Jiuxiao Huanpei: a Tang dynasty qin and the words carved on it

A qin is made of wood. How long can wood last?

A chair, a few decades. A roof beam, a few centuries. Yet in the storerooms of the Palace Museum in Beijing there is a qin whose ink inscription gives a date in the Kaiyuan era, the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty, 713 to 741. From then to now is roughly twelve hundred and seventy years. It is not an excavated relic dug out of a tomb. It has stayed above ground the whole time, passing through the hands of one generation after another, and in the twentieth century it could still be played.

Its name is Jiuxiao Huanpei.

What it looks like

Turn it over and look.

The front is in the Fuxi style: a square head, with a pair of rounded inward curves at the neck and another at the waist. It is one of the oldest qin shapes, traditionally said to have been designed by Fuxi, a legendary sage-ruler of high antiquity. The soundboard is paulownia and the back catalpa, and the whole instrument is lacquered a deep purple. The lacquer is covered in "snake-belly" crackle: as lacquer shrinks over the centuries it splits into transverse cracks, evenly spaced like the scales on a snake's belly. Crackle is the hallmark of an old qin. New instruments do not have it, and it cannot be convincingly faked.

On the back, above the dragon pool (the larger of the two sound holes), four characters in seal script give the instrument its name. Below the pool is a large seal reading "Baohan", "Embracing". On either side of the pool is an inscription. On the right:

Leaving its traces beyond the azure heavens, roaming at ease in the Great Ultimate. Tingjian.

It is signed by Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), one of the four great calligraphers of the Northern Song. On the left:

Clear and cool, it longs for high antiquity. Treasured by the Shimeng Studio.

The Shimeng Studio was the studio name of Ye Shimeng, a collector of the late Qing.

Inside the body, if you look in through the dragon pool, there is a line of ink giving a date of making in the Kaiyuan era. Scholars have discussed the exact wording of this inscription, but there is little dispute that the instrument is Tang. The crackle, the form, the wood and the lacquer ground all agree.

Whose hands it passed through

The history of an instrument's ownership is written in the inscriptions on its body.

Huang Tingjian's inscription shows that it was already a famous instrument in the Northern Song (960–1127). Huang was a friend of the poet Su Shi and a great calligrapher, and his willingness to inscribe a qin shows that it was already regarded as a treasure. His eight characters are cut large, filling most of the space to the right of the dragon pool, in the lean, wiry strokes that are unmistakably his.

"Treasured by the Shimeng Studio" shows that at the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) it belonged to Ye Shimeng. Ye was a qin player and collector of the late Qing, born into the imperial clan, who owned a great many instruments; he named his studio after six of his finest qin, and Jiuxiao Huanpei was a prize among them. The words he chose for it, "clear and cool, it longs for high antiquity", meaning a sound as cool and distant as the remote past, are his verdict after hearing it.

In the Republican period the instrument belonged to a father and son of the Liu family, and in the 1950s it entered the collection of the Palace Museum. Of all the hands it passed through between the Kaiyuan era and today, most left no name. What they left was the qin.

The Lei family

The most famous Tang instruments are those made by the Lei family of Shu, the region around modern Sichuan, known as "Lei qin".

The Leis were a family of qin makers around Chengdu over several generations of the Tang; the names Lei Wei, Lei Jue, Lei Xiao and Lei Wen appear in later records. A Song dynasty miscellany describes how Lei Wei chose his timber. On a day of heavy wind and snow he would go alone into the pine forests of Mount Emei and listen to the trees in the wind. The tree whose sound was long and sustained was the one to make a qin from. The story may not be reliable, since pine is not a usual tonewood for the qin, but it follows the same line of thought as Cai Yong hearing a piece of paulownia crackle in a kitchen fire (see the Scorched Tail qin): a good qin is heard before it is made.

Both Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi (1037–1101) wrote about Lei instruments. In his miscellaneous notes on the qin, Su Shi says his family owned a Lei qin built so that

the bridge was too low to admit a finger, and yet the strings did not buzz.

The yueshan, the bridge, is the strip of hardwood at the head that carries the strings. The lower the bridge, the closer the strings lie to the soundboard and the easier they are to stop, but the more likely they are to buzz against the board. That Lei instruments could have an extremely low bridge without buzzing came from their skill with the curve of the soundboard and the carving of the interior. This, Su Shi says, is what set Lei qin apart from all others.

