There is a qin in the Palace Museum in Beijing that has been authenticated as a Tang dynasty instrument — over a thousand years old. It is the most celebrated qin in existence.
Its name is Jiuxiao Huanpei (九霄環佩).
In Chinese culture, the number nine carries the meaning of ultimate — the highest, the most, the farthest beyond reach. Jiuxiao — the Nine Heavens — is not simply the sky. It is the realm of immortals, the place above all places, where ordinary sound cannot travel.
Huanpei is the jade ornament worn at the waist by ancient Chinese scholars and officials — pieces of jade strung together so that when the wearer moved, they knocked softly against each other and produced a delicate, ringing sound. It was considered the sound of refinement itself. The sound of a person worth listening to.
Put them together: this qin sounds like jade ornaments ringing somewhere in the immortal realm, above the ninth heaven.
The name alone tells you how the people who made it understood music: not as entertainment, not as skill, but as something that did not belong to this world.
Four Chinese characters. Nine heavens. Jade pendants. The sound of immortals.
English needs a sentence to approximate what Chinese says in a breath. This is not a flaw in translation — it is an invitation. If you want to fully inhabit a name like Jiuxiao Huanpei, you need a little Chinese, and a little classical poetry, and the habit of mind that finds an entire landscape in four words.
That habit of mind is also, not coincidentally, what it takes to listen to the qin.
The Makers
The Lei family of Sichuan were the greatest qin makers the Tang dynasty produced. They flourished for over 120 years, across three generations and three imperial reigns — early, middle, and late Tang. Nine master craftsmen emerged from this single family. Later generations summed them up in a couplet: “Among Tang qins, the Lei family stands first; among the nine Leis of Sichuan, none can compare.”
The Jiuxiao Huanpei came from their hands. Whether it was made by Lei Wei himself, or by someone in his workshop, or by a later hand working in his tradition — scholars have debated this for centuries. The debate has never been resolved. It probably never will be.
What is not debated: the qin exists. It has been played. It has survived.
How Many Are There?
Here is where the story becomes stranger.
The Jiuxiao Huanpei is not one qin. There are four instruments bearing this name.
One is in the Palace Museum in Beijing. One is in the National Museum of China, also in Beijing, with an inscription by the Song dynasty statesman Zhou Bida, dated 1201, that traces the qin’s lineage back to the Kaiyuan era of the Tang. One is in the Liaoning Provincial Museum. One is in a private collection in Hong Kong, with an inscription inside the sound chamber dated to 756 AD — the first year of Emperor Suzong’s reign — and a seal reading “Treasured and appreciated by Su Shi of the Eastern Slope.”
This is less surprising than it sounds, if you know how Chinese literati culture worked.
A beautiful name was a valuable thing. When the Lei family made an instrument worthy of the heavens, they named it accordingly. When another instrument, years or decades later, met the same standard, it received the same honor. This was not deception. It was recognition. In Chinese artistic tradition, a great name belongs to the thing that deserves it — not exclusively to the first thing that received it.
Think of it this way: in the West, a vineyard might produce a grand cru wine in an exceptional year, and again in another exceptional year, and label both the same. The name describes a quality, not a unique object.
The four Jiuxiao Huanpei are four instruments that, across different decades of the Tang dynasty, were judged to have reached the same level. The name was the verdict.
Good names, in China, have always been in demand.
The Four Instruments
Palace Museum, Beijing
Total length 124 cm. Paulownia soundboard, cedar base. Deep purple-black lacquer with vermilion repairs. Snake-belly cracking throughout. Mother-of-pearl fret markers, rosewood tuning pegs, carved white jade feet, zitan nut and saddle. Dragon Pool and Phoenix Marsh both oval. The name Jiuxiao Huanpei inscribed in seal script above the Dragon Pool. To the left, in running script by Huang Tingjian: “Soaring beyond the azure sky, wandering free at the edge of the cosmos.” Above the feet, by Su Shi: “Gentle, gentle, the spring wind moves. / Clear, clear, the sound of jade pendants. / A curtain parts — a new swallow speaks. / In the vast sea, an old dragon sings.”
