Every old qin has a name, but not every old qin has a name that announces a golden age.
The name of this one is Cai Feng Ming Qi — "The Colorful Phoenix Sings on Mount Qi." It carries one of the oldest legends in China. When the Zhou dynasty was rising more than three thousand years ago, a phoenix was said to have sung on Mount Qi — a mountain in Shaanxi, and the birthplace of the rise of King Wen of Zhou. People heard in that song the omen of a new and better world. The Book of Songs gave the image its most beautiful form: "The phoenix sings on that high hill; the wutong tree rises toward the morning sun." The phoenix, the old books say, will land on nothing but the wutong. And the qin — the instrument of this whole story — is made from the wutong.
So the name says two things at once. It says: a golden age is coming. And it says: this instrument is made of the very tree a phoenix would choose. For a qin carved more than thirteen hundred years ago, it is a name with a lot of confidence in it. What follows is the story of how the qin earned it.
The Zhejiang Provincial Museum dates the qin to the mid-Tang dynasty. The form is luoxia — "falling clouds" — the rosy, sweeping silhouette of the sky at dusk, with a waist that narrows and then blooms outward like a garment. The qin is long for its kind: 124.8 centimeters from end to end, with an effective string length of 116.3. Its shoulders measure 18.8 centimeters, its tail 12.5; it is 5.4 centimeters thick. Inside, on the belly of the instrument, the maker left a carved inscription: made by Lei Wei in the second year of the Kaiyuan era of the Great Tang. Lei Wei was the most celebrated name in Tang qin making, a master of the Lei family of Sichuan whose instruments were already famous in their own century and have never stopped being famous since. A qin bearing his name is, by itself, an event. A qin with his own inscription inside the wood is rarer still.
If you turn the qin over, its back tells the rest. The original lacquer is chestnut brown, the color of a ripe chestnut shell, with passages of red lacquer woven through it; the red on the face and sides was added later, in a later age's care. The lacquer has aged into crackle — ice-crack patterns joined by finer lines like the traces of small flowing water — the kind of surface that cannot be faked and cannot be rushed, because it is simply wood and lacquer growing old together over a thousand years. The sound chambers are cut as a rectangular dragon pool and phoenix pond. Above the dragon pool, the name is carved. Around it run three passages of inscription by the collector who loved this qin most — but I am ahead of the story.
In the last years of the Qing dynasty, the qin belonged to Prince Dingshen, who kept more than a hundred qin. In 1900 — the gengzi year, the year the capital fell into chaos — the prince's collection scattered. Of all those instruments, the museum's own account says, this one was the first and the finest.
It then came into the hands of Yang Zongji, the man often called the first qin figure of the Republican era: founder of the Jiuyi school, author of the monumental Qinxue Congshu, the most systematic qin scholar of his generation. Yang called his hall the Banbai Qin Zhai — the Hall of Half a Hundred Qin — and among the dozens of instruments he lived with, this one stood in the top three he treasured most. He wrote about it in the Cang Qin Lu, the "Record of Collected Qin," the final volume of his great work. His verdicts survive in his own words: "its sound is absolutely superb," and "it may truly be called the phoenix feather and unicorn horn of the qin world" — an idiom that means, simply, the rarest of the rare.
Yang did more than admire it. The qin's face shows thick lacquer ground that is probably tile ash — applied, the museum's researchers believe, when Yang himself repaired the instrument, scraping away the old ground and laying down a new one with his own hands. The three inscriptions around the dragon pool are his: colophon, praise, and signature, a collector's love letter written directly onto the body of the qin. It is a strange and moving thought. The hands of a Tang master shaped the wood; the hands of a Republican-era scholar re-lacquered it and wrote on it. The qin carries both.
How it reached Hangzhou is recorded in one quiet line: in 1953, the descendants of Xu Shengchan donated it to the Zhejiang Provincial Museum. And then, in the way of this collection's larger story, the qin slept. For half a century it sat in the museum's storeroom, unplayed and unknown, while the qin world searched for exactly this kind of instrument without knowing where to look.
Its rediscovery is part of the story I told in a previous essay — the 1994 visit of Wang Shixiang and Yuan Quanyou, one trained eye noticing a corner of the storeroom, and the slow awakening of a collection that had slept through five decades. Among all the instruments that visit set free, this was the one the museum would come to count among its greatest treasures.
In 2008, the museum did what no state museum in China had done before: it invited qin masters — Cheng Gongliang, Ding Chengyun, and Yao Gongbai — and recorded them playing its Tang qin, this one included. The recordings were published. For the first time, anyone could hear what Yang Zongji heard: the sound he called absolutely superb, ringing like bronze and stone. In 2018, the qin appeared on the CCTV program National Treasure. A thousand-year-old phoenix, singing on television.
I keep coming back to the name. The ancients heard a phoenix sing on Mount Qi and took it as a promise: the world is about to become worthy of the song. That promise is not usually how we think about old instruments. We file them under heritage, under preservation, under glass. But the people who kept this qin — the Tang maker who signed it, the prince who shelved it, the scholar who repaired it and praised it, the family that gave it away, the museum that let it be played again — none of them treated it as an object to be filed. They treated it as a promise to be kept.
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