Li Bai once heard a monk from Sichuan play the qin.
The monk arrived carrying his instrument and played for him. Li Bai heard not merely notes, but the wind moving through ten thousand mountain valleys. The sound lingered after the playing stopped; by the time he noticed, dusk had fallen over the hills.
Bai Juyi also wrote about a qin. His poem The Abandoned Qin describes an instrument left untouched, its markers dim and its strings covered in dust. He believed an ancient sound lived within it, but knew that many listeners found it too plain. He was willing to play, even if no one cared to listen.
One poet listened so deeply that he forgot the time. Another was willing to play, but feared that nobody would listen.
What if they had met?
They could not. Li Bai died in 762; Bai Juyi was born ten years later. Bai Juyi would one day visit Li Bai’s grave and write of the poet whose words had shaken heaven and earth. He could read Li Bai’s poems, but he could never sit beside him and play the qin.
I sometimes wonder whether Li Bai would have heard the wind through those mountain valleys in Bai Juyi’s dusty instrument. That is only an imagined meeting. Hearing beauty in one monk’s playing does not mean Li Bai would have loved every piece Bai Juyi played. We cannot declare two people kindred listeners when they never met.
Boya, at least, had met Zhong Ziqi. He knew someone had understood his music; after Ziqi died, he broke his strings. Bai Juyi faced a different loneliness: not knowing where a willing listener might be, yet still being willing to play.
Perhaps the sorrow from a thousand years ago was not that no listeners existed. Perhaps player and listener were scattered across different moments in time.
Time kept Li Bai and Bai Juyi apart forever. Today oceans, languages, and unfamiliar ways of listening still separate us. Someone hearing the qin for the first time might not know the story behind a piece. They might find it slow. That is all right. We do not have to begin with understanding when we meet an unfamiliar instrument.
The piano, too, was once an unfamiliar sound in China. People listened, learned, taught, and made room for it in their own musical lives. “I don’t understand it” need not be a permanent answer.
We have even sent the sound of the qin beyond Earth. The Golden Records aboard the Voyager spacecraft carry Guan Pinghu’s performance of Flowing Streams. We do not know whether anyone will ever encounter those records, let alone what they would hear in that music. Yet humanity sent the sound anyway.
There are possible listeners much closer than outer space. Just yesterday, September 24, China’s president extended a new invitation to young Americans while speaking at a White House welcome ceremony, according to a Xinhua report: 100,000 would be invited to China for exchanges and study over the next five years. It followed his 2023 invitation, announced in San Francisco, for 50,000 young Americans over five years. The numbers are vast; my wish is smaller and more personal. I hope a few hundred of these young visitors might enter a room in China and sit down to hear a real qin performance. For a moment, the distance between cultures would be no wider than the space between a player and a listener.
I would not ask them first whether they understand. I would not promise that every one of them will be moved.
When they arrive, invite them to sit down. Let them listen first.
After the last note fades, ask what they heard. Someone might think of wind in the mountains; someone else, of home. Someone might say honestly that they did not understand it yet. That, too, is a real encounter.
I built Seven String Qin to make room for such encounters. A person far away can hear a recording first, then meet the players and the stories behind the instrument. And perhaps one day, they can sit down here and hear a piece in person.
Li Bai and Bai Juyi never met. We cannot give them back those ten years. But we can give the players and listeners of today a better chance to find one another.
0 comments