National Museum of China, Beijing
Total length 123.5 cm, shoulder width 23 cm. Paulownia soundboard, catalpa base. Original black lacquer now faded to the color of chestnut shell, with red ground showing through. Mother-of-pearl fret markers, deer-antler ash underlayer, snake-belly and hair-fine cracking throughout. Round Dragon Pool, long oval Phoenix Marsh. Tuning pegs and geese feet both carved from red agate. The name inscribed in large seal script on the base. To either side of the Dragon Pool, an inscription in running script by Zhou Bida, Song dynasty statesman, dated 1201 AD:
“Made by the Lei clan, beginning from the Kaiyuan era. Treasured by the Feng clan, through how many hands unknown. I am no connoisseur, yet something can be said: the heart governs within, the hand responds to the strings. Thus the sound, harmonious, can calm a startled horse; the intention, concentrated, can mirror the stillness of a mantis stalking its prey. In grand moments, sing the ‘Ode to the South Wind.’ In quiet ones, tend the humble basket of your father. All of it rises from this.” Below the Dragon Pool, a seal reading “Spirit of Central Harmony.”
Liaoning Provincial Museum
Length 122 cm, width 21.2 cm. Mid-Tang period. Vermilion lacquer, partially re-lacquered. Seven strings, thirteen mother-of-pearl fret markers. Rosewood tuning pegs and feet, zitan nut and saddle. Hair-fine cracking on the soundboard, ice-crack and small snake-belly cracking on the base. Round Dragon Pool, oval Phoenix Marsh. The name Jiuxiao Huanpei inscribed in seal script above the Dragon Pool; below it, a seal reading “Pure Harmony.”
Private Collection, Hong Kong
Inside the Dragon Pool, an inscription in clerical script dated to 756 AD — the first year of Emperor Suzong’s reign, the beginning of the mid-Tang period. On the base, the name Jiuxiao Huanpei in seal script. Between the Dragon Pool and Phoenix Marsh, two square seals: one reading “Pure Harmony”; one reading “Treasured and appreciated by Su Shi of the Eastern Slope,” filled with gold lacquer.
The Sound
Ancient texts describe the Jiuxiao Huanpei as having a sound that is loose, ancient, and penetrating (松古透) — three words that Chinese qin players use the way wine critics use terroir. Loose means the wood has aged into a kind of acoustic freedom. Ancient means the resonance carries history in it. Penetrating means the sound travels, opens, doesn’t stop at the surface.
A qin that is merely old does not sound this way. A qin that is merely well-made does not sound this way. The combination of materials, construction, lacquer, time, and use — over a thousand years of being played and resting and being played again — produces something that cannot be manufactured. It can only be waited for.
This is why the Jiuxiao Huanpei is not just a famous qin. It is an argument. An argument that time is an ingredient.
The Hands It Passed Through
What happened to these instruments over the nine centuries after they were made is largely unknown. What we can trace — for the Palace Museum qin — begins in the final decades of the Qing dynasty.
The first documented owner was Yehenara Foniyin Bu, a nephew of Empress Dowager Cixi. He studied the qin under several masters and later taught the instrument to Robert Hans van Gulik — the Dutch sinologist and diplomat who introduced the Chinese qin to the Western world through his landmark study The Lore of the Chinese Lute (1940). The Jiuxiao Huanpei was present at this moment: the beginning of the qin’s entry into European consciousness.
From there, the qin passed to Aisin Gioro Pu Tong — known by his studio name Master of the Red Bean Pavilion — a prince of the Qing imperial family and one of the great connoisseurs of classical Chinese performing arts. Each spring and autumn, he would retreat with friends to the Dajue Temple in the Western Hills outside Beijing, bringing the Jiuxiao Huanpei to play Gao Shan Liu Shui — “High Mountains, Flowing Water” — the ancient piece said to be playable only for a true friend who can hear what the music means.
The qin then passed through the hands of Liu Shiheng and his son Liu Huizhi — scholar, collector, and one of the great private antiquarians of the Republican era. Of the roughly 90,000 oracle bone fragments surviving on the Chinese mainland today, 28,000 came from Liu Huizhi’s collection. His library on Xinzha Road in Shanghai — the Xiaojiao Scripture Pavilion — held 100,000 volumes. The Jiuxiao Huanpei rested there, among oracle bones and ancient books, while the world outside changed beyond recognition.
In 1952, Zheng Zhenduo — then Director of the Bureau of Cultural Relics — oversaw its acquisition and transfer to the Palace Museum in Beijing, where it has remained ever since.
One qin. A hundred years of documented travel between Beijing and Shanghai, through the hands of imperial nephews, Qing princes, and scholar-collectors. And before that: nine centuries of silence.
A Note on Our Replica
The instrument we offer is a replica made in reference to the Palace Museum’s Jiuxiao Huanpei — its dimensions, its profile, its acoustic intentions. The wood is new. The lacquer is new. The thousand years are not included.
But the shape is the same. And the shape, as the Tang craftsmen knew, is where the sound begins.
If you’d like to see the instrument, it’s here: [view product]
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