Its lacquer is damaged. Its name has been scarred. A later repair was abandoned halfway through. Yet inside this Middle Tang qin lies a structural detail once described as one of the great untransmitted secrets of Lei-family craftsmanship.
An ancient qin is often expected to look serene.
We imagine a dark surface polished by centuries, elegant cracks running through the lacquer, and inscriptions remaining exactly where their first owners placed them. Age, in this imagination, is graceful.
Yulinglong tells a less comfortable and more truthful story.
The instrument has lost lacquer in multiple places. Damage has reached the inscription bearing its name. A large seal once carved on its back has been covered by later lacquer and can no longer be read. Its wooden feet were glued permanently into place during a later repair. Someone attempted to restore other damaged areas, applied lacquer carelessly, and stopped before the work was finished.
Yulinglong survived, but not beautifully.
And yet the most important evidence it carries is not on its damaged surface. It is hidden inside the body, where a small structural detail connects the qin to one of the most celebrated traditions of Tang-dynasty instrument making.
The secret Su Shi went looking for
Centuries after the Tang dynasty, the Northern Song poet and statesman Su Shi owned a qin associated with the Lei family of Sichuan.
Lei qins were famous for a sound that was balanced, powerful and unusually long in resonance. Their excellence was praised, but the exact methods used to create that sound were not easily explained. Su Shi wanted to understand why his instrument behaved as it did.
So he opened it.
Inside, he observed the raised internal structure known as the nayin, positioned between the two sound holes. Rather than allowing vibration and air to leave the body immediately, this structure shaped their movement through the internal cavity. Su Shi believed the sound was made to hesitate, turn and circulate before emerging.
He called it a “most untransmitted secret.”
This does not mean that one groove or raised surface can explain the entire sound of a qin. Wood, thickness, arching, cavity design, lacquer, string tension and the hands of the player all matter. But Su Shi understood that the finest qins were designed not only on the outside. Their makers controlled the invisible space within them.
That is where Yulinglong becomes especially important.
A secret preserved inside
Yulinglong has a circular Dragon Pool and a flattened oval Phoenix Pond. Inside the body, the nayin rises near the Dragon Pool. At the Phoenix Pond, a circular groove was cut into the raised structure.
A related feature can also be seen in the Tang qin Jiuxiao Huanpei. In Yulinglong, the groove appears only near the Phoenix Pond. The circular form of its Dragon Pool may have made an additional circular groove there unnecessary or structurally unsuitable.
This internal treatment has been associated with the sophisticated construction of Tang Lei qins and with the kind of workmanship discussed by Su Shi. It does not, by itself, prove the identity of an individual maker. There is no surviving maker’s inscription inside Yulinglong. But it provides important physical evidence connecting the instrument to the technical world in which the great Lei qins were made.
The outside is damaged. The inscriptional record is incomplete. The inside still speaks.
The posture of a phoenix
Yulinglong was made during the Middle Tang and belongs to the Fengshi, or “Phoenix Posture,” form. Tradition attributes the design to Wei Yangying, which is why it is also known as the Wei Yangying style.
The qin is 122 centimeters long, with a vibrating string length of 111.8 centimeters. Its soundboard was made from paulownia. The body is relatively slender, only 4.8 centimeters thick.
Its neck and waist show rounded shaping, while the underside of the forehead slopes inward to reduce mass. These adjustments are not merely decorative. Every curve changes the distribution of wood and therefore influences stiffness, vibration and response.
The body was covered in black lacquer over a ground made from pure deer-horn powder. Beneath that ground lies a layer of loosely woven yellow ramie cloth. Where the lacquer has broken away, and on the reverse of detached fragments, this textile foundation can still be seen.
The cloth helped bind the lacquer system to the wooden body and distribute stress. More than a thousand years later, its exposure also allows us to see the instrument as a construction rather than a mysterious black surface: wood, cloth, mineral ground and lacquer built up in carefully controlled layers.
Across the remaining lacquer are irregular small snake-belly cracks. Its thirteen studs are made from shell, and its bridge and tail fittings from rosewood. Despite the damage and later intervention, the overall presence of the instrument remains broad, substantial and powerful.
A name almost lost
Above the Dragon Pool, the name Yulinglong—“Exquisite Jade”—is carved in flowing script, each character roughly an inch high.
The name is elegant. The surface carrying it is not.
Losses in the lacquer have reached the inscription. Below the Dragon Pool was once a large seal. Its outline remains visible, but later lacquer has covered the characters so completely that they can no longer be identified.
The qin has no known inscription inside its body naming the maker.
This is an important reminder that inscriptions do not always move safely through history. They can be added, altered, covered, damaged or misunderstood. A prestigious date or signature cannot automatically outweigh the physical evidence of construction. Conversely, the loss of an inscription does not erase what the body itself can reveal.
Yulinglong’s history is now read from fragments: the form, the internal structure, the lacquer ground, the textile beneath it, the remaining characters and the traces of work performed by later hands.
When repair becomes another wound
Not every repair in an ancient instrument’s life was carried out by a master.
Yulinglong’s rosewood feet were glued permanently in place by a later restorer. Elsewhere, lacquer was applied roughly over damaged areas. The work appears to have been abandoned before completion.
It is tempting to treat such intervention only as vandalism. Certainly, poor repair can conceal evidence, restrict later conservation and cause new damage. But it also belongs to the object’s history.
Someone believed the qin needed to be saved. That person may have lacked the knowledge, materials or patience required to do the work well. The result is neither original Tang craftsmanship nor responsible modern conservation. It is the visible record of an unsuccessful attempt to hold the instrument together.
Ancient qins do not survive through a perfect chain of enlightened owners. They pass through periods of appreciation and neglect, expertise and ignorance, prosperity and crisis. Some generations preserve. Some alter. Some nearly destroy what they intend to repair.
Yulinglong carries all of them.
From Hunan to the Palace Museum
In the twentieth century, Yulinglong belonged to Chen Weibin of Hunan, who had acquired it from Yang Boxiu.
In the early 1950s, following a suggestion from the writer, historian and public figure Guo Moruo, Chen donated the qin to the state. It was received by the cultural relics authorities of the Ministry of Culture and later transferred to the Palace Museum, where it remains today.
The precise year of the donation still requires further documentation, so it is safer to preserve the historical record as it stands: the early 1950s.
The transfer changed the future of the instrument. Yulinglong was no longer dependent on the circumstances of a single private household. It entered a national collection where its damaged lacquer, unusual internal construction and long history could be documented and studied together.
What the wound could not erase
Yulinglong is not powerful because it escaped history.
It did not.
Its lacquer broke. Its cloth foundation became exposed. Its name was damaged. A seal disappeared beneath later paint. Its feet were glued in place. A careless restoration stopped halfway through.
But the instrument’s deepest evidence remained where damage on the surface could not easily reach it.
Inside the body, the raised nayin and its circular groove preserve an idea about sound: that resonance must be guided, delayed and allowed to turn within an enclosed space before it is released.
Su Shi opened a Lei qin because he wanted to discover why its sound lingered.
Yulinglong gives us another glimpse of that answer.
The secret was never written as a formula. It was carved into wood.
More than a thousand years later, the surface is wounded, but the secret is still inside.
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