Yes. Absolutely yes.
But first, a question.
When do you drink coffee? How many cups a day? And what are you doing while you drink it?
Most people, if they’re honest, drink their first cup while checking their phone. The second cup at their desk, half-finished, gone cold. Maybe a third in the afternoon, more out of habit than need.
Coffee is supposed to be a pause. It rarely is.
Now imagine the same cup — same temperature, same smell — but with a piece of guqin music playing in the background. Not as background noise. As the reason you sit still for four minutes.
Something changes.
I know what you’re doing with that cup.
You’re on the phone. You’re talking about a colleague. You’re complaining about the weather. You’re half-listening to something playing in the background.
I’m not asking you to change any of that.
I’m just asking you to give one cup to the guqin.
Not the whole morning. Not a ritual. Just one cup, with nothing else competing for your attention. Let the music be the thing you’re doing, not the thing playing while you do something else.
Four minutes. Maybe eight. The length of one piece.
See what happens.
Ten thousand kilometers away, several hundred million people are holding their own cups — tea, not coffee, but the same warmth in the hands, the same pause between one thing and the next.
And among them, there is a particular kind of person. They are not silent by nature. They have opinions. They have complaints. They have things to say.
But they are sitting with tea and a piece of guqin music.
And something is happening.
The low, resonant tones move through the room and take the grievances with them. The sound comes and goes — unhurried, unresolved — and the people who were talking begin, without quite deciding to, to stop. Not because the music demands silence. Because it makes silence feel like the more interesting choice.
This is what the guqin has always done, in rooms like that, for a very long time.
Now coffee has come to China too.
In the cafés of Shanghai and Beijing, young faces move through the noise — laughing loudly, listening to rock music, joking with each other across the table.
But look more carefully.
In the corner by the window, there is someone sitting alone. Headphones on. Eyes on the street outside. Still, in a way that is different from the stillness of someone waiting. More like someone who has arrived somewhere.
If they take the headphones off for a moment, you will hear it.
Guqin.
The same instrument that scholars played a thousand years ago. The same sound that moved through those tea rooms and took the grievances with it.
Now it lives in a pair of headphones, in a coffee shop, on a street that did not exist fifty years ago.
It does not mind. It has always gone where it was needed.
The guqin has always been an instrument of the everyday. Scholars played it in the morning before work, in the evening after dinner, in the garden when the weather was good, indoors when it rained. They played it while slightly drunk — which is why one of the most famous pieces in the repertoire is called Jiu Kuang — 酒狂 — “Drunken Ecstasy.”
What the guqin asks of you is not reverence. It’s attention. There’s a difference. Reverence is performed. Attention is simply being present with what you are hearing.
You don’t need incense. You don’t need silk. You just need a few minutes and something to drink.
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