The qin in Tang poetry: from 'sitting alone in the bamboo' to 'few play it now'

A banquet in Chang'an, capital of the Tang dynasty (618–907). The singing and dancing are in full swing. Pipa (a pear-shaped lute), bili (a reed pipe) and jiegu (a waisted drum) take their turns, and the hall roars. In a corner sits a man with a qin in front of him, the seven-string Chinese zither. No one asks him to play. He does not mean to: here a qin would be drowned the moment it began.

When the banquet ends he goes home, and the moon comes up. He lays the qin across his knees and plays a piece. There is no audience, only the moon.

Both of these scenes appear in Tang poetry. Read side by side, the Tang poems about the qin form a history of the player's life in that age, and not a triumphant one.

Wang Wei: playing alone

"Bamboo Lodge", by Wang Wei (699–761):

Sitting alone in the secluded bamboo, I play the qin and whistle long. Deep in the grove, no one knows I am here; the bright moon comes to shine on me.

Twenty characters: one person, a bamboo grove, a qin, the moon. No audience, and he does not mind, because the moon has come. This is the classic image of the qin in Tang poetry: not performance but solitude.

Wang Wei played the qin and as a young man served as assistant director of the Grand Music Office, which ran court music. In his poems the qin always goes with mountains, water and solitude. In "Reply to Vice-Prefect Zhang" he writes:

The pine wind blows my sash loose; the mountain moon shines on my playing.

Alone again, and the moon again. "Bamboo Lodge" was written late in life at his Wangchuan estate outside Chang'an, when he was half official, half recluse. The qin belonged to the recluse half.

Li Bai: listening to someone else play

"Listening to the Monk Jun of Shu Play the Qin", by Li Bai (701–762):

The monk of Shu, cradling his Green Silk, came west down from the peak of Emei. For me he swept his hand once, and I heard the pines of ten thousand valleys. The traveller's heart was washed by flowing water; the lingering notes passed into the frosty bells. Without my noticing, the green hills darkened; autumn clouds dimmed them, layer on layer.

A monk from Sichuan (Shu) has come down from Mount Emei to play for Li Bai. Three allusions are packed into the poem. "Green Silk" (Lüqi) was the name of Sima Xiangru's famous qin, and here stands for any fine instrument (see Sima Xiangru courts with the qin). "Flowing water" is Bo Ya's Liu Shui (流水, "Flowing Water") (see Zhiyin: the friend who knows the music). "Frosty bells" comes from the Shanhaijing (山海经, "Classic of Mountains and Seas"), an ancient book of geography and marvels, which says that on Mount Feng there were nine bells that rang by themselves when frost fell. Li Bai fits them in without strain: a reader who knows none of them still finds the poem smooth.

"For me he swept his hand once, and I heard the pines of ten thousand valleys" is the most famous line about the sound of the qin in all of Tang poetry. The qin is a quiet instrument, and Li Bai insists it sounds like wind across ten thousand valleys. An exaggeration, and also true: the qin's bigness lies not in volume but in what it lets you hear. And "without my noticing, the green hills darkened": he listened until nightfall without realising it. There is no higher praise for a player.

Liu Changqing: no one plays the old tunes

"Listening to the Qin", by Liu Changqing (c. 710–c. 789):

Cool and clear over the seven strings, I listen quietly to the cold wind in the pines. Though I love the ancient tunes myself, few people today still play them.

"Wind in the pines" is a pun: the wind itself and the qin piece Feng Ru Song (风入松, "Wind in the Pines"). The second couplet is a complaint.

The poem dates from the mid-eighth century, when Central Asian instruments such as the pipa and jiegu were in fashion and the court's "ten divisions of music" were dominated by foreign music. The qin already seemed "ancient". Players today will find the complaint familiar. It has always been on the edge of being left behind, and never left behind.

Li Qi: Dong Tinglan

"Listening to Dong Da Play the Hujia, with a Message for Gentleman Fang of the Secretariat", by Li Qi (c. 690–751), opens:

Lady Cai long ago made the music of the nomad flute, one playing in eighteen stanzas. The nomads wept, their tears wetting the border grass; the Han envoy's heart broke before the woman going home.

Dong Da is Dong Tinglan, the High Tang's most famous qin player (see Dong Tinglan). He is playing Hujia (胡笳, "The Nomad Flute"), based on the story of Cai Wenji, a Han noblewoman carried off to the steppe and later ransomed home (see Cai Wenji and the Hujia). No Tang poem describes a qin piece more concretely. It goes on to "the Wusun tribes, their homeland far away; the sands of Luosuo stir up grief", Luosuo being the Tang name for Lhasa. In effect it retells the whole plot of the music.

