Listen as you read — Guan Pinghu's recording of You Lan:
China lost the score of its ancestors. Centuries later, it was found at a neighbor's house.
A Scroll in Japan
There is a scroll of Chinese writing kept in Japan. It was copied by hand more than a thousand years ago, during the Tang dynasty. The copy is thought to date from the reign of Empress Wu Zetian, around the years 684 to 714, and for centuries almost no one paid attention to it. It is not a Buddhist sutra. It is not a poem. Read closely, character by character, it is a set of instructions: this finger, this string, this position, this gesture, then the next. It is music, written out entirely in words.
The piece on the scroll is called You Lan, "The Hidden Orchid." It is the earliest surviving score for the qin, the seven-stringed zither of the Chinese scholars, and the only qin piece that has come down to us in the original prose notation. It is also one of the oldest surviving pieces of written music anywhere in the world.
The road back to this scroll runs through the late nineteenth century, when the Chinese scholar Yang Shoujing, in Japan searching out old books, came across the manuscript and recognized what it was. At the end of the Qing dynasty, a photolithographed copy was brought home to China in the "lost ancient books" series put together in Japan by Li Shuchang and Yang Shoujing. Only then did Chinese musicians learn that the music they had inherited on paper was far older than anyone had dared to imagine. The discovery also opened a window onto the qin music of the Tang dynasty itself: how it was written down, and what it meant to the people who played it.
The Orchid in the Valley
The story the piece carries is ancient. Confucius lived in an age when the old order was breaking apart, and the men of his time said of him that he was a phoenix caught in a chaotic world. He knew it, and did the work anyway. He traveled from state to state offering his learning to rulers who would not use it. On the road home from Wei to Lu, the old book Qin Cao says, he passed through a hidden valley and saw a fragrant orchid blooming alone among the common weeds. He sighed and said: "The orchid ought to be the fragrance of kings. Yet here it blooms alone, mixed in with the weeds — like a man of worth born out of season, keeping company with common men." Then he stopped his carriage, took up his qin, and played. He was, says the story, lamenting his own time, and borrowing the orchid to say it.
The story was first told of a piece called Yi Lan, attributed to Confucius himself. The scroll of You Lan carries a note after its title: "also called Yi Lan." Yang Shoujing, reading those four characters, took the scroll to be the music of this story, and the great Shenqi Mipu of 1425 says the same of its own Yi Lan. Later scholars are more cautious. The Ming and Qing score books that print a piece called You Lan or Yi Lan carry entirely different music — separate transmission lines, not this one. Whatever the true descent, for centuries players heard the same sigh in the music, and the poets agree: Bao Zhao of the Southern Dynasties wrote lyrics for a qin piece of the same name, kept in the Collection of Yuefu Poetry, and its subject is exactly this — a man of worth unmet by his times. Something of the finest quality, standing where no one was looking for it. That feeling has never gone away.
Music Written Out in Words
The scroll is an example of the oldest kind of qin notation, the prose score. There are no symbols for notes. Every single sound is described in words: the left hand's position and touch — how a finger leans, rises, slides, retreats — and the right hand's stroke, pluck, and sweep, all named in characters, with one small character standing in for the hui, the markers down the qin's face, and other words fixing the string and the position. The scroll runs to two hundred twenty-four lines, each of twenty to twenty-four characters, four thousand nine hundred fifty-four characters in all. A short piece of music becomes a long essay. The original score is unsigned; no composer's name stands on it.
Its structure is visible in the words themselves. The piece moves in four beats, and the end of each beat is written out in full — "the great breath of the beat," or simply "beat" — four marks in all, exactly four beats. The preface gives the piece its character in a few characters: "its sound is faint, but its intent travels far." The closing note gives the player his one instruction: this piece must be played slowly, with every nuance attended to. Nothing about the orchid should be made to please. It is a piece that refuses to show off, written in a notation that refuses to abbreviate.
The piece's full title is Jieshi Diao You Lan. "You Lan" is what the music depicts; "Jieshi Diao" is the name of the tune-type placed before the title — a way of naming a qin piece found nowhere else. Where the mode came from is a question with two old answers. One line traces it to the xianghe songs of the Han court, to a piece called "The Song of Longxi," from the frontier country of today's Gansu, with the Qiang to the south and the Xiongnu to the north; by this account the music likely absorbed the sound of the northwestern frontiers. Another connects the mode to the Jieshi dance that was popular in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and an old Tang source on yuefu titles records that the "Jieshi" was court music performing the poems of Cao Cao — the one that begins, "East I climb Jieshi, to gaze on the vast sea." By either road, the tune behind this most bookish of instruments came out of the north: a scholar's lament carried on a steppe-flavored mode.
This is also why the piece matters so much to the story of how qin music survived. The prose notation is so heavy that later musicians eventually compressed it into the reduced notation, the "gathered-character" script that a Chinese musician can still read today. You Lan stands at the beginning of that whole story: the first chapter of how a civilization learned to write music down.
