He has been living here for some time now, and every day he does the same thing: he looks south. To the south lie the Jiuyi mountains, where, according to legend, the ancient emperor Shun is buried. But he has never seen them clearly. There is always mist on the river. The mist rises and becomes cloud, and the cloud hides the mountains.

He looks for many days. Then he goes back inside and turns what he has seen, and not seen, into a piece of music.

The preface

The Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, "Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries", 1425), compiled by the Ming prince Zhu Quan and the oldest surviving collection of qin music, includes Xiaoxiang Shuiyun (潇湘水云, "Mist and Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang"). Its preface to the piece is a single sentence:

This piece was composed by Master Chuwang, Guo Mian. The master was a man of Yongjia. Whenever he gazed toward Jiuyi, it was hidden by the clouds of the Xiao and Xiang, and so he lodged in this piece his quanquan feeling.

Quanquan (惓惓) describes earnest, anxious attachment, a feeling that cannot be put down. What he was attached to, the preface does not say. It gives only an action, gazing, and a result, being blocked.

It may be the weightiest sentence in any qin preface: it explains nothing, yet for six hundred years players have felt they understood it.

The Jiuyi mountains

To understand the sentence, you first need to know what Jiuyi means.

The Jiuyi mountains, also called Mount Cangwu, lie in what is now Ningyuan county in southern Hunan. The Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), the great history written by Sima Qian around 100 BCE, says that Shun "went south on a tour of inspection, died in the wilds of Cangwu, and was buried at Jiuyi south of the Yangzi". Shun was one of the sage-kings of Confucian legend, a model of filial devotion who handed his throne to the most worthy man rather than to his own son, and under whom the world was perfectly governed. Jiuyi is therefore a symbol: clear and honest government, an age when the world followed the Way, a past worth looking back toward.

This is also where the story of Ehuang and Nüying is set. Shun's two wives followed him south to the banks of the Xiang, and when they learned of his death they wept until their tears stained the bamboo with spots (see the entry on Xiangfei Yuan in the guide to classic qin repertoire (in Chinese)). The waters of the Xiao and Xiang are a landscape wrapped in mourning: Shun died here, and his wives died here.

A man of the late Southern Song, standing between the Xiao and the Xiang and gazing toward Jiuyi, was gazing toward the tomb of a sage-king and an age when the world was in order. And the clouds hid it. Later readers find it hard not to think of the state of the country at the time.

Guo Chuwang

Guo Mian, courtesy name Chuwang, came from Yongjia (modern Wenzhou, on the coast of Zhejiang) and lived in the late Southern Song (1127–1279). Very little is recorded about his life. Pieced together, the story runs roughly like this.

As a young man he went to Lin'an (modern Hangzhou) and lived as a retainer in the household of Zhang Yan, a senior official. Zhang Yan collected qin scores and owned a great many of them, part of which had come from the collection of Han Tuozhou, the all-powerful chief minister of the day. In Zhang's house Guo read every one of these scores and put them in order. It was the most important education of his life.

In 1206 Han Tuozhou launched a northern campaign to recover the Central Plain, the old heartland of China, which had been lost to the Jin dynasty in 1127. The campaign was a disaster. The following year Han Tuozhou was killed and his head was sent to the Jin as part of the peace terms. Zhang Yan, as a member of Han's faction, was dismissed from office. Guo Mian lost his patron. He left Lin'an with the scores, travelled south into Hunan, and settled between the Xiao and the Xiang.

In his time the Jin held the north, the Mongols were rising beyond them, and after the failed campaign the Song court in Lin'an had no hope left of recovering the north. What a man in his position thought as he gazed toward Jiuyi, having left the capital because his patron fell, carrying a chest of scores south, the preface does not say. It is not hard to guess.

Xiaoxiang Shuiyun, Fan Canglang (泛沧浪, "Drifting on the Canglang") and Qiu Hong (秋鸿, "Autumn Geese") are among the pieces credited to him, though the attribution of Qiu Hong is disputed. The preface to Fan Canglang says his wish was "to sail a small boat out onto the Five Lakes". The man who wanted to leave and the man who gazed at the mountains are the same man.

Is that reading right?

From the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) on, Xiaoxiang Shuiyun has been read as a piece about the fate of the nation: water and cloud on the surface, grief for the country underneath. Some Qing dynasty (1644–1912) handbooks say it outright, rewriting the preface to say that Guo Chuwang withdrew to Mount Heng because of the Jin invasion, and that the clouds hiding Jiuyi expressed his anguish at the loss of the land.

