The Scorched Tail: the block of paulownia Cai Yong pulled from the fire

The last years of the Eastern Han dynasty, in the region of Wu, near the mouth of the Yangzi. It is evening, and in one household's kitchen the cooking fire has been lit. The stove is stuffed with split paulownia wood. Paulownia is light and burns easily, and in the countryside it is common firewood.

The fire catches, and the wood begins to crackle.

The family pays no attention. But a guest lodging next door suddenly stands up. He is a refugee from the north and has been living here for some time. He has heard the sound, and it is not the dull burning of ordinary firewood. It is a clear, ringing crack with an echo in it. He runs into the kitchen and pulls the piece of wood out of the fire.

One end is already charred. He asks if he may keep it.

Some thirty characters in the Book of the Later Han

The scene comes from the biography of Cai Yong in the Hou Hanshu (the "Book of the Later Han", the official history of the dynasty, compiled in the 5th century). The original is a single sentence:

A man of Wu was burning paulownia to cook his food. Yong heard the fierce crackle of the fire and knew it was fine wood. He asked for it and cut it into a qin, and it did indeed have a beautiful sound. But its tail was still scorched, and so people of the time called it the Scorched-Tail Qin.

There are two points to notice in this sentence.

The first is that Cai Yong heard it. Whether wood cracks crisply or dully in a fire tells you its density and dryness: dense, well-dried paulownia burns crisp, damp or loose wood muffled. For a qin maker the ear comes before the eye. One crack was enough.

The second is "its tail was still scorched". A maker would normally trim the timber clean, but Cai Yong left the black mark. The instrument survived carrying its own history, and the flaw became its name. When people say "Jiaowei" (焦尾, "Scorched Tail") today, they mean not only an instrument but a man who heard something in a fire.

Who Cai Yong was

Cai Yong (133–192), courtesy name Bojie, from Chenliu in present-day Henan, was one of the great scholars of the late Eastern Han.

He did a great many things. He led the collation of the Confucian classics and had the fixed text carved in clerical script on forty-six stone tablets outside the Imperial Academy in Luoyang, the Xiping Stone Classics; when they went up, the carriages of people coming to copy them blocked the streets every day. As a calligrapher he is said to have invented the "flying white" style after watching workmen brush whitewash on a wall, the white showing through the strokes. He was expert in music, played the qin, and wrote the Qin Cao ("Qin Melodies"), the earliest surviving book to record systematically the background of qin pieces. His daughter was the poet Cai Wenji.

His political career was a disaster. His memorials criticizing the government offended the court eunuchs and got him banished to the northern frontier. Pardoned, he offended powerful men again, dared not return to the capital, and lived as a fugitive in the Wu and Kuaiji region for twelve years. The burning paulownia belongs to those years.

Later the warlord Dong Zhuo seized the court and forced Cai Yong into office, promoting him three times in three days. When Dong Zhuo was assassinated, Cai Yong sighed in the presence of the minister Wang Yun, only a sigh, and was thrown into prison, where he died at sixty.

So the owner of the Scorched Tail heard good wood in exile and lost his life at court over a sigh. The instrument and the man were both pulled from the fire, and neither escaped it entirely.

Not only a scorched tail

There is a similar story about Cai Yong in the preface to the "Rhapsody on the Long Flute" by Fu Tao of the Eastern Jin (317–420).

While Cai Yong was hiding in Kuaiji, he lodged at a place called Keting. One day he looked up at the roof, noticed the sixteenth bamboo rafter, and said, "That is fine bamboo." He had it taken down and made into a flute, and its sound was "uniquely marvelous". This flute, the Keting flute, later came into the hands of the Eastern Jin general Huan Yi, which is another story (see Huan Yi's three variations).

One instrument heard in a fire, another seen in a roof. Both stories point to the same thing. For Cai Yong an instrument began as a material, and the material would speak for itself, if only you could hear and see it.

The Four Famous Qin

The Scorched Tail was later grouped with three other instruments as the "Four Famous Qin". The source is the preface to the "Rhapsody on the Qin" by Fu Xuan of the Western Jin (265–316):

Duke Huan of Qi had a singing qin called Haozhong; King Zhuang of Chu had a singing qin called Raoliang; in the middle ages Sima Xiangru had the Lüqi, and Cai Yong had the Jiaowei. All of them were famous instruments.

Each of the four has its legend.

Haozhong ("Roaring Bell") was the qin of Duke Huan of Qi, the first of the five hegemons of the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE). Its sound was said to be as loud as a bell, and the name has the swagger of its owner.

