Listening to the Qin and the Hall of Ten Thousand Qin: Emperor Huizong's instrument

A pine tree. Beneath it, a qin table, and at the table a man in a Daoist robe and a small cap, playing. On either side of him sits another man, one in a red robe and one in green. Both have their heads lowered, one tilting his face upward and the other leaning forward, as though they were following a very long sentence. A boy stands to one side. In front of the qin table is an incense burner, and a thread of blue smoke rises from it perfectly straight. There is no wind.

A trumpet vine climbs the pine, and a pot of flowers sits on a stone stand. That is the whole painting. No mountains, no water, nobody speaking.

This is Listening to the Qin (Tingqin Tu, 听琴图), a hanging scroll in ink and color on silk in the Palace Museum, Beijing. At the top is a poem by Cai Jing; the three characters in the upper right and the cipher in the lower left belong to Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty.

What is in the painting

Start with Cai Jing's quatrain:

Sounding zhi and tuning shang on paulownia saved from beneath the stove, among the pines one half hears the tune of wind entering the pines. One looks up, one looks down, guests full of feeling, as if listening to a single air on a qin without strings.

Zhi and shang are notes of the traditional five-note scale. The paulownia saved from beneath a stove is Cai Yong's Scorched Tail qin, made from a piece of wood he heard crackling in a neighbor's fire (see The Scorched Tail qin). Among the pines one seems to hear Feng Ru Song (风入松, "Wind Entering the Pines"), a piece traditionally attributed to the third-century poet and musician Ji Kang. And the two listeners are as absorbed as if they were hearing the stringless qin of the poet Tao Yuanming (see The stringless qin).

Four lines, three allusions from qin history, all used correctly: the scorched paulownia for the instrument, the wind in the pines for the music, the stringless qin for the highest state of listening. Cai Jing is counted among the four great calligraphers of the Northern Song (960–1127); one view holds that the "Cai" in the traditional list of Su, Huang, Mi and Cai originally meant him. He also understood the qin. His poem is not a courtesy but a commentary: what you see here is not simply a man playing, but a man playing a fine instrument, playing a fine piece, for people who understand.

In the upper right corner, the three characters of the title are written in "slender gold" script (shoujin ti, 瘦金体), a style Huizong invented himself. The strokes are thin as iron wire, with knife-sharp turns. In the lower left is his cipher, which reads "the one man under heaven". Its four characters are run together into a single sign that looks like an elongated character for "heaven".

Who the figures are

The traditional view is that the robed man playing beneath the pine is Huizong himself.

Huizong was devoted to Daoism and gave himself the title "Emperor, Lord of the Dao, Head of the Teaching", and the player wears a Daoist robe. The player's face, long with narrow eyes and a small moustache, resembles surviving portraits of the emperor. And who would dare paint someone else in the central seat, playing the qin, in a picture the emperor himself titled?

As for the two officials listening, some say the man in red is Cai Jing and others say he is Tong Guan, a powerful eunuch general. Both are guesses; the painting does not say. But if the player is Huizong, the listeners can only be his closest ministers, and during the Xuanhe reign period (1119–1125) no one was closer than Cai Jing. The "guests full of feeling" in Cai Jing's poem may well include Cai Jing himself.

Whether Huizong painted it himself is also disputed; one view gives it to an artist of his painting academy, with the emperor adding title and cipher. Huizong's academy was the finest in Chinese history, and its painters routinely worked to the emperor's wishes for him to inscribe. Whoever held the brush, the scene it records is clear: in the palace at the end of the Northern Song, the emperor played, and his chief minister listened and wrote a poem.

The Hall of Ten Thousand Qin

Huizong collected qin.

The thirteenth-century writer Zhou Mi, in his Yunyan Guoyan Lu (云烟过眼录, "Record of Clouds and Mist Passing Before the Eyes"), a catalogue of art he had seen, says that Huizong set aside a "Hall of a Hundred Qin" in the Xuanhe Palace to house the famous instruments of the empire. Later writers usually call it the Hall of Ten Thousand Qin. Huizong collected everything from painting and bronzes to rare stones, flowers and birds, but he gave the qin a hall of its own.

First among the instruments was Chunlei (春雷, "Spring Thunder"), made by Lei Wei of the Tang dynasty (618–907). The Lei family of Sichuan were the most celebrated qin makers of the Tang; for more on them and on Tang instruments, see Jiuxiao Huanpei and the Tang qin.

