Making a qin: what a block of wood goes through to become an instrument

A small workshop. Against the wall lean several dozen planks of different lengths. Some still have the mortise holes of old roof beams; some are blackened, as if pulled from an old building. The master picks one up, raps it with a knuckle, and tilts his head to listen. He puts it down. He picks up another, raps it, listens. This one he raps a few more times, and then he makes a chalk mark on it.

In about three years, this piece of wood will become a qin, the seven-string Chinese zither. It will be cut, hollowed, given dozens of layers of ash paste and dozens of coats of lacquer, and then left to wait in a damp, dark room. The waiting takes far longer than the working.

The character zhuó (斫) means to chop or hew. Making a qin is called zhuoqin, and a maker is a zhuoqin shi. The word is heavier than "make", and rightly: a qin really is hewn.

First, the heritage listing

In November 2003, UNESCO proclaimed "the Guqin and its music" a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. In 2006 the art of the guqin was placed on China's first national list of intangible cultural heritage. Both protect the art itself: performance, transmission and repertoire.

But an art needs instruments. In recent years, the craft of qin making has also been added, as a traditional handicraft, to heritage lists in various regions of China. It is the other half of the art of the guqin, the half that belongs to the hands, and it is the subject of this article.

Choosing timber

The soundboard, the top of the instrument, is made of paulownia or Chinese fir. The back is made of catalpa. This pairing is summed up in a phrase meaning "the essence of paulownia and catalpa combined", the very words carved on Sima Xiangru's famous qin Lüqi ("Green Silk") (see courting with the qin).

The soundboard needs to be open-grained, light, and quick to carry sound, so paulownia or fir is used. The back needs to be hard and stable, so catalpa, qiu wood or cypress is used. The soundboard sounds and the back reflects: one soft, one hard.

The best timber is old timber: beams, door panels and even coffin boards salvaged from old buildings. Dried for decades or a century, it will not warp further, and it sounds clear and open. A good plank of old fir now costs thousands of yuan or more, and grows scarcer as old houses disappear.

The story of Cai Yong hearing a fine piece of paulownia crackling in a kitchen fire (see the Scorched Tail), and the story of Lei Wei of the Tang dynasty climbing Mount Emei to listen to the pines sounding in the wind (see Jiuxiao Huanpei), are both about this first step. A good qin must first be heard. When the master raps a plank and listens to it ring, he is listening for density and dryness. A clear sound that dies away cleanly means dense, dry wood; a dull, muddy one means wood too damp or too loose.

Once chosen, the timber must be air-dried, for at least a year or two. Sun would split it, so it dries slowly in a well-ventilated place.

Shaping and hollowing

First the soundboard is cut to the outline of a qin, with its head, neck, waist and tail, and its upper surface is carved into a gentle arch. This is called shaping. There are more than a dozen established forms of qin, among them the Zhongni, Fuxi, Lianzhu ("linked pearls"), Jiaoye ("banana leaf") and Luoxia ("falling sunset") styles. They differ mainly in the curves along the two sides of the body. The Zhongni style, with a squared notch on each side, is the most common; the Fuxi style has rounded notches; the Jiaoye style, shaped like a banana leaf, is the hardest to make. Jiuxiao Huanpei, the Tang qin in the Palace Museum in Beijing, is in the Fuxi style.

Next comes the hollowing, called caofu. The soundboard is turned over and carved out from the back to form the resonant chamber.

This step decides the sound. Carve deep, and the sound is open but may become hollow. Carve shallow, and the sound is solid but may become dull. Where to leave the wood thick and where to make it thin is each maker's own method, and it is the very core of the craft. In general the soundboard is thicker in the middle and toward the head. But it is the fine departures from the general rule that separate one qin from another. The Biluozi Zhuoqin Fa, a Song-dynasty treatise on qin making, already discusses the thickness of the soundboard at different points, measured to the tenth of an inch. The famous claim made for the Lei family of Tang makers, that the bridge was "too low to slip a finger under, yet the strings do not buzz", was also an achievement of the hollowing.

When the hollowing is done, the soundboard and back are joined with raw lacquer or fish-bladder glue. Two sound holes are left in the back. The larger is called the "dragon pool" and the smaller the "phoenix pond". Once they are joined, most of the sound is settled; later stages can refine it but not change it.

The ash ground

The joined body is still bare wood. Next comes its coat: the ash ground, huitai.

