In 1925, the Committee for the Disposal of Qing Imperial Household Affairs entered the southern storeroom of the Yangxin Hall in the Forbidden City.
The roof had been leaking. Whatever was inside had been sitting under rain and mud for years, possibly decades. The cataloguers worked through the contents methodically, recording what they found.
They came to a qin.
It was encased in mud. The lacquer was buried under water rust. The zitan nut had half fallen off. The qin scholar Zheng Minzhong, who examined it years later, recalled the description: “The roof had been leaking. The rain had covered it like a shell of mud. The nut had fallen half away.”
The cataloguers wrote four characters in their ledger:
破琴一张。
One broken qin.
They moved on.
The Qing dynasty had fallen in 1912. The imperial family, before they were finally expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924, took what they could — the portable treasures, the obvious valuables, the things anyone would recognize as worth saving.
No one recognized the qin in the leaking storeroom.
It had no companion but the rain. For decades, while dynasties changed and wars came and went and the world outside the Forbidden City transformed beyond recognition, the qin sat in the dark, under a dripping roof, encased in mud.
In the old Chinese understanding, a qin waits for a zhīyīn — 知音 — a “one who knows the sound,” a listener who truly hears. The greatest qin players in history were said to have broken their strings when their zhīyīn died, because there was no longer anyone worth playing for.
For twenty-two years, this qin had no zhīyīn. It had only the wind and the rain.
Then Wang Shixiang walked in.
The Eye That Saw It
In 1947, the scholar and connoisseur Wang Shixiang examined the qin. He noticed the date inscribed inside the sound chamber. Beneath the water damage and the rust, in red lacquer clerical script, four characters: 至德丙申 — Zhide bingshen — the year 756 AD. The first year of Emperor Suzong’s reign. A Tang dynasty date. An imperial instrument.
Wang Shixiang declared it a treasure.
Two years later, with the approval of Ma Heng, then director of the Palace Museum, the renowned qin master Guan Pinghu was commissioned to restore it. Guan spent months carefully removing the water rust, layer by layer, working with the patience of someone who understood what was at stake.
When he finished, the surface of the qin was intact. Not a crack from the damage. Not a mark from the restoration.
The zitan nut was reset. The geese feet were replaced. The qin was moved to the Yanxi Palace storeroom, given back its name, and strung. It answered.
In 1960, the qin scholars Zheng Minzhong and Gu Tiefu wrote their official assessment: “The oldest surviving famous qin in transmission. Beautiful and distinctive in form. Brilliant and solemn in color. The cracking patterns rise like coiling dragons. The inscriptions are precise and magnificent. Worthy of being called a heavenly treasure, a jewel among qins.”
They classified it: Grade One, Class A — the highest designation in the Chinese cultural heritage system.
From “one broken qin” to Grade One, Class A.
A Thousand Years of Wind and Rain
When Guan Pinghu finished the restoration, those who examined the qin could not find a single mark of damage on the wood beneath. Not from the water. Not from the decades of mud. Not from the restoration itself.
This is not magic. This is raw lacquer — shēngqī (生漆) — the sap of the lacquer tree, harvested, processed, and applied in layers by Tang dynasty craftsmen over 1,200 years ago.
Raw lacquer, when properly cured, becomes one of the hardest and most chemically resistant natural substances known. It does not dissolve in water. It does not rot. It does not yield to acid. Museums use modern synthetic coatings to protect artifacts for decades. The Tang craftsmen used raw lacquer to protect a qin for over a millennium — and it worked.
The mud came off. The qin was underneath, waiting.
A thousand years of wind and rain, and the lacquer held.
The Year It Was Made
The year 756 AD was not an ordinary year.
It was the year the An Lushan Rebellion — the greatest catastrophe of the Tang dynasty — reached its worst. The rebel general An Lushan had declared himself emperor of a new dynasty. Emperor Xuanzong had fled the capital Chang’an. At the Mawei Courier Station, his imperial guard mutinied and forced him to execute his beloved consort Yang Guifei. The old emperor continued south into Sichuan, broken.
His son, the crown prince, went north. On the twelfth day of the seventh month, at Lingwu in the northwest, he declared himself Emperor Suzong and proclaimed a new reign era: Zhide — Sublime Virtue. The year became known as Zhide bingshen.
In the middle of all this, somewhere in Sichuan, a qin was made.
