The Jinyu Qin Society and the survey of 1956: how twentieth-century players saved the qin

Beijing, spring 1956. A man in his fifties is packing his bags. He is a senior employee of an airline, but this trip has nothing to do with his job. He is about to visit more than twenty cities in search of a kind of person who is close to disappearing.

He is taking a tape recorder. In those years a recorder was a rare thing, heavy and expensive, and it needed someone whose job was to carry it. He is also taking two young people, Wang Di and Xu Jian, both trained in music. The three of them set out from Beijing, heading south, then west, then south again.

The people they are looking for are qin players: people who can play the guqin, the seven-string Chinese zither. They do not know how many are left in the whole country.

Why they had to search

The guqin was inscribed by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, and it is often described as "endangered". Its most endangered moment, though, was the first half of the twentieth century.

Around the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) and the early Republic, the situation of the qin was roughly this. The people who could play were scattered across the country and did not know one another. The older masters were growing old, and no one was recording how they played. Handbooks of notation sat in private hands, some surviving in only one or two copies. Pieces passed from teacher to student by ear and by hand, and when a teacher died, the pieces went with him. There were no recordings, no surveys, and no institution responsible for any of it. When a master died, it was as if a library had burned down.

Against this background, a group of players decided to act on their own.

Suzhou, 1936

In March 1936 Zha Fuxi, Peng Zhiqing, Zhang Ziqian and about twenty other players founded the Jinyu Qin Society (今虞琴社) in Suzhou. Jinyu means "Yushan today", a tribute to the Yushan school of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), one of the most influential schools of qin playing (see Yan Tianchi).

The founders came from quite different backgrounds. Zha Fuxi was from Jiangxi, had learned the qin in his home town, and later built a career in aviation. Peng Zhiqing was from Hunan and had inherited the qin from his family; the piece Yi Guren (忆故人, "Remembering an Old Friend") came down through his family line (see Classic pieces to learn (in Chinese)). Zhang Ziqian came from Yangzhou in Jiangsu and was an heir of the Guangling school. They knew one another through the qin, visited back and forth around Suzhou and Shanghai, and came to feel that there ought to be an organization.

After its founding the society moved its activities to Shanghai and held a yaji every month. A yaji is an "elegant gathering": a group of people meet, take turns playing, listen to one another, check their scores against one another, and exchange the handbooks handed down in their families. Today this sounds ordinary. At the time it was new. Before this, players mostly played on their own, and there was no regular setting where people from different lineages could sit in the same room.

In 1937 the society published the Jinyu Qinkan (今虞琴刊, "Jinyu Qin Journal"), a thick volume. What was in it? A directory of players: every player in the country the society could reach, with name, native place, teacher and address. There were fewer than two hundred. It also contained studies of handbooks, discussions of fingering, biographies of players and the society's own rules. It was the first modern "census" of qin players across China, carried out by the most laborious method available: writing letters and asking.

The journal is still the most important source for the study of the qin in the Republican period (1912–1949). Lingxian's fingering encyclopedia cites the Jinyu Qinkan in more than a dozen entries.

A few months after the journal appeared, the war with Japan broke out, and the society's activities stopped.

The whole country, 1956

Back to the journey at the beginning.

In 1956, commissioned by the Chinese Musicians' Association and the Institute of National Music, Zha Fuxi took Wang Di and Xu Jian on a tour lasting several months. They visited more than twenty cities, among them Beijing, Tianjin, Jinan, Nanjing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Hefei, Wuhan, Changsha, Chengdu, Chongqing, Xi'an and Taiyuan. They found more than eighty players, recorded more than two hundred performances, and collected a quantity of handbooks and instruments.

The method was simple. They found a player, asked him to play the pieces he did best, and recorded them. Then they asked him about his teachers and how he had learned, and wrote that down too. Some of these players had gone decades without anyone listening to them. When the recorder was switched on, a few of them wept.

The importance of this survey is hard to measure today. Most of the old masters were elderly, and many died within the following ten years. Without the recordings, their way of playing would have gone with them. The sound captured in 1956 became the baseline for the transmission of the qin in the second half of the century: trace back the version that many masters play today, and you often arrive at these tapes.

