How the handbooks were cut: from Shenqi Mipu to the Qinqu Jicheng
Jianzipu is handwritten, but it survived because it was carved into wood. This article explains how woodblock printing produced the qin handbooks (writing the model, pasting it on the block, carving and printing), why jianzipu glyphs are harder to carve than ordinary characters, why Shenqi Mipu was the first printed handbook, how many handbooks the Ming and Qing printed, how the twentieth-century facsimile collection Qinqu Jicheng brought them together, and how the 2009 heritage listing of woodblock printing relates to the qin.
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Translated from the Chinese original.
The first year of the Hongxi reign, 1425. Nanchang, in the palace of the Prince of Ning.
In one room a dozen or more carvers sit at long tables. Before each lies a board of pear wood, and pasted face down on each board is a thin sheet of paper covered in writing. The paper is damp and has been brushed with paste so that it has become one with the wood; through its back the characters show in reverse. Each carver cuts along the edges of the ink with a small knife, paring away the wood until the characters stand in relief.
A man in a Daoist robe walks among them, stopping now and then to look at a board. He is close to fifty, the seventeenth son of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), and he holds the title Prince of Ning. His name is Zhu Quan. He watches only one thing: whether the components of those square notation characters have been cut out of place.
At one board he stops the carver. "This hook (勹) is too close to the three (三) inside it. Open it up a little." The carver cuts again.
The book being carved runs to three volumes and sixty-four pieces. It is called the Shenqi Mipu ("Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries"). Six hundred years later, players who perform Guangling San or Jiu Kuang ("Drunken Ecstasy") still play from scores printed from these boards.
First, the heritage listing
In 2009 UNESCO inscribed the Chinese woodblock printing technique on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Like the guqin, the seven-string Chinese zither (inscribed 2003), and Chinese calligraphy (2009), it is a practical technique that became cultural heritage.
Most scores players use today are digital or printed. But trace any of them back far enough and it came from a block of wood.
Woodblock printing
Woodblock printing matured in China around the Tang dynasty (618–907); the earliest surviving printed item with a firm date is a copy of the Diamond Sutra from 868. The process has four steps. The text is written out on thin paper, which is called writing the model. The sheet is pasted face down on a wooden board, called mounting the block. A carver cuts away the wood around the inked strokes, leaving the characters raised, called carving. Finally ink is brushed on the block, paper laid over it and the back of the paper rubbed with a dry brush; lifted off, it is one printed page. One block can print hundreds or even thousands of sheets, and it can be stored and used again later.
Most of the cost of a book lay in the carving. A skilled carver might cut a little over a hundred characters a day, so a book of several hundred thousand characters took years. Printing was therefore for those with money: government offices, monasteries, commercial publishers and wealthy families. Qin handbooks were printed by this method, and most of them were paid for by the last group, well-off players.
Jianzipu is harder to carve than ordinary text
For an ordinary book the carver simply follows the model. He knows how Chinese characters are built, and if the model is a little unclear he can fill in what is missing. Jianzipu (减字谱), the tablature that compresses finger instructions into composite characters, is different. Every glyph is assembled from several components, and their size, position and spacing must all be exact; a small slip turns it into a different instruction. If the "three" inside the hook that means gou (勾, inward pluck with the middle finger) becomes a "four" (四), the note moves to another string. The component that marks the start of a fan yin (harmonic) passage (卜) and the "ten" (十) that means the 10th hui differ by a single stroke. A carver who did not play the qin could only trace, and if he traced wrong he would never know.
So for a good printed handbook, the model had to be written by a player, and written well. The great handbooks of the Ming and Qing (1644–1912), such as the Songxianguan Qinpu (1614), the Dahuange Qinpu (1673) and the Wuzhizhai Qinpu (1722), owe the beauty of their glyphs to model writers who understood both the qin and the brush (see calligraphy and the qin). This was what Zhu Quan was watching for in the opening scene. He was a player; his carvers were not.
The reverse is also true. In a badly carved handbook, with components misplaced and strokes blurred, later readers have to guess. Part of what makes dapu, reconstructing a piece from a historical score, difficult today is the slip of a carver's knife centuries ago.
Shenqi Mipu
The Shenqi Mipu is the earliest surviving printed qin handbook. Zhu Quan (1378–1448) had both money and leisure. He had been a frontier prince commanding troops, but in the political upheaval between the Jianwen and Yongle reigns, when his nephew was overthrown by his brother, he was moved to a fief in Nanchang. Afterwards he stayed out of politics and devoted himself to writing books. He gathered a great many old scores and printed them in three volumes. The first, Taigu Shenpin ("Divine Pieces of High Antiquity"), holds sixteen pieces he considered the oldest and rarest, including Guangling San, Jiu Kuang and Xiao Hujia ("Little Barbarian Reed Pipe"). The second and third volumes, Xiawai Shenpin ("Divine Pieces from Beyond the Clouds"), hold forty-eight pieces still in circulation in his time, including Xiaoxiang Shuiyun ("Mist and Clouds over the Xiao and Xiang Rivers") and Meihua Sannong ("Three Variations on Plum Blossom").