The Song dynasty text Yue Shu records: “When Emperor Xuanzong returned from Sichuan, he summoned Lei Yan to await his orders at Xiangyang.” Scholars believe the Da Sheng Yi Yin may have been commissioned by Xuanzong himself — made by Lei Yan of the Lei family of Sichuan, as a gift to celebrate his son’s accession to the throne. A father’s offering, made in exile, in the middle of a war he had helped cause.
The Instrument
Total length 122 cm, shoulder width 20.1 cm. Paulownia soundboard — yellow in color, loose in grain, straight and dense. Black lacquer overall, faded in places to reveal chestnut-colored underlayer and deer-antler ash ground. Vermilion lacquer repairs. Snake-belly and hair-fine cracking throughout. Gold fret markers. Jade tuning pegs. Round Dragon Pool, flattened oval Phoenix Marsh. Zitan nut and saddle.
Above the Dragon Pool, in cursive script: 大圣遗音. To either side, in clerical script, sixteen characters:
A vast chasm welcomes autumn. / A cold river mirrors the moon. / Ten thousand sounds fade into stillness. / A lone paulownia tree splits in the wind.
Below the Dragon Pool, a seal: Baohán — “containing all things.” Inside the Dragon Pool, in red lacquer: 至德丙申 — the year 756 AD. An instrument that signs its own birth.
Where the Name Comes From
The name Da Sheng Yi Yin — The Sound the Great Sages Left Behind — comes from the Han dynasty scholar Cai Yong, who wrote: “The qin embodies the three powers and possesses the nine virtues. It is truly the sound that the great sages left behind.”
Who were the great sages? The Song dynasty writer Ouyang Xiu — one of the most celebrated literary figures of his era — gives us the clearest answer. In his essay Seeing Yang Zhi Off, he describes suffering from what he calls “a melancholy illness” — what we might today call depression. He had retreated into quiet retirement, but nothing helped.
Then a friend taught him a few qin pieces in the gong mode.
“I played them for a long time and came to love them, and forgot that the illness was still in my body.”
Ouyang Xiu went on to explain why the qin had this power: its music carried “deep sorrow and far-reaching thought” — the emotions of Shun, of King Wen, of Confucius. The sages had put their inner lives into the qin, and the qin had carried those lives across the centuries. To play the qin was to be in conversation with the sages. To listen was to hear what they had felt.
This is what Da Sheng Yi Yin means. Not just “the sound the sages left behind” as a historical fact. But the living transmission of their inner world, available to anyone who knows how to listen.
The Four Tang Qins of the Palace Museum
The Palace Museum holds four authenticated Tang dynasty qins — a complete sequence across the dynasty’s three periods:
Jiuxiao Huanpei — early/high Tang, Lei family. The most celebrated qin in existence, with inscriptions by Su Shi and Huang Tingjian.
Linglongyu (Jade Delicacy) — mid-Tang, Lei family.
Da Sheng Yi Yin — mid-Tang, Lei family. The only one with a verified date inscription, making it the standard reference instrument for mid-Tang qins.
Feiquan (Flying Spring) — late Tang, Lei family.
Because the Da Sheng Yi Yin has a confirmed date — 756 AD, written in the maker’s own hand inside the body — it anchors the entire sequence. It is the instrument against which the others are measured.
Two Qins, One Name
There are two instruments bearing this name. The second Da Sheng Yi Yin was also made in 756 AD, and was owned for many years by Wang Shixiang and his wife Yuan Quanyou. Its inscriptions differ: to either side of the Dragon Pool, sixteen characters reading “Paulownia from Yi Mountain, timber from hollow mulberry; a phoenix sings in the autumn moon, a crane dances on the jade terrace.”
In 2012, this qin was sold at auction for 115 million yuan — approximately 16 million US dollars at the time.
One broken qin in a leaking storeroom. One sold for sixteen million dollars. Both made in the same year, by the same family, in the middle of the same war.
What Remains
To tap the back of the Da Sheng Yi Yin is to hear something that qin players describe as firm, loose, and resonant. To play it is to hear a tone that is bright, clear, and full of ancient meaning.
Over 1,200 years old. Still playing.
The An Lushan Rebellion ended. The Tang dynasty recovered, then declined, then fell. The Song came and went. The Yuan. The Ming. The Qing. The republic. The revolution. The storeroom with the leaking roof.
And then Wang Shixiang noticed a date.
A Final Note
The Palace Museum holds over 88 qins spanning the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Every single one of them is priceless. Every single one of them is on public display.
Get a visa. Buy a ticket to Beijing. Walk into the Forbidden City. Turn left.
They’ll be there.
0 comments