Zha Fuxi went on to compile the Cunjian Guqin Qupu Jilan ("Survey of Extant Qin Scores", 1958), a master catalogue of the pieces in all surviving handbooks. It shows at a glance which piece appears in which handbooks and how the different versions relate. He also directed the Qinqu Jicheng (琴曲集成, "Collected Qin Pieces"), a facsimile collection of more than 140 handbooks from the Ming onward. The project ran for decades and was finally completed in thirty volumes by Zhonghua Book Company in 2010. It is the set that players use today when reconstructing a piece and that scholars use to compare editions (see Printing the handbooks).

Guan Pinghu

Guan Pinghu (1897–1967), of the same generation as Zha Fuxi, did a different kind of work: dapu, reconstructing pieces from historical scores.

Guan came from a family of painters; his father, Guan Nianci, was a court painter. Guan Pinghu painted too and made his living by it all his life. In the qin he belonged to the line of Yang Zongji of the Jiuyi school, but he went on to study widely across other schools and was generally recognized as the most technically complete player of his time.

In the 1950s he joined the Institute of National Music and worked full time on dapu, bringing back to sound pieces in the old handbooks that no one played anymore. Jianzipu, the tablature in which qin music is written, records which string to pluck and where to stop it, but not rhythm. For a piece that no one has played in several hundred years, how it should actually go is decided by the person doing the reconstruction. Guan Pinghu's versions of Guangling San (广陵散), Youlan (幽兰, "Solitary Orchid"), Liu Shui (流水, "Flowing Water"), Li Sao (离骚, "Encountering Sorrow") and Hujia Shibapai (胡笳十八拍, "Eighteen Stanzas of the Nomad Flute") became the modern standard versions of these pieces. Guangling San alone took him several years: forty-five sections, worked out one section at a time.

In 1977 his recording of Liu Shui was included on the Golden Record carried into space by the Voyager probes (see Zhiyin: the friend who knows the music). By then he had been dead for ten years.

For what dapu is and how it is done, see What is dapu (in Chinese).

The sound on the tapes

Part of the 1956 recordings was later published, and players can listen to them. The sound is very different from the guqin heard in concert halls today. Many players used silk strings, which sound husky, soft and close. The recording equipment was basic, and the background hiss is loud. Most of the players were old men whose hands were no longer fast, but every note is steady. Some pieces were known to only one person; after the recording, no one played them again, and that tape is the only sound the piece has left in the world.

Zha Fuxi's own Xiaoxiang Shuiyun (潇湘水云, "Mist and Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers") and Yu Ge ("Fisherman's Song"), Zhang Ziqian's Longxiang Cao ("The Soaring Dragon"), and Guan Pinghu's Liu Shui and Guangling San are all among these recordings. Wu Jinglue, Pu Xuezhai, Yang Baoyuan, Xia Yifeng: today these names are known only to qin players, but their fingers are preserved on tape.

What strikes a listener most is not that the recordings sound old. It is how small and separate each tradition was. Every player plays differently from every other. There is no standard version and no textbook; each person plays the way his own teacher taught. This is what the qin looked like before the survey: a few dozen small traditions, each alive on its own and unaware of the others. The survey brought them together.

That generation

The players of the first half of the twentieth century did, broadly, four things. They organized (societies). They documented (the journal, the survey, the recordings). They compiled (the collections of handbooks). They revived (reconstruction). Taken together, these four are the whole foundation on which the guqin could later be nominated as "living heritage".

Not one of them made a living from the qin. Zha Fuxi worked for an airline, Guan Pinghu lived by painting, Zhang Ziqian worked in a bank, and Peng Zhiqing had been a teacher. The qin was their pastime, and they turned that pastime into a tradition passed on.

One fact deserves attention here. The qin was not saved by the court, by a school or by any institution. It was saved by a group of amateurs who thought the work needed doing, and did it.

"Rescue"

In discussions of intangible heritage today, the word "rescue" comes up often. For the guqin, rescue did not begin in 2003. It began in 1936. That year there were fewer than two hundred players in the country; today the number of people learning the qin runs to more than a million. What lies in between is the work of that generation.

Qin societies still exist. The Jinyu Qin Society still meets in Shanghai, and there are many more across the country. At every yaji, players listen to one another and check their scores together, doing what those people did in 1936. Few of them, perhaps, think about the fact that the scores in their hands and the versions in their ears were brought back seventy years ago by three people carrying a tape recorder through more than twenty cities.

If you want to hear what that survey recorded, start with Guan Pinghu's Liu Shui. It went into space, and it also stayed on earth.