Nearly Lost, Then Found Again
The preface to the scroll names the man who handed it down. The preface says: "Master Qiu, whose courtesy name was Ming, was a man of Kuaiji. At the end of the Liang dynasty he withdrew to Mount Jiuyi, where he was a master of the Chu mode. Of all the pieces he played, You Lan he played with the most consummate skill... In the tenth year of the Kaihuang era of the Sui, he died at Danyang, at the age of ninety-seven." Qiu Ming lived from 494 to 590, a hermit across the collapse of one dynasty and the founding of the next. After him, the piece survived only as writing. For well over a thousand years, no one alive had heard it.
So who played You Lan best? For most of its existence, the honest answer is that nobody alive had played it at all. The first to try were the modern collectors: at the end of the Qing, once the printed copy reached China, the scholar Yang Zongji — known as Yang Shibai, whose qins now rest in Zhejiang — and his contemporaries made the first attempts at rebuilding the music from the page. In the 1950s the work became a project: the Musicians' Association and the Institute of Folk Music organized the masters, and several players could at last perform the piece. Sheng Jialun, Zha Fuxi, and Guan Pinghu each made his own reading, and Wu Wenguang laid the piece out in four sections that follow the orchid's arc: the first deep and restrained, its rhythm free; the second and third alternating harmonics and stopped strings, the contrasts sharp; the fourth played almost entirely in clear harmonics, bright at last, as if light were coming through. The discipline is called dagu, reconstructing from the score. The notation preserves the notes but not the performance, so every player who brings You Lan back to sound is, in a quiet way, its co-composer. It is one of the few great works of music that belongs to whoever is willing to sit down and read the oldest instructions carefully enough to make them sing again.
The Players Who Made It Sing
The reconstruction of You Lan was never the work of one man. Yang Zongji, Sheng Jialun, Zha Fuxi, Guan Pinghu, and others each sat with the oldest score and each came away with something of his own. Among them, it is Guan Pinghu (1897–1967) whose reading most players today hear first. Guan learned the qin in the tradition of Yang Zongji — the very scholar who had made the first attempt at the piece — and grew into one of the most complete players of his generation. In the 1950s, when the Institute of Folk Music gathered its masters to rebuild the ancient repertoire, Guan took on the two hardest scores of all: Guangling San, which survives in the Shenqi Mipu of 1425, and You Lan, which survives only on the Tang scroll. Working from the notation, gesture by gesture, he reconstructed both. We have already met his qin on this site, in our piece on Guangling San [link to be added]. His You Lan keeps the discipline the score itself demands: slow, faint in sound, and far in intent.
A Poet Who Would Rather Listen
Even in the Tang dynasty, the piece was already old. Bai Juyi wrote: "The ancient piece in my qin is You Lan. Play it for me once more, with care. If you want body and mind to be still and well together, playing it yourself is not as good as hearing someone else play it." A thousand years ago, a poet already knew what players and listeners have rediscovered ever since: the hidden orchid is a piece for the listener.
The Man Who Sent It Home
It is worth pausing on the name in that earlier paragraph. Li Shuchang was born in 1837 in the mountain country of Zunyi, in the far southwest of China, in the province of Guizhou; he called himself, a little proudly, a "man of Qian," the old name for that rugged land. Trained by the scholar Zheng Zhen in the learning of practical statecraft, he was still a young man when he submitted a memorial of ten thousand characters to the throne on the ills of the empire, and the court marked him for office. He served on the staff of Zeng Guofan, the great statesman of the age, and was later counted among the "four disciples of Zeng's school," beside Zhang Yuzhao, Wu Rulun, and Xue Fucheng. In 1876 he went abroad with China's first generation of ministers posted to the world, in the suite of the envoy Guo Songtao, and five years in Europe took him through ten countries; he wrote up what he saw in a book, the Western Miscellany. In 1881 he was raised in rank and sent out as the Qing minister to Japan, and he went a second time in 1887, after a home leave. It was in those Tokyo years that the "lost ancient books" series was gathered. And in Japan he was loved as much as he was useful: every spring and autumn he held poetry gatherings for the Japanese and Chinese literati, and the scholars who knew him there esteemed his character and his writing deeply. When he left his post at last, the crowds that came to see him off filled the lanes and followed the road for hundreds of li, a farewell that the Western envoys in Tokyo said they had never seen for any returning minister.
Everyone talks about the orchid, and almost no one talks about the man who carried it back. But that is how old things survive. The treasure gets remembered; the keepers do not. The qin piece came home by a narrow road, and every step of that road was a person.
The Orchid Still Blooms
The orchid is the same flower whether the one who sees it calls it a rare treasure or mistakes it for a weed. It keeps its own counsel, and it keeps its life. The music is like that. It opens in a deep, quiet sadness, but it never becomes bitter; at the end it thins into harmonics so clear that players hear light coming through, as if the orchid's own character were promising that brightness, of some kind, is on the way. What begins in the sorrow of a man born out of season settles, at the last, into a stillness that belongs to no one and no time.
The music survived by a narrow road: one copyist, one hermit, one scroll carried to Japan, one collector who recognized it. That is how old things survive. Not by being famous, but by being kept.
You do not need to know anything about the qin to hear the piece. The score itself asks for slowness: its sound is faint, but its intent travels far. What you are hearing, when you hear You Lan, is something of the finest quality standing where the world did not look for it, waiting, and finally being heard.
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