Inside the dragon pool of this qin, written upside down so that only someone peering into the instrument's hollow body could read it, is a single line of regular script: made by Xuanqing of the imperial clan, first year of the Xingyuan era of the Great Tang. That is the year 784.
Xuanqing is not a name most people know. That turns out to be the point.
A prince who made his own instruments
Xuanqing was the style name of Li Mian, a member of the Tang imperial house. The Book of Tang lists him among the chancellors of the imperial clan: in the first year of Xingyuan he was appointed acting Minister of Works and Chancellor. It also records, almost in passing, the detail that matters here — he was skilled at playing the qin, he made instruments himself, and the whole world treasured them.
He was not a hobbyist. Li Mian wrote a treatise, the Qin Shuo, in one volume, and he built qin by the hundred. He was especially known for baina qin, the "hundred-patch" instruments assembled from many small pieces of wood — among the most difficult things a maker can attempt.
Two of his own instruments were famous by name: Xiangquan, "Echoing Spring," and Yunqing, "Resonant Chime." They were the two he loved most. Neither survives. Yang Zongji, writing in the early twentieth century, put it plainly: Xiangquan is no longer to be found in this world, and Yunqing has passed away. Of the instruments Li Mian made and loved, what is left is this one — which he signed, not with the name history remembers, but with the name his friends used.
Yang's verdict is worth quoting whole, because it is one of the most confident things ever written about a surviving Tang qin. This instrument made by Xuanqing, he said, stands as solidly as the Hall of Lu — the ancient hall that outlasted the dynasty around it. And then the argument that makes the qin unfalsifiable: in later ages people knew there had been a Lord Li Mian, but no one knew Xuanqing. A forger works with the famous name. Only the maker himself would sign with the private one.
Spring thunder and autumn pipes
On the playing surface, just inside the bridge and again written upside down toward the player, are four characters in seal script: Chun Lei Qiu Lai — "Spring Thunder, Autumn Pipes."
It is a name about sound rather than lineage. Spring thunder is the qin's low register: the first storm of the year, felt in the chest before it is heard. Qiu lai is the sound of autumn — the thin, carrying tone of wind through reeds and pipes, the register where the qin goes clear and far. One name for the two ends of the instrument's voice.
What is left of the surface
The qin is in the zhongni form, black-lacquered, with a rectangular dragon pool and phoenix pond. It measures 117.1 centimeters end to end, with an effective string length of 107.3; its forehead is 16.8 centimeters across, its shoulders 17.4, its tail 12, and the body is 5.2 centimeters thick. The narrow difference between forehead and shoulders gives it an unusually straight, austere silhouette.
The back is covered in fine flowing-water crackle, the close parallel lines that come only with great age. On the face, faint small snake-belly crackle can still be made out — but only faintly, because the playing surface was repaired by later hands, and in that repair most of the crackle was lost. It is the ordinary tragedy of a working instrument: to keep a qin playable, someone eventually has to take away part of its age.
Yang Zongji did not care. What he valued was not the crackle but the sound, and on that he allowed himself no hedging: clear, round, penetrating and lustrous, beyond comparison. A rare treasure of the world, he called it.
A prince made it, a scholar a thousand years later recognized it, and the name he signed it with — the one nobody remembered — is the reason we can believe both of them.
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