Zhou Mi also recorded Spring Thunder's eventful later life. In the Jingkang Incident of 1127, the armies of the Jin, a dynasty founded by the Jurchen people of the northeast, took the Song capital Bianjing (modern Kaifeng) and carried off the treasures of the palace. Spring Thunder went north with them and became a favorite of Emperor Zhangzong of Jin. When Zhangzong died, the instrument was buried with him in his tomb. According to Zhou Mi, eighteen years later it came to light again and passed to Yelü Chucai, the adviser of Genghis Khan, who was also a qin player. After that it changed hands several more times.

Not every detail can be trusted, but the story shows one thing: an instrument can outlive a dynasty. The Song fell, the Jin fell, and the qin was still there.

And what became of the Hall of Ten Thousand Qin? When the Jin entered the city in 1127, the collections of the Xuanhe Palace were hauled away cartload by cartload, and the qin went with them. Not one instrument remained in Bianjing. The old things Huizong had spent his life collecting became, in a single night, someone else's old things.

The emperor who lost his empire

Huizong, whose personal name was Zhao Ji, was the most artistically gifted emperor in Chinese history and also one of the most disastrous.

He painted birds and flowers, and his Auspicious Cranes and Cotton Rose and Golden Pheasant remain among the best-known Song paintings. He created the slender gold script. He had his bronzes catalogued in the Xuanhe Bogu Tu and his paintings and calligraphy in the Xuanhe Huapu and Xuanhe Shupu. He built the Genyue, an imperial garden, filling it with rare stones shipped from the south; the "flower and stone convoys" that carried them drained the people of the southeast. He ran a painting academy and set its examination questions himself. One of his famous topics was a line of poetry, "returning from treading on flowers, the horse's hooves are fragrant", which asked painters to show a scent.

He reigned for twenty-six years. As the Jin armies moved south he abdicated in favor of his son; two years later Bianjing fell, and father and son were carried thousands of miles north as captives. Huizong died in Wuguocheng, in present-day Yilan in Heilongjiang province. He was fifty-four, and had been gone from his capital for eight years.

So later viewers have looked at this painting with complicated feelings. The scene itself is serene: pine, qin, incense, listeners, each in its proper place. But the viewer knows that the dynasty outside the frame would be gone a few years later. Cai Jing, the "guest full of feeling" of his own poem, was later banished and died on the road into exile at the age of eighty. Tong Guan was executed. Of the three men in the painting, not one came to a good end.

Qin tradition has a saying that the qin is the opposite of "the music of a fallen state": it is an instrument of self-cultivation and restraint. Huizong is the exact counterexample. The man who appreciated the qin better than almost anyone lost his country. That is not the qin's fault, but the painting makes it impossible not to think of it.

Another side of Huizong and the qin

Huizong also played. The History of Song calls him fond of antiquity and broadly cultivated, and the qin was part of his daily routine. During the Xuanhe period he summoned qin players from across the country to the palace, and players from Shu (modern Sichuan) were especially valued, since the Lei family's instruments came from Shu and the Shu style of playing was well known.

His taste in the qin was for the old. Spring Thunder was a Tang instrument, and most of those ranked after it were Tang or early Song, matching his taste in painting and bronzes: he wanted the sounds left behind by earlier dynasties. A man who possessed the whole empire wanted, more than anything, the past.

That may also explain why Listening to the Qin looks the way it does. The robe, the pine, the incense and the stringless qin all lead back toward antiquity. The man in the painting is less a Northern Song emperor than the gentleman of the Jin dynasty (265–420) he imagined himself to be, the age of Ji Kang and Tao Yuanming.

Why still look at this painting

Because it is the most complete picture we have of a Song scholar's life with the qin.

The qin table, lower than an ordinary table, with a recess to hold the instrument steady; the qin placed with its head to the player's right; the incense burner in front, where the smoke will not drift over the instrument; the listeners on low stools, leaning slightly forward, hands on their knees; even the position of the boy. All of this is physical evidence. Much of what players today say about burning incense before playing (see The qin and incense), the height of a qin table or how to listen comes from paintings like this.

More important, the painting shows a relationship: between the one who plays and the ones who listen. None of the three figures is looking at the instrument. The player watches his own hands; both listeners have their heads bowed. It is the same idea as the story of Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi: the qin is played for someone, and the listener matters more than the instrument. Cai Jing's last line says the same: listen deeply enough, and it no longer matters whether there are strings at all.

Huizong did not manage to be a good emperor. But in this painting, under the pine, with the smoke rising straight into still air, he is a good qin player: a fine instrument, a fine piece, listeners who understand. Of all the things an emperor might do well in a lifetime, this is probably the smallest. It is also the one that has lasted.