In 2013, a friend told me there was a qin for sale in Beijing. An old man had just passed away, and his widow was selling off his collection. The qin, he said, was from the Tang dynasty.
I drove 1,000 kilometers to find out.
The widow received me at a villa on the outskirts of Beijing. She was elderly, soft-spoken, and visibly grieving — her husband had died less than two weeks before. The house was filled with his lifetime of collecting: stone sculptures in the courtyard, a large koi pond, what appeared to be a Northern Wei Buddhist relief just inside the entrance. The living room held two complete sets of Ming and Qing dynasty furniture — grand armchairs, eight-immortals tables, and two enormous carved wedding beds, their surfaces covered in hand-chiseled figures. Everywhere I looked: scholar's rocks, porcelain, calligraphy, paintings.
A man who collected like this, I thought, would not have a fake qin.
She brought it out. The body was carved with scenes of ancient battle — 108 warriors, in the style of the classic novel Water Margin. I had been playing qin for three years. I thought: this must be very old.
Inside the sound chamber, brushed in ink, were three characters: Inside the sound chamber, brushed in ink: 貞觀元年郭諒製 — "Made by Guo Liang, first year of Zhenguan." Zhenguan was the reign of Emperor Taizong of Tang. The year was 627 AD.. I looked him up that night. Guo Liang was a master luthier of the Tang dynasty, spoken of in the same breath as the legendary Lei family.
She had been asking 300,000 yuan. By the end of our conversation, she offered it to me for 30,000. She said she could tell I truly loved the qin.
I paid. We took a photograph together. I drove 1,000 kilometers home through the night.
For days I examined every inch of it. The inscription. The lacquer. The shape of the body. I was certain I had found something extraordinary.
Then one afternoon I came across a photograph online. Another qin — identical. Same carvings, same warriors, same inscription. I tracked down the owner: an employee of the Jinan power company in Shandong province. When I sent him my photographs, he went quiet for a moment.
They're the same qin, he said.
Neither of us said much after that. He wouldn't tell me what he had paid. I didn't ask twice.
We had both bought the same mass-produced replica. The kind sold in antique markets for a few hundred yuan. The Guo Liang zuo inscription was stamped into every one of them.
I put the qin in the corner of a room. It stayed there for years.
Then one day a message arrived on WeChat. It was from a number I barely recognized. The sender explained he was the widow's son — he had found my contact in his mother's phone and wanted to let me know: she had passed away.
He was sending the message to everyone in her contacts. He didn't know who I was or how we had met.
I have thought about this story many times since then, and I no longer think of it as a story about being deceived.
Someone, somewhere, made that qin in a factory and sold it as an antique. That person I will never know. But after that first transaction, I believe everyone who touched this instrument acted in good faith.
The old man — a pioneer of cable television in China, a lifelong collector — probably received it as a gift from someone currying favor. He didn't know qin. He kept it because it looked important. The widow sold it to me because she believed it was valuable, and because she thought a man who had driven 1,000 kilometers deserved a fair price. I bought it because I trusted what I saw around me.
A forgery passed through innocent hands. No one along the way meant to lie.
There is one more detail worth mentioning. The friend who first told me about the qin still doesn't know the full story. To this day, he believes he helped me find a treasure. I took him out for dinner several times to thank him. He accepted graciously.
I never told him.
I don't regret the 30,000 yuan. I don't regret the drive.
There is a concept in Chinese that has no clean translation: yuanfen — the invisible thread that connects people across distance and circumstance. Some connections are joyful. Some are sorrowful. None of them can be planned.
That qin is still in the corner of my room. It is not a Tang dynasty masterpiece. But it was present for something real: a grieving woman in a house full of beautiful things, a long drive through the night, and a lesson I could not have learned any other way.
No one is born with the eyes to see everything clearly. When you are fooled by something that passed through innocent hands — let it go.
0 comments