In fairness, this is a later reading, not something Guo Chuwang said himself. The preface in the Shenqi Mipu speaks only of quanquan feeling. It does not mention the Jin, and it does not mention lost territory. Quanquan can mean grief for one's country, but it can also mean the simple melancholy of a view that is always withheld. A stranger in a strange place who wants to see a mountain and never can is reason enough for a piece of music. Qin prefaces often give a single image and leave the rest to the player.

But once a reading takes hold, it reshapes the music. In Ming and Qing handbooks Xiaoxiang Shuiyun grew from ten sections to eighteen. Players added many gun and fu (滚拂, rapid sweeps across the strings), cuo (撮, two strings plucked together) and long sliding passages. The music became more and more turbulent, and the sections of "surging cloud and water" grew longer and longer. Performers played the grief into it. The Xiaoxiang Shuiyun we hear today carries six centuries of interpretation, and it is hard to say which layer belongs to Guo Chuwang and which to those who came after. They have grown together.

Listening to the piece

Start with the recordings by Guan Pinghu or Wu Jinglüe, two great twentieth-century players. The opening harmonics are clear, cold and slow, like mist just beginning to rise from the water. Then stopped notes enter, the fingers travel along the strings, and single notes stretch into chains: the clouds begin to move. In the middle section the right hand sweeps continuously across the strings while the left hand plays wide vibrato. The water heaves, the clouds heave, and the whole instrument seems to sway. Then it suddenly stops and returns to harmonics. The water grows still and the clouds disperse, and the mountains are still not there.

When it ends, you notice that the piece contains no mountain from beginning to end. It is all cloud and water. The mountain exists only in the preface. The player knows it is there and so does the listener, but neither has seen it. That was Guo Chuwang's method: do not write what cannot be seen; write what hides it.

The Zhejiang school

Guo Chuwang is also remembered as the founder of the Zhejiang school of qin playing.

He taught his art to his student Liu Zhifang, who taught Mao Minzhong and Xu Tianmin. Mao Minzhong was a major player of the last years of the Southern Song and composed Yu Ge (渔歌, "Fisherman's Song"), Qiao Ge (樵歌, "Woodcutter's Song") and Shanju Yin (山居吟, "Living in the Mountains"), among others. Xu Tianmin's family handed the qin down for four generations and became known as the Xu lineage, and around them the Zhejiang school took shape. Through the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and the early Ming it was the most influential of all the schools, and many of the pieces in the Shenqi Mipu came from its transmissions.

The Zhejiang school was distinguished by its focus on the purely instrumental: qin pieces were played as instrumental music, without sung words. In the Ming this approach was taken up by the Yushan school and became the mainstream of later qin music (see The schools of the guqin (in Chinese) and Yan Tianchi and the Songxianguan Qinpu). In other words, the fact that qin players today play without singing can be traced back to Guo Chuwang, the man on the riverbank gazing at the mountains.

The tightened fifth string

Xiaoxiang Shuiyun is played in a tuning called jin wu xian (紧五弦, "tightened fifth string"), also known as ruibin diao, in which the fifth string is raised by a semitone.

This tuning gives the piece a tonality different from zhengdiao (正调, standard tuning), and its intervals have an unsettled quality that fits the image of clouds hiding Jiuyi. Standard tuning is, as its Chinese name says, "upright"; the tightened fifth is slightly askew, and that slight tilt carries the taste of longing for something out of reach. The first task in learning the piece is to get used to the positions under your hand again. Fingers trained in standard tuning will land on the wrong notes.

Xiaoxiang Shuiyun is the model of the qin's large-scale pieces. It usually takes fifteen to twenty minutes to perform and is graded at the highest level of difficulty. Its structure runs roughly like this: harmonics at the opening, like mist beginning to rise; a long middle section full of slides and sweeps, cloud and water surging; and a return to harmonics at the end, the clouds withdrawing and the water falling calm. Its technical difficulties are discussed in the guide to classic qin repertoire (in Chinese).

Clouds

The most moving thing about this piece is that it is not about the mountains. It is about the clouds that hide them.

The mountains are there all the time. They simply cannot be seen. Guo Chuwang did not write "the country is broken", as the Tang poet Du Fu did in his famous line about a ruined capital. He wrote "whenever he gazed toward Jiuyi, it was hidden by the clouds": an action repeated every day, and a result received every day. He does not complain about the clouds. He only records it. I looked; it was hidden.

That restraint is how the qin handles great subjects. It does not cry out. It looks, the way the man on the riverbank looked south each day. And the listener, in that cloud, sees everything he did not say.