Calligraphy and the qin: jianzipu is written too
Chinese calligraphy was inscribed as intangible cultural heritage in 2009, and its tie to the guqin is closer than it looks: jianzipu is built from handwritten character components, the printed handbooks are works of calligraphy, and the inscriptions on the backs of instruments were left by calligraphers. This article explains what calligraphy is, its five scripts and why it is heritage, then the hand skill the two arts share, in which the start of a brush stroke and the finger's descent onto the string are one thing.
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Translated from the Chinese original.
The Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Changshu, a town near Suzhou. A qin player is writing out a score by lamplight.
Before him lies a ruled sheet; his brush is a fine one, made for small regular script. He writes the first notation character. At the top goes the component "big" (大), which stands for the thumb. At its lower right goes "nine" (九), for the 9th hui, one of the thirteen position markers inlaid along the string. Below goes a hook-shaped component (勹), which stands for gou, the inward pluck of the middle finger. Inside the hook goes "three" (三), for the 3rd string. Four components fitted into one square: the thumb stops the string at the 9th hui, the right middle finger plucks the 3rd string, and one note sounds.
He writes slowly. The horizontal of "big" must stay short or it will press on what lies below; the sweep of the hook must be held in or it will crowd the "three". A piece runs to several hundred characters, and it will take him several evenings.
When the sheet is finished it will be pasted face down on a board of pear wood, and a carver will cut along his ink lines to print the handbook. Four hundred years later, a student who opens that handbook will be looking at the characters he wrote on those evenings.
First, the heritage listing
In September 2009 UNESCO inscribed Chinese calligraphy on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Seal engraving and woodblock printing were inscribed in the same round. The guqin, the seven-string Chinese zither, had been recognized six years earlier, in 2003.
Why should someone who plays the qin care about calligraphy? Because of the scene above. Jianzipu (减字谱), the tablature that compresses finger instructions into composite characters, is written by hand.
What calligraphy is
Calligraphy, shufa (书法) in Chinese, is the art of writing Chinese characters with a brush. Its materials are brush, ink, paper and inkstone; its core is the line: how a stroke begins, travels and ends, how thick or thin, fast or slow, wet or dry it is. Every choice leaves a trace that cannot be corrected.
There are five main scripts, in the order they appeared. Seal script is the ancient writing used before the Qin unification of 221 BC, with rounded, even lines; today it survives mainly on carved seals. Clerical script was the official hand of the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220); its characters are wide and flat, with horizontals that start blunt and end in a flare. Regular script settled into its mature form after the Wei and Jin dynasties (third to fifth centuries AD); each stroke is separate and upright, and it is the ancestor of modern printed type. Running script is regular script written quickly, with strokes beginning to link; it is the commonest hand in daily use, and Wang Xizhi's Preface to the Orchid Pavilion Gathering (353) is its most celebrated example. Cursive script is the fastest and most abbreviated, with many joined strokes and characters hard to read without training. It is the script closest to music, read for the rhythm of the line rather than the words.
Most classics of calligraphy are everyday writing. The Orchid Pavilion Preface is a draft with visible corrections. Yan Zhenqing's Draft of a Eulogy for My Nephew (758) is the rough draft of a funeral text; as it goes on, grief takes over and the characters grow wilder. Su Shi's Cold Food Festival Poems were written on a rainy day in exile at Huangzhou in the early 1080s. None of these was made as a "work". They were written for oneself or a friend, and later generations treated them as art. That is very like the qin, which was played for oneself and treated as art by posterity.
Why it is heritage
Intangible heritage protects living skills and practices. Calligraphy was inscribed because writing characters with a brush is a whole cultural practice: the way the brush is held, the tradition of copying classical models stroke by stroke, the custom among the educated of giving writing as a gift, inscribing poems on paintings and cutting texts into stone, and the shared standards for judging whether a character is well written. That practice has run unbroken for two thousand years, but its foundation changed when the brush left daily life. Once it grew out of ordinary writing; now one sets out to learn it.
Like the qin, calligraphy has many who can do it and few who do it well. Every schoolchild in China has used a brush; few understand brush technique.
Jianzipu is calligraphy
Jianzipu is made from pieces of ordinary characters, taken apart and fitted back together. Gou is written with the hook (勹) taken from the character for "hook". The thumb is written with "big" (大), from the Chinese name for the thumb, "big finger". The 10th hui is written "ten" (十). An open string, san yin, is written with the grass radical (艹) taken from the character san, "scattered". The pieces are fitted into one square. Every notation character is handwritten, and every handbook is a work of calligraphy.