Gao Shi's famous farewell couplet, "do not grieve that the road ahead holds no one who knows you; who under heaven does not know your name?", was also written for Dong Tinglan. No qin player after the Tang had two major poets write for him.

Han Yu: what the sound is like

The first eight lines of "Listening to Master Ying Play the Qin", by Han Yu (768–824):

Murmuring like young lovers whispering, fond and cross by turns, calling each other "you". Then with a sudden stroke it turns heroic, a warrior charging into the enemy's ranks. Floating clouds and willow down, with no root or stem, drifting and soaring through the wide world. A clamour of a hundred birds, and suddenly a single phoenix appears.

Han Yu does not describe the qin, only what its sound is like. It is a chain of similes, the same method Bai Juyi used for the pipa in his famous line about "large pearls and small pearls falling on a jade plate". In the second half, tears soaking his clothes, he begs Master Ying to stop: "do not put ice and burning coals inside me".

In the Song dynasty (960–1279) the writer Ouyang Xiu argued that this poem must really describe a pipa, not a qin, because the qin's sound does not rise and fall so dramatically. Su Shi disagreed and wrote an essay to refute him. The question whether the qin can sound "heroic" has been argued ever since. The Yushan school of the Ming later held up the ideal of "clear, subtle, plain and distant", and Xu Shangying added "grand" and "vigorous" to the list. It was the same debate (see Yan Tianchi).

Bai Juyi: the qin as a friend

Bai Juyi (772–846) was the most accomplished qin player among the Tang poets and wrote about it the most. "Taking Up the Qin on a Boat at Night":

Birds roost, fish lie still; moonlight on the deep night river. Beyond myself there is nothing to do; in the boat there is only the qin. The seven strings are my true friends; my two ears are the ones who know the sound. When the heart is still, the sound is plain; within it there is no ancient and no modern.

The qin is his friend, and his own ears are his zhiyin, "the one who knows the sound", the word that comes from the story of Bo Ya and Zhong Ziqi. This is an answer to that story: the one who understands you need not be someone else. The last couplet could almost serve as a summary of qin aesthetics.

He also wrote "The Abandoned Qin", about an instrument that no one plays:

Silk and paulownia join to make a qin; within it lies the sound of high antiquity. The ancient sound is plain and has no flavour; it does not suit the feelings of today.

Liu Changqing's thought, but sadder: the qin is not broken; people simply do not want it. Bai Juyi had a qin of his own, and wrote of "still playing alone deep into the night, glad for a while that no one hears". It is the same feeling as Wang Wei's "no one knows I am here".

For Bai Juyi pairing the qin with tea, see The qin and tea.

An overlooked poem: Chang Jian

One more poem is often overlooked. "Qin Feelings on the River", by Chang Jian (active in the 720s and 730s):

On the river I tune my jade qin; each string clears one part of the heart. Cool and clear, I play through all seven, and ten thousand trees fall still in the shade. It can make the river moon whiter, and make the river water deeper. Only now I know that paulownia wood deserves to be set with hui of gold.

(The hui are the position markers inlaid along the soundboard.) "Each string clears one part of the heart" is the most direct statement in Tang poetry of what the qin is for. One plays not for others but to clear one's own heart, a string at a time. It is Bai Juyi's idea seen from the other side: he says a still heart makes the sound plain; Chang Jian says playing makes the heart still. Both hold.

How the Tang treated the qin

Put these seven poems together and the qin in the Tang occupies a few fixed places.

It is a companion in solitude (Wang Wei, Bai Juyi): one person, one qin, one moon, no audience.

It is something to write poems about when someone else plays (Li Bai, Han Yu, Li Qi). The listener is more famous than the player, and the player's name survives only through the listener.

It is an "ancient tune" that looks outdated beside the instruments from Central Asia (Liu Changqing, Bai Juyi): "few people today still play them", "it does not suit the feelings of today".

All three places are still occupied. Players still mostly play alone; listeners are still few; the qin is still "ancient". Tang poetry tells us this is not decline but what the qin has always been: never popular, always played by a few people, at night, in bamboo groves, on boats. So it was twelve hundred years ago, and so it is today.

Most of the pieces named in these poems, Liu Shui, Feng Ru Song and Hujia, can still be played, and they are introduced in Classic pieces to learn (in Chinese). As for the sound "cool and clear over the seven strings", you will only know it by sitting down at a qin yourself, after the banquet, when the moon is up.