In China, the Palace Museum in Beijing holds the most famous qin in the country. It is not the only one. The Zhejiang Provincial Museum — a provincial museum, in a province that, if it were in America, would simply be one state among many — holds a collection of old qin that can be counted as second only to the Palace Museum's. But in courage, I would put Zhejiang first. Because this museum dared to do what few museums anywhere in the world dare to do: it let its thousand-year-old instruments be played. For most museums, an old instrument is an object to be protected from touch. For Zhejiang, a qin that is never played is not protected. It is lost. That openness, I think, is where this story begins — and it took the collection more than fifty years to get there.
Some of them spent fifty years in a museum storeroom in Hangzhou, unplayed, unexamined, and unknown.
The Zhejiang Provincial Museum holds more than thirty qin. About ten of them date from before the Yuan dynasty, most of them Tang or Song instruments. And for most of the twentieth century, almost nobody knew it existed.
The story begins, as so many qin stories do, with one man. In the early 1950s, the museum gathered together a group of more than twenty qin. Fourteen of them had belonged to Yang Zongji — the man often called the first qin figure of the Republican era, the founder of the Jiuyi school, the author of the monumental Qinxue Congshu. Every one of those fourteen instruments had been collected, supervised, or repaired by Yang himself, and every one of them is documented by name in the Cang Qin Lu, the "Record of Collected Qin," the final volume of his great work. Yang Zongji's qin had been sought after by the qin world for decades. Nobody realized that fourteen of them were sitting quietly in a Hangzhou storeroom.
Four of the museum's qin are Tang instruments, bearing inscriptions attributed to the most celebrated makers of the Tang dynasty: Lei Wei, Lei Xiao, and Li Mian. If Tang qin are the rarest treasures of the qin world, the qin of the Lei family are the rarest of the rare. To put fourteen Yang Zongji instruments in one room, four of them Tang, three of them by master hands — this is the kind of collection that scholars had assumed no longer existed.
How it was found again is my favorite part of the story.
In 1994, the great scholar-collector Wang Shixiang and his wife Yuan Quanyou came to the museum to examine a Ming dynasty table that Mr. Zhu Jiagan had donated. In the corner of the storeroom, Yuan Quanyou noticed some qin. She was, by all accounts, not looking for them. But she picked up a few, examined them, and said with quiet certainty: there are quite a few Tang and Song qin here.
One glance from a trained eye, and a collection that had slept through five decades woke up. The museum began to reorganize, research, and re-appraise its holdings. Later, they invited qin masters from around the country to examine the qin in the mountain-cave storeroom, and the verdict confirmed what Yuan Quanyou had suspected: the long-lost qin of Yang Zongji had been found.
The qin world has a saying about instruments like these, and the master Guo Yi put it plainly: a qin is like a house. If nobody lives in it, if the air never moves through it, it goes moldy. Only when a qin is played — when the strings vibrate — does the sound stay alive instead of turning dull and mute. The museum's own researchers said it even more simply: the wood is the body of the qin; the sound is its soul. Protecting the sound, and the culture it carries, matters more than protecting the object.
This is an unusual position for a museum to take. Museums are built to preserve things. But a qin that is preserved perfectly and never played is, in a sense, a dead qin — the shell of an instrument whose soul has gone silent. What the Zhejiang Provincial Museum has spent the last decade doing is treating its qin as what they actually are: instruments, not relics.
In 2008, they took a step no state museum in China had taken before. They invited three of the finest living qin masters — Cheng Gongliang, Ding Chengyun, and Yao Gongbai — and recorded them playing the museum's Tang qin, among them the instrument the museum counts among its greatest treasures. The recordings were published as a CD. For the first time, qin that had been silent for half a century could be heard by anyone, and heard as instruments, not as exhibits.
Since then, the museum has kept going in this direction: its most famous qin have been named treasures of the museum, one of them appeared on the CCTV program National Treasure in 2018, and they have sounded again in concerts of Tang qin music at the museum. The museum's qin first went on public display in 2006.
I find the whole story moving for a reason that goes beyond the instruments themselves. On this website I write a lot about the people of the qin — the masters, the teachers, the hands that pass the music down. The qin survives because of people. But the Zhejiang story is the mirror image: people survived because of the qin. A museum, a table, a corner of a storeroom, one woman's trained eye. Fourteen instruments that had been written down in a book a century ago, waiting in the dark for someone to read them again.
The wood was kept safe. What was restored was the soul.
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