The ash ground is a paste of raw lacquer mixed with deer-horn ash, made by calcining deer antler and grinding it to powder. Some makers use tile ash, bone ash, or "eight-treasure ash" containing powdered gold, silver, copper and iron. The ground protects the wood, hardens the surface and focuses the sound. Soft wood lets the sound spread; a hard shell draws it together.

The paste is scraped on in many layers. Each must dry and be sanded flat before the next, going from coarse to medium to fine. Each layer takes from a few days to more than ten days to dry, depending on the weather.

Finishing the ash ground on a single qin usually takes several months. Every day is the same: scrape, wait, sand, scrape again.

Lacquering

Over the ash ground goes the lacquer. The qin uses natural lacquer, the sap tapped from the lacquer tree, a material that East Asian craftsmen have used for thousands of years.

Natural lacquer has an unusual property: it only cures in a humid environment. It does not dry in the air the way paint does. So a qin maker needs a "shade room", with the doors and windows kept shut and water sprinkled on the floor to keep the humidity up. The lacquered instrument is placed inside to wait. The damp, dark room in the opening scene is this shade room.

Dozens of coats of lacquer are applied. Each thin coat cures in the shade room and is sanded before the next. The colors are mostly black, purple and vermilion. Natural lacquer itself is dark brown. Iron powder turns it black, and cinnabar turns it red. The final stage is burnishing: the maker dips the palm of his hand in oil and rubs the surface over and over until the lacquer shines like a mirror.

Natural lacquer is toxic. A single touch brings out a rash in those who are allergic, and most makers' hands are scarred where the lacquer has bitten them.

From the ash ground to the finished lacquer, a qin takes one to two years. This is what most sets the qin apart from other instruments: most of its making is not working but waiting.

Setting the hui and stringing

When the lacquer is done, the thirteen hui are set. The hui are the position markers inlaid along the soundboard, made of mother-of-pearl, jade or gold. Their positions are calculated from simple fractions of the string length. The 7th hui is at the exact middle, the 4th and 10th hui are a quarter of the way from either end, and so on (see calculating harmonics (in Chinese)). If a hui is off by a millimeter, the harmonic at that point will not ring.

Then the yueshan, the hardwood bridge at the head that carries the strings, is fitted, along with the longyin, the nut at the tail, and the feet and tuning pegs. Then the strings go on. The height of the yueshan decides how far the strings sit above the soundboard. Too high, and they are hard to press; too low, and they buzz against the board. The secret of the Lei family lay here. Traditionally the strings were silk. Today most players use steel-core nylon strings (see silk strings). Once the strings are on and tuned to zhengdiao, the standard tuning, the qin is finished.

The master plays it through once. If a string buzzes or a harmonic does not ring, it is taken apart and redone.

Crackle

There is one thing a qin maker cannot make: crackle, duanwen.

Crackle is the network of fine cracks that opens in the lacquer surface over the years, as the lacquer slowly shrinks and the wood beneath it breathes. The patterns are named for what they resemble: snake belly, flowing water, ox hair. Crackle takes several decades to a century to appear. Crackle shows that a qin is old and that its lacquer is genuine; chemical lacquers do not crackle, they only peel.

Hence the old saying that a qin does not crackle until it is a hundred years old. Crackle is not damage but the instrument's record of its own time. When you buy a new qin, you are buying its beginning. The crackle is what it will write for its next owner.

Where the craft stands today

By the middle of the twentieth century, only a handful of people in all of China could still make a qin. In the 1950s, leading players such as Guan Pinghu in Beijing and Wu Jinglüe in Shanghai repaired and even built instruments with their own hands, because there was no one else left to do it.

After China's reform and opening began in the late 1970s and the number of learners grew, qin making found a market again. Today there are many workshops across China, selling everything from practice instruments at a few thousand yuan to instruments by famous makers at several hundred thousand. Yangzhou alone, the national center, has over a hundred workshops.

But the core of the craft has not changed. The lacquer still waits, the ash still goes on layer by layer, the hollowing still depends on hands and ears. Machines can cut wood and spray lacquer, but cannot decide where the wood should be thick and where thin. The difference between a fine qin and an ordinary one still lies in those one or two years of waiting and those dozens of coats of lacquer.

Before buying a first qin, see the section on choosing an instrument in the beginner's guide (in Chinese). What wood is the soundboard made of? Is the lacquer natural? Do any of the strings buzz? These questions are the beginner's version of the craft of qin making. Each one you ask corresponds to a step in a workshop like the one where the master is still rapping planks and listening.