The woodblock handbooks of the Ming and the Qing (1644–1912), such as the Shenqi Mipu ("Handbook of Spiritual and Marvelous Mysteries", 1425), the Songxianguan Qinpu ("Handbook of the Pine-String Hall", 1614) and the Wuzhizhai Qinpu ("Handbook of the Studio of Five Knowings", 1722), are as handsome in their lettering as rubbings of classical inscriptions. The structure of a notation character, which component sits above, which below and which in the middle, follows the rules of ordinary characters: tight above and loose below, held in on the left and released on the right, compact at the center. A poor calligrapher writing the model sheet left components tilted and crowded, and readers misread them. So a good handbook was always written out by someone who understood both the qin and the brush. The Changshu player of the opening scene was such a person.
Learning jianzipu is learning a special kind of Chinese character. The font in the Lingxian editor is modeled on the glyph shapes of the woodblock handbooks. How each glyph is written and how its components align is explained in how to read jianzipu (in Chinese). How the printed handbooks themselves were made is the subject of how the handbooks were cut.
The words on the back of the instrument
A fine qin usually carries its name and inscriptions on its back. The name sits above the "dragon pool", the larger of its two sound holes, in two or three characters, most often in seal or clerical script. Verses or a dedication run down either side of the dragon pool in running or regular script, and carved seals come below. The back of a qin is laid out like a complete work of calligraphy.
On the Jiuxiao Huanpei, a famous Tang-dynasty instrument, the two sides of the dragon pool carry two inscriptions. One is by Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), one of the four great calligraphers of the Northern Song:
Surpassing all traces, up into the azure sky; roaming free in the Great Ultimate.
The other, attributed to Ye Shimeng, reads "cool and clear, longing for high antiquity". In Emperor Huizong's Listening to the Qin, the subject is a qin and the inscription is in "slender gold" script, the hand Huizong himself invented, thin and hard as iron wire. Cai Yong (132–192), who rescued the Scorched Tail qin from a fire, was also a calligrapher, traditionally credited with "flying white", a style in which the dry brush lets streaks of bare paper show through the stroke. Su Shi (1037–1101) played the qin, wrote and painted. In the hands of Chinese scholars, qin and brush were never apart.
The hand's work is one thing
Calligraphy speaks of bifa, "brush method"; the qin speaks of zhifa, "finger method". The two terms are built the same way, and so are the principles.
A brush stroke has three phases: start, travel and finish. At the start the brush "hides the tip", pressing briefly the opposite way so no sharp point shows. In the travel it keeps a "centered tip" down the middle of the line. At the finish it "returns the tip", drawing back rather than flicking off the paper.
A note on the qin also has three phases: the finger's descent, the crossing of the string and the recovery. The descent should be "half nail, half flesh": all nail sounds thin, all flesh sounds dull. The crossing should be square on. The Qinxue Rumen ("Introduction to Qin Studies", 1864), a Qing teaching handbook, borrows calligraphy's own term for it:
The finger must strike with a centered tip, squarely, and must never sweep at a slant.
The recovery should come to rest on the neighboring string, never fly off into the air.
Calligraphy says "strength that pierces the back of the paper"; the qin says "press until it enters the wood". Calligraphy says "the stroke breaks but the intent continues"; the qin says "the sound breaks but the resonance does not". Calligraphy's worst fault is a traced, strengthless line; the qin's is a rubbed note with no attack. Calligraphy speaks of lifting and pressing the brush; the qin speaks of light and heavy touch on the string.
This is no coincidence: the same people, with the same bodies, did both. Ming qin treatises ask the right hand for a "suspended wrist", the calligrapher's own posture: the wrist does not rest on the table, and strength passes from shoulder to fingertip.
One word: shi
The two arts also share a word that resists definition: shi (势), roughly momentum, or the force latent in a form.
In calligraphy, shi is the relation between one stroke and the next, the invisible line linking them though no ink lies between. In Wang Xizhi's writing every stroke prepares the next. On the qin, it is the relation between one note and the next, the hand already traveling between strings though no sound is heard.
So a calligrapher looks at what lies between the strokes, and a qin player listens to what lies between the notes. Calligraphy calls that "between" xingqi, the flow of breath down a column of characters; the qin calls it qikou, the breathing point. Both words contain qi (气), breath.
Learn both
Anyone learning the qin might spend a few days writing with a brush. The aim is only to feel the start, travel and finish of one stroke, then return to the instrument, play a single gou, and notice whether descent, crossing and recovery feel the same.
Conversely, a calligrapher who takes up the qin finds that the centered tip, the hidden tip and the returned tip all have counterparts on the string, and that the teacher's words are already familiar.
The guqin and calligraphy entered the heritage list a few years apart, not because they are old but because they are two expressions of one body. To preserve one is to preserve the other.
For how each technique is written and played, see the technique index. The jianzipu form given for every entry is a small problem in calligraphy, the same kind of problem the Changshu player in the opening scene was solving under his lamp.