In the spring of 1910, Yang Zongji acquired a qin called Ming Feng — "The Singing Phoenix." It had come out of the Prince Yi household, from a hall that once held twenty-four qin. It was a fine instrument. But a singing phoenix, in the old poetry, is a bird calling for a mate. And for three years, Yang could not find one.
He was not a man short of instruments. He called his own hall the Hall of Half a Hundred Qin, and in those three years more than twenty additional qin passed through his hands. He judged every one of them against Ming Feng, and not one of them was its equal.
Then he found this one, and he wrote his joy directly onto its back, in characters imitating the hand of Su Dongpo, and named it Lai Huang — "The Phoenix Has Come." Beneath the name, in neat regular script, he set down the whole story, ending in a short inscribed verse:
A phoenix sought its mate, and circled three years in flight.
Then the good wood was met by chance, complete in all nine virtues.
Phoenix, phoenix — heaven lent us this bond.
He signed it on the day of the winter sacrifice, 1912: the Man of Mount Jiuyi, Yang Zongji, inscribed at the Latter Hall of Twenty-Four Qin, south of Xuanwu Gate.
What the wood says
Lai Huang is a Tang qin in the zhongni form — the plainest and most orthodox shape in the whole repertoire, named for Confucius. It measures 120.4 centimeters end to end, with an effective string length of 110.7; as recorded, its forehead measures 5.8 centimeters, its shoulders 20.7, its tail 13.5, and its body is 5.6 centimeters thick.
The lacquer is the color of purple chestnut husk. Both the playing surface and the back are covered in crackle — ice-crack patterns interwoven with niumao duan, "ox-hair crackle," those hair-fine lines that only a thousand years of slow drying can produce. Below the eighth fret position the ox-hair lines are especially clear. The side walls, strangely, have no crackle at all.
The sound chambers are a rectangular dragon pool and phoenix pond. And inside the wood are inscriptions that read like a repair log spanning six centuries: in the belly above the dragon pool, made by Lei Xiao, restored by Zhu Zhiyuan of Chicheng; inside the phoenix pond, repaired again by Li Suifu of Yueyang, twelfth year of the Tongzhi reign — 1873.
Lei Xiao was one of the celebrated qin makers of Tang-dynasty Shu, of the same Sichuan tradition as Lei Wei. Zhu Zhiyuan was a famous qin figure of the Yuan dynasty. So the instrument carries, in its own hollow body, the hands of a Tang maker, a Yuan restorer, a Qing repairman, and a Republican-era scholar who re-lacquered nothing but wrote everything.
Is it really Tang?
Yang Zongji thought the belly inscriptions were genuine, not later forgeries — and he said so in the inscription itself, treating Lai Huang's worthiness as proof that the Lei Xiao attribution could be trusted. It is a circular argument, and a very human one: the qin sounded like a Tang qin, so the Tang signature must be real.
Modern scholarship reached the same conclusion by a different road. Professor Ding Chengyun of the Wuhan Conservatory of Music, weighing the construction method, the overall bearing of the instrument, and above all the sound, judged Lai Huang to be a Tang qin.
The phoenix that was heard again
In 2008, when the Zhejiang Provincial Museum did what no state museum in China had done before and invited masters to record on its Tang instruments, two qin were chosen. One was Cai Feng Ming Qi. The other was this one.
Yang Zongji spent three years looking for a match for a singing phoenix. He found it, and named it for arrival. Ninety-six years later, the two phoenixes of the collection sang on the same recording. It is not the ending he wrote, but it is the one he would have wanted.
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