The qin and the scholar

A quiet instrument

Lay a qin on a table and it looks like a plain dark board. There are no movable bridges under the strings and no frets on the neck, only a row of thirteen small inlaid dots, the hui, along the far edge. Its range is about four octaves, but it is soft: in a room with traffic outside you would hardly hear it. That was the point. UNESCO, which proclaimed the qin and its music a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003, notes that it was never meant for public performance.

The qin came first among the four arts a cultivated person was expected to practise, with the board game weiqi, calligraphy and painting. Its traditional length of three chi, six cun and five fen (old Chinese units of length) was read as the 365 days of the year, and the thirteen hui as the twelve months and a leap month. Measurements varied in practice, but the symbolism tells you how the instrument was thought of: a small model of the world, laid on a table.

Three kinds of sound

Every note on the qin is one of three kinds. Start the recordings above and you hear the first two on their own.

An *open string (散音 sǎnyīn*) is simply plucked: a deep, round tone. The first clip plays the seven open strings in the standard tuning, one after another. You may notice that there are only five different notes, the lowest two returning an octave higher. That is the five-tone scale of step 1, built into the instrument itself.

A *harmonic (泛音 fànyīn) is made by touching a string very lightly at one of the hui* while plucking it. The note that floats out is high, clear and bell-like, as in the second clip. Whole passages are often played this way, especially at the opening and close of a piece.

A *stopped note (按音 ànyīn*) is pressed firmly against the wood. Because there are no frets, the finger can slide after the pluck, rising, falling or trembling while the sound dies away. This is where much of the music lives: in what happens after the string is struck.

The friend who knew the sound

An old story, told in two early Chinese books, the Liezi and the Lüshi Chunqiu, is attached to the third recording. Bo Ya was a great qin player. His friend Zhong Ziqi could tell, just by listening, whether Bo Ya was thinking of high mountains or of flowing water. When Zhong Ziqi died, Bo Ya broke his qin and never played again, because no one else would understand him. From this comes the word zhīyīn, “one who knows the sound”, still the Chinese word for a true friend.

The titles High Mountains and Flowing Water appear in the oldest surviving qin handbook, from 1425. The Flowing Water most people hear today is much younger: a 19th-century version from Sichuan, credited to the master Zhang Kongshan, with a long middle passage of rolling sweeps that sound like water racing between rocks. Charlie Huang plays it from a handbook printed in 1876. In 1977 Guan Pinghu's 1954 recording of the Zhang Kongshan version went into space on the Voyager Golden Record, the only Chinese music on it.

A calmer picture

The last recording, Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank, first appears in a handbook of 1634 and is among the best-loved qin pieces. It is played here by the Hong Kong master Lo Ka Ping, around 1970. Nothing dramatic happens: geese circle and settle on a sandbar. Listen to how much space Lo leaves between phrases, and how the sliding notes trail off into silence. If you would like to hear the same piece in another pair of hands, Charlie Huang's 2006 recording follows the version in a handbook of 1868.

詞語

古琴 gǔqín

“old zither”, the seven-string zither of the scholar, for most of its history simply called 琴 qín

徽 huī

the thirteen inlaid dots along the edge that mark where the harmonics are

泛音 fànyīn

harmonics, the floating bell-like notes made by touching a string lightly at a hui

知音 zhīyīn

“one who knows the sound”: a friend who truly understands you

在別處聆聽

• Guan Pinghu's Flowing Water on NASA's Voyager Golden Record page
• UNESCO: Guqin and its music, with a short film