Raoliang ("Circling the Rafters") was the qin of King Zhuang of Chu, named for a sound that lingers around the roof beams after the music stops. A later legend says the king neglected his court for seven days after acquiring it, until Queen Fan Ji asked how he then differed from Jie of Xia and Zhou of Shang, the proverbial tyrants who lost their dynasties; he had it smashed with an iron ruyi scepter. The episode appears in no source from the Han or earlier. But it shows another side of the qin: good enough to make a ruler forget his duties.

Lüqi ("Green Silk") was the qin of Sima Xiangru, said to have been a gift from Prince Xiao of Liang and inscribed with the words "the united essence of paulownia and catalpa". It was the instrument he played when he won Zhuo Wenjun with the song Feng Qiu Huang ("The Phoenix Seeks His Mate") (see The qin seduction).

Jiaowei was Cai Yong's qin.

Only the Scorched Tail has its origin in an official history; the other three live mostly in later commentaries. But the grouping already existed in the Western Jin, less than a century after Cai Yong's death.

Where the instrument went

According to the Nanshi (the "History of the Southern Dynasties") and other sources, the Scorched Tail later entered the palace of the Southern Dynasties. It was still in the imperial storehouse under Emperor Ming of Qi (reigned 494–498), who once had it brought out for a qin player to perform on. After that there is no reliable record. An instrument of the Eastern Han would now be nearly nineteen hundred years old, and the wood itself has very likely long since perished.

But "Jiaowei" survived as a word. Later players often named their own instruments after it; in poetry "the scorched tail" simply means a fine qin; and the tail end of the instrument itself came to be called the jiaowei. A single instrument became a byword for the qin, and then a place on its body.

Why paulownia

What Cai Yong pulled out of the fire was paulownia, not some other wood, and that matters.

Paulownia, the tree called tong in Chinese, is the most traditional soundboard material for the qin. It is light, with widely spaced growth rings; it carries sound quickly and resonates well. Its weakness is that it is soft and dents easily. The legendary ruler Fuxi was said to have "carved paulownia into a qin", and the Book of Songs, the oldest collection of Chinese poetry, has the line:

The yi tree, the paulownia, the catalpa and the lacquer tree: these are cut to make the qin and the se.

From the Song dynasty (960–1279) onward, fir gradually became the other main soundboard wood, because it is more stable and durable. But the clear tone of paulownia has always remained the standard sound in players' minds.

So when Cai Yong heard paulownia cracking in the stove, his ear registered not just "good wood" but "a good qin". Dense, thoroughly dried old paulownia comes by luck: the tree grows for many years, and the timber then dries in the shade for many more. The family was burning firewood; to Cai Yong, they were burning a qin.

Later makers agreed that the best soundboards come from old timber: beams from demolished houses, old door panels, even old coffin boards, dried for decades or a century, no longer warping, and open in tone. Cai Yong's paulownia was probably such wood, or it would not have sounded that way in the fire. The man of Wu may well have been burning an old roof beam.

How a qin gets a name

The qin has a custom that no other Chinese instrument shares: it is given a name. Nobody names a pipa, a flute or a zheng, but a qin is named. The name is carved on the back of the instrument and passes down with it.

The custom goes back to the Four Famous Qin, whose four names come from four sources: Haozhong the sound, Raoliang the lingering resonance, Lüqi the appearance, Jiaowei the origin. Later names mostly follow one of these paths. Jiuxiao Huanpei ("Jade Pendants of the Ninth Heaven") and Dasheng Yiyin ("Sound Bequeathed by the Great Sage") describe sound; Chunlei ("Spring Thunder") and Feiquan ("Flying Spring") describe imagery; Haiyue Qinghui ("Clear Radiance of the Moon over the Sea") describes appearance.

Jiaowei is the most unusual, because it names a flaw that a maker would normally hide. This shaped later taste. The lacquer of an old qin cracks with age into patterns called duanwen; strictly speaking this is damage, yet players treasure it, and a saying holds that "a qin under a hundred years old has no cracks". An instrument's scars are read as its record of service, a way of seeing that probably begins with the Scorched Tail.

The qin maker's ear

Qin makers today still choose timber by listening. They tap a paulownia or fir soundboard with a knuckle and listen for a clear ring and a clean decay; old wood or new, dried long enough or not, it all shows in the sound. An experienced maker can even hear roughly how the finished instrument will sound.

Cai Yong hearing a fine piece of paulownia in a kitchen fire, and a modern maker tapping a plank, are two thousand years apart and doing the same thing. For how a qin goes from timber to instrument, see the article on qin making.

As for the instrument that kept its burn mark, it reminds us of one thing. The history of a fine object does not have to be flawless. It can be something pulled out of a fire.