Whether Jiuxiao Huanpei was made by the Lei family is not settled, but it is often regarded as a work from Shu in the High Tang. Very few Tang instruments survive: only a dozen or so are generally accepted today, divided among the Palace Museum, the National Museum of China and a few private collectors. Nor is this the only qin called Jiuxiao Huanpei, though the Palace Museum's is by far the most famous.

Other Tang instruments

Also in the Palace Museum is Dasheng Yiyin ("Sound Bequeathed by the Great Sage"), another Tang qin, in the Shennong style, with its name carved on the back and a date in the Zhide era of Emperor Suzong, the year 756. That was when the An Lushan rebellion (755–763) was at its most savage. The instrument was made in the middle of a war, and has survived more than twelve hundred years.

One more story deserves telling. In 1947, during an inventory of the Palace Museum's holdings, a qin was found in the corner of a storeroom, its lacquer under a thick layer of dust and its strings broken. It was entered in the register as "one broken qin". Later the scholar Wang Shixiang and the qin master Guan Pinghu examined it and recognized it as the Tang instrument Dasheng Yiyin; under the dust the lacquer looked almost new. Guan Pinghu restored it himself and restrung it, and it played perfectly. A national treasure had spent decades listed as a broken qin.

These two instruments show one thing: that a Tang qin has reached us at all is half luck. Jiuxiao Huanpei's luck was to find owners like Huang Tingjian and Ye Shimeng. Dasheng Yiyin's luck was that, after being written off as broken, someone was still able to recognize it.

The name

Jiuxiao Huanpei means the sound of jade pendants striking one another on immortals in the ninth heaven, the highest of the heavens.

Huanpei were the jade ornaments that people in antiquity hung from their belts. As the wearer walked they knocked together with a clear, ringing sound; the Book of Rites says that a gentleman's jade chimes as he walks. Move that sound up to the highest heaven and the name is saying: the voice of this qin does not belong to the human world.

The Tang had a particular taste in naming qin. Dasheng Yiyin, Feiquan ("Flying Spring"), Chunlei ("Spring Thunder"), Yu Linglong ("Jade Chime"): all of them are about sound. The Song emperor Huizong ranked Lei Wei's Chunlei first in his palace collection, which is a story for another article.

Why wood can last so long

A qin that survives a thousand years depends on three things.

The first is the timber. Wood for a qin must be air-dried for many years, and only when it is thoroughly dry does it stop moving. Tang makers mostly used old wood that had already been drying for decades before it became an instrument; after another thousand years it is entirely stable.

The second is the lacquer. The qin is finished with natural lacquer over a ground mixed with powdered deer horn, applied in dozens of coats, which seals the wood away from air and moisture. Crackle is a sign that the lacquer has aged, not that it is damaged: the surface has cracked but not come away, and the wood is still safe inside. For more on lacquer and the ground, see qin making.

The third is people. In every generation someone treated it as a treasure, kept it from damp, kept it from being dropped, kept it from being burned for firewood. In twelve hundred years, a single careless generation would have been enough to lose it. Huang Tingjian, Ye Shimeng, the Liu family and countless people whose names were never recorded are all the reason it survives.

A qin is not like a painting or a piece of calligraphy. Those are made to be looked at; a qin is made to be used. Jiuxiao Huanpei was still being played in the twentieth century. Guan Pinghu and other masters performed on it, and its tone was still open and resonant. That an instrument made twelve hundred years ago can still make a sound today is more moving than any inscription.

What does it sound like? Those who have heard it use three words: song, tou and gu. Song is looseness, the absence of strain; tou is a sound that carries, whose resonance travels; gu is age, a particular depth that only old wood has. None of these words is precise, but this is the only way to describe the sound of a Tang qin: it does not sound like a new thing.

For players today

Most people will never touch a Tang qin in their lives. But the Tang standard is still there: old timber, real lacquer, and crackle as a gift of time rather than a flaw. Choosing a practice instrument today still means looking at the beginner's version of these things: whether the soundboard is fir or paulownia, whether the lacquer is natural, whether the strings buzz against the board. The section on choosing an instrument in the beginner's guide (in Chinese) goes into this.

A good qin will outlive its owner. Keep that in mind when you buy one and you will not choose badly. What you are buying is not just an instrument but something you will one day hand on to the next person.