Courting with the qin: Sima Xiangru, Zhuo Wenjun and Feng Qiu Huang

Linqiong, in the commandery of Shu, during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE). On a spring evening the richest family in the county is giving a banquet.

The host, Zhuo Wangsun, has made his fortune in iron smelting and keeps eight hundred household servants. Tonight's guests are the county magistrate, Wang Ji, and a friend the magistrate has brought along: a young man just back from the capital, Chang'an, named Sima Xiangru. He has arrived by carriage with dozens of attendants, so poised and elegant that the townspeople crowded the roadside to watch him pass.

After several rounds of wine, the magistrate asks him to play the qin. He declines politely, then plays.

The Zhuo family has a daughter, Wenjun, seventeen years old, recently widowed and back in her father's house. She is in the inner rooms. She hears the qin and looks out through a gap in the door.

One sentence in the Records of the Grand Historian

For the motive behind that evening, the biography of Sima Xiangru in Sima Qian's Shiji (史记, the Records of the Grand Historian, completed around 90 BCE) needs only one sentence:

At that time Zhuo Wangsun had a daughter, Wenjun, newly widowed and fond of music. So Xiangru made a show of mutual esteem with the magistrate, and stirred her with the heart of the qin.

Wenjun was fond of music. So Sima Xiangru staged a friendship with the magistrate to get himself a seat at the Zhuo banquet, and then used the feeling carried in his playing to move her.

Note the word "made a show". The two men really were friends, but at Linqiong they put on a performance. The magistrate called on Sima Xiangru every day; Sima Xiangru pleaded illness and refused to see him; the magistrate grew only more deferential. When Zhuo Wangsun heard that the county had such a distinguished guest, he could hardly fail to invite him. The whole banquet was designed around one piece of music.

Sima Qian goes on. Xiangru came to the feast "with a retinue of carriages and horsemen, dignified, at ease and very handsome". He played at the table, and "Wenjun peeped at him through the door, was delighted and drawn to him, and feared she was not his match." After the party he paid her maid handsomely to carry his messages. "That night Wenjun fled to Xiangru," and the two drove through the night to Chengdu.

Then come the famous words: at his house there was "nothing but four bare walls".

Where Feng Qiu Huang comes from

The Records say only that he played. They do not say what he played or sang. The title Feng Qiu Huang (凤求凰, "The Phoenix Seeks His Mate") and its lyrics come from a much later book, the Yutai Xinyong ("New Songs from a Jade Terrace"), an anthology of love poetry compiled in the 6th century, which includes "Two qin songs of Sima Xiangru". The first reads:

Phoenix, oh phoenix, come home again; he has roamed the four seas in search of his mate. While the time was not right he had nowhere to go; who knew that tonight he would climb to this hall? A lovely, modest lady sits in her chamber; the room so near, the person so far, it tears at my heart. How might we twine our necks like mandarin ducks, and rise and fall together as we fly?

"The room so near, the person so far": that line captures the whole evening. He is in the hall, she is behind the door, separated by one door and by everything the door stands for.

Whether Sima Xiangru sang these words that night cannot be proved. The Yutai Xinyong is more than six hundred years later than the Records, and the lyrics of Han dynasty qin songs very rarely survive intact. But from then on this became the standard text of the courtship. Every later Feng Qiu Huang, whether qin piece, opera or film, sings these lines.

The second half: tending the wine shop

The story is usually told only as far as the elopement. The second half in the Records is better, because it brings the romance down to earth.

In Chengdu the couple were too poor to manage. Wenjun said: let us go back to Linqiong; even borrowing from my brothers we could get by. Back in Linqiong they opened a wine shop. Sima Qian writes:

Wenjun tended the counter, and Xiangru himself put on a calf-nose apron, worked alongside the hired hands, and washed the vessels in the marketplace.

The "calf-nose apron" was a short loincloth of the kind labourers wore.

This was deliberate. Linqiong was Zhuo Wangsun's territory, and his daughter and son-in-law were running a little tavern and washing cups under his nose, in full view of the town. Zhuo Wangsun "heard of it and was ashamed, and shut his gate and would not go out". Relatives and friends reasoned with him: you have one son and two daughters and no shortage of money; Wenjun has already given herself to Sima Xiangru; he is poor, but he has talent enough, and he is the magistrate's friend; why let them be shamed in the street? At last Zhuo Wangsun relented and gave Wenjun "a hundred servants and a million cash". The couple returned to Chengdu, bought land and a house, and were rich.

The courtship is the romantic opening, the wine shop the realistic middle, and the ending is a father-in-law who accepts the match. Sima Xiangru later served Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141–87 BCE) as a court gentleman and wrote the great rhapsodies Zixu and Shanglin, which made him the leading literary figure of his age. Wenjun's story became the model for countless elopements in later literature.