The importance of the Shenqi Mipu lies in its being printed. Before it, qin scores existed only as manuscripts. Each copy was the only one of its kind, every copying introduced new errors, and when a manuscript was lost the piece was lost with it. A printed edition could run to hundreds of copies spread across the country, all carrying the same errors, which was itself an advantage, since later readers could compare them. Guangling San can still be played today because Zhu Quan printed it (see the end of Guangling San). In his preface he explains why he did so:
These are secrets the world has not passed on. I did not dare to keep them to myself.
The Ming and the Qing
The Shenqi Mipu set an example, and printing a handbook became a central undertaking in a player's life. By the count of the twentieth-century scholar Zha Fuxi, about forty Ming handbooks survive and about a hundred from the Qing; with those of the Republican period (1912–1949), there are more than 140 in all, containing over 3,300 notated versions, or something over 600 distinct pieces once duplicates are removed. Most were private publications: a player paid out of his own pocket to have his school's repertoire carved, then gave the copies away or sold them.
It was a major undertaking. The Songxianguan Qinpu was printed with the wealth of Yan Tianchi's family (see Yan Tianchi), and once it appeared the repertoire of the Yushan school was fixed. The Dahuange Qinpu was printed by the disciples of Xu Qingshan after his death. The Wuzhizhai Qinpu took many years to compile and became the most widely circulated handbook of the Qing. The Ziyuantang Qinpu (1802), with more than ninety pieces, cost an enormous amount of carving. A printed handbook was the evidence a school left behind. Schools that never printed one have disappeared.
Print runs were small. A handbook was usually printed in a few dozen to perhaps two hundred copies, given to fellow players and students, with a few kept at home. The blocks were stored and reprinted on request, so the same handbook may exist in early and later impressions; in the later ones the worn blocks give blurred characters. War, fire and insects destroyed blocks, and the printed copies were scattered one by one. After four hundred years, a handbook that survives in three to five copies counts as well preserved.
These editions are now scattered among libraries and private collections, some surviving in only one or two copies. The classical source texts quoted in Lingxian's technique index were checked against scans of these editions.
An example of a carving error
What do later readers do about such errors? Take a common situation.
In the same piece, one handbook has gou on the 3rd string at a certain point and another has gou on the 4th string at the same point. Which string is right? Perhaps the first was miscopied, perhaps the second was miscarved, or perhaps the two schools simply played it differently. The person doing dapu plays both versions and listens for which sounds natural. Then they check the dates and lineages of the two handbooks to see which derives from which, and look at the surrounding notes to see which fits the mode. Sometimes the question can be settled. Sometimes it cannot, and both readings are kept.
This kind of comparison was impossible in the age of manuscripts, when a player had only one copy. Only when printed editions multiplied did errors become visible. That is another meaning of printing: it gave qin scores a textual history.
The Qinqu Jicheng
Bringing more than 140 handbooks together was the work of the twentieth century.
In the 1950s Zha Fuxi directed the editing of the Qinqu Jicheng ("Collected Qin Pieces"), a facsimile collection of the surviving handbooks arranged by date. Facsimile here means the pages were neither reset nor recarved but photographed from the originals and reproduced, keeping every glyph exactly as it was, carvers' errors included. It is the clumsiest method and the most reliable: every resetting adds a chance of error, and a photograph adds none.
The first part appeared in 1963. The project then stalled for many years, and the full set of thirty volumes was completed by Zhonghua Book Company in 2010. Today it is the primary source for anyone doing dapu and for scholars comparing editions. On Zha Fuxi and his generation, see the Jinyu Qin Society.
From block to screen
The medium of the qin score has changed three times: manuscript, woodblock print, facsimile reprint. Now comes a fourth, the digital score.
Like the woodblock, the digital score solves the problem of turning one score into many copies. Unlike the woodblock, it can be edited, searched and checked against pitch, and two handbooks can be laid side by side. What the Lingxian editor does and what Zhu Quan did in printing the Shenqi Mipu are at bottom the same thing: fixing a score so that it can be passed on.
The only difference is that Zhu Quan's carvers cut each glyph stroke by stroke, and a mistake meant carving the whole block again, while today a glyph takes a few keystrokes and a mistake is simply deleted. But the shape of the glyph, which component sits above and which below, how far the hook should stand from the three inside it, still follows the rules Zhu Quan was enforcing as he stood behind his carvers six hundred years ago. For the structure of the glyphs, see how to read jianzipu (in Chinese).