Listen as you read — William Xu plays Jiu Kuang:
There is a piece of Chinese music that sounds like a man walking home at night after too much wine. The steps are short. The body leans. The world tilts a little with every third beat — and yet the man never falls. The piece is called Jiu Kuang, "Drunken Ecstasy," and it is one of the most beloved pieces in the qin repertoire.
A Dangerous Age
The piece carries the name of a story, and the story comes from one of the most dangerous times in Chinese history. The Han dynasty was dead; the Sima family was taking the throne piece by piece; and the scholars of the age had to decide, again and again, what to say and what not to say. Saying the wrong thing could cost a man his life. Ji Kang, the greatest of them, was executed in the early 260s; the story goes that before the blade fell, he played one last piece on the qin — Guangling San, whose story we have already told.
Ruan Ji chose a different answer. He was one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, the circle of poets and thinkers who stepped outside the politics of their day. His armor was wine. He drank in public and in office, at court and at home, so thoroughly and so deliberately that no one could ever prove what he actually thought. In an age when words were lethal, a drunk man's words were forgivable. The qin piece is his signature, written not in a manifesto but in a stagger.
Sixty Days of Wine
The old history records the sharpest anecdote. When the Sima ruler sought a marriage between his family and Ruan Ji's, Ruan Ji went on a drinking binge and stayed drunk for sixty days. The matchmaker could never find him sober, and the proposal quietly died. Wine, in his hands, was not a pleasure. It was a wall.
The Piece
Jiu Kuang comes down to us in the great Shenqi Mipu of 1425, the book that saved so much of the tradition, and the editors attribute it to Ruan Ji. Their note says, in essence: he sighed that the Way did not prevail, that he was out of step with his time, and so he set the world's cares outside his body and took his delight in wine.
The music itself is short, and unlike almost everything else in the repertoire. It does not open with dignity and build. It circles. Short phrases rise and turn back on themselves, and the accent keeps landing where the listener does not expect it, so that the whole piece walks with a lean in it, like a man steadying himself against the walls of the world. It never breaks into triumph, and it never collapses. It stumbles, and steadies, and stumbles again — which is exactly what its composer did, for decades, in public, in an age that killed men for standing straight.
How the Stagger Was Found
Its modern life begins with Yao Bingyan, who described himself simply as an amateur. His first attempt, in 1957, went nowhere: he played the score as written and found no wine in it at all, and set the piece aside. Some time later, while reconstructing another piece, he picked up the Jiu Kuang score again, noticed how much it repeats, and let his fingers wander idly through the notation — and the tipsy lilt appeared on its own. "You can wear out iron shoes hunting for a thing and find nowhere to look," he said later, "and then, without any effort, it is simply there." He told the story in a lecture at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music on May 14, 1980, and it is his reading, with its tipsy triple lilt, that players know as Jiu Kuang today.
The Rhythm Goes Electric
The rhythm has even left the qin behind. The rock singer-songwriter Xu Wei heard the stagger of Jiu Kuang and worked it out on guitar, in his song Shi Wai Tao Yuan — "Peach Blossom Land" — and carried it onto the concert stage. The young audience took it for one of his own inventions. His answer, so the story goes, carried the pride of an entire civilization: this rhythm, he told them, was left to us by our ancestors. It is over a thousand years old.
The Straight Line in the Stagger
Ruan Ji is often remembered as an eccentric who drank too much. The piece says otherwise. A man who drinks to forget is sloppy; a man who drinks to remain is precise, and the piece is precise. Every lean is placed. Every stumble is timed. It is the walk of a man who knows exactly how straight a line he intends to keep, and exactly what it would cost to walk it openly.
The dangerous age left the qin tradition two answers. Ji Kang's Guangling San is the piece that refused to surrender. Ruan Ji's Jiu Kuang is the piece that refused to speak. Both have survived everything since — the fall of dynasties, the loss of scores, the silence of centuries — and they still sit near each other in the repertoire, two ways of staying human when the times are not.
The rhythm did not stay in the study. In the companion piece, One Rhythm, Five Lives, we follow the stagger out into the modern world — the master's hands, a rock stage, a street-dance duet, a voice in two languages, and my own qin.
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