Lüqi

Tradition says the qin Sima Xiangru played was called Lüqi (绿绮, "Green Silk"), a gift from Prince Xiao of Liang, inscribed with a phrase meaning "the essence of paulownia and catalpa united": a soundboard of paulownia and a back of catalpa, the best of two woods joined in one instrument. In the preface to his Qin Fu ("Rhapsody on the Qin"), the Western Jin writer Fu Xuan (217–278) lists it with Haozhong, Raoliang and Jiaowei as the four famous qin of antiquity (see the Scorched Tail qin).

Lüqi later became a poetic name for the qin itself. Li Bai (701–762) opens his poem "Listening to the Monk Jun of Shu Play the Qin":

The monk of Shu, cradling his Green Silk, comes west down from Emei Peak.

A monk from Sichuan carries his qin down the mountain. Li Bai chose the word Lüqi because the setting is Shu, and Sima Xiangru was a man of Shu. The word, the man and the place are tied together.

How later writers used the story

Once qintiao (琴挑, "stirring with the qin") had become a word, the scene was staged again and again.

The Ming dynasty play Yuzan Ji ("The Jade Hairpin") by Gao Lian contains a scene called simply "Qin Tiao". The scholar Pan Bizheng is lodging at a Daoist convent. On a moonlit night he hears the nun Chen Miaochang playing the qin and follows the sound. The two test each other through music: she plays Guanghan You ("Wandering in the Moon Palace"), he answers with Zhi Zhao Fei ("The Pheasant Flies at Dawn"), and she hears the "phoenix seeking his mate" in it and blushes. The scene remains in the standard repertoire of Kunqu opera today (see Kunqu and the qin).

In the opera and fiction of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and after, scenes of a scholar winning a young lady with his qin are beyond counting, and all of them go back to that night in Linqiong. Even when Lin Daiyu plays the qin in Dream of the Red Chamber with Jia Baoyu listening outside the window, the early commentator Zhiyanzhai compares the moment to Sima Xiangru.

Curiously, in nearly every retelling the player is a man and the listener a woman. Yet what the Records stress is that Wenjun was "fond of music": she understood the qin. Sima Xiangru's playing could move her only because she could hear that it had something to say. This is another story of the zhiyin (知音, the "one who knows the tone"), the true listener (see Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi). Bo Ya found a woodcutter. Sima Xiangru found a widow behind a door.

What became of Wenjun

The Records end with the couple prosperous, but a widely told sequel was added later.

According to legend, once Sima Xiangru had risen high he thought of taking a woman from Maoling as a concubine, and Wenjun sent him a poem, the Baitou Yin ("Song of White Hair"), with the lines:

I wish for a man of one heart, who will not leave me until our hair is white.

Sima Xiangru read it and gave up the idea. The poem is preserved in the Yutai Xinyong, where it is titled simply "old yuefu song". Whether Wenjun wrote it cannot be proved. Like Feng Qiu Huang, it is the other half of the story, supplied by later generations.

Set side by side, the two poems are the two ends of a single tale: at one end the pursuit, "how might we twine our necks like mandarin ducks"; at the other the insistence, "a man of one heart". Later readers needed both ends for the story to feel complete.

Feng Qiu Huang today

A qin piece called Feng Qiu Huang appears in a number of Ming and Qing handbooks. It is often performed as a qin song, sung to the Yutai Xinyong lyrics, and there are also purely instrumental versions. It is short and bright, the most immediately tuneful piece a beginner meets, and many students come to it within two or three months of starting the qin.

It is of course not the music played at the Zhuo banquet. No one knows what Sima Xiangru played. But when a player performs it, what they are playing is the story: a poor scholar, a qin, someone listening behind a door, and the door.

The heart of the qin

Go back to that sentence in the Records. Sima Qian's phrase is qin xin, "the heart of the qin", not "the sound of the qin".

The word deserves a pause. Sima Qian's meaning is clear: what moved Wenjun was not technique but the fact that the music had something to say. The Records say not a word about how well Sima Xiangru played, just as the Liezi says nothing about Bo Ya's technique. They say only that he had something to tell her, and she heard it.

That is also why qintiao could become a word at all. In the Chinese understanding the qin has always been a way of speaking. Bo Ya told Zhong Ziqi of high mountains and flowing water; Sima Xiangru told Zhuo Wenjun of a phoenix seeking its mate. When the listener understands, the story holds.

For the fingering techniques the piece uses, see the Feng Qiu Huang entry in the guide to classic repertoire (in Chinese).