How wood, water, mountain winds, and human hands came together to make the Tang qin
When people speak of the great qins of Chinese history, they often speak of the Tang dynasty. This is not only because a few celebrated instruments have survived from that period. It is because the Tang was the moment when qin making became a mature art: materials were sought with unusual care, instruments were made according to recognizable standards, and individual makers began to leave a name in the history of sound.
The story begins before the Lei family. It begins with a culture that understood a qin as more than a piece of furniture or a musical tool. A qin was a meeting point between wood, lacquer, craft, listening, and moral cultivation.
Before the Lei Family: Qin Making in Shu
The Tang writer Li Chuo, in Shangshu Gushi, preserved two stories that reveal how highly qin making was already valued around the beginning of the Sui dynasty.
Yang Xiu, the fourth son of Emperor Wen of Sui, was enfeoffed as the Prince of Shu. He loved the qin and, while living in Shu, is said to have had more than a thousand qins made. They were later scattered across the country.
Li Chuo also tells of Li Mian, the Duke of Qian. Li Mian had a qin made by joining fine paulownia and catalpa woods together. He called it the Ba Nǎi Qin, the “百衲琴,” or “Patchwork Qin.” Its hui, the inlaid position markers, were made from snail shell. Three of his qins were considered especially fine. Their sound was said to be like a spring, their resonance like a ritual stone chime, and their strings were reputed not to break for ten years after being fitted.
These stories do not prove that the Lei family began with Yang Xiu. They do show why Shu, the region around present-day Sichuan, became an important center of qin making. There was royal patronage, a culture of collecting, access to mountain timber, and a growing belief that the making of a qin required judgment far beyond ordinary carpentry.
The Nine Leis of Shu
Among the finest makers of Shu was the Lei family. On a qin associated with the modern qin master Yang Zongji, an inscription praises them:
“Among Tang qins, Lei is the first to be named; among the nine Leis of Shu, none has an equal.”
The nine names traditionally associated with the family are Lei Shao, Lei Yan, Lei Zhen, Lei Xiao, Lei Wei, Lei Wen, Lei Jue, Lei Hui, and Lei Xun. Of them, the most famous is generally considered to be Lei Wei. A qin made by him could be called a “Lei Gong qin,” a qin of Master Lei.
The name of Lei Wei belongs to the reign of Emperor Daizong, during the Dali era. But what has survived about him is not only a name. It is also a way of imagining the maker: someone who listened before he cut.
Lei Wei and the Sound of a Tree
A story recorded in the Yuan dynasty Langhuan Ji says that Lei Wei did not always use paulownia. Sometimes he chose pine or cedar. In the depths of winter, after drinking in the wind and snow, he would put on a straw rain cape and bamboo hat and enter Mount Emei alone.
He was listening for a tree.
If he heard a long, continuous, beautiful resonance in the sound of the wind passing through a particular tree, he would cut it down and bring it back to make a qin. The qin made from that wood was said to sound even better than one made from paulownia. Those who especially admired it called such an instrument Songxue, “Pine Snow.”
Whether every detail of this story is historical is difficult to establish. But the story expresses something essential about the old craft. A maker did not simply ask whether a piece of wood was large enough. He asked whether the wood had already learned how to sound.
What Did a Lei Qin Sound Like?
Su Shi owned a Lei qin. In Miscellaneous Notes on Qin Matters, he described an instrument whose surface was covered with snake-belly断纹. An inscription in the long pool read, “Made in the tenth year of Kaiyuan, Lingguan Village, Yazhou.” An inscription near the phoenix pool read, “Recorded by the Lei family; joined in eight days.”
Su Shi was puzzled by the instrument. Its bridge was less than a finger high, and it felt remarkably comfortable under the hand. Yet it did not suffer from what he calls xieyin, a kind of unwanted or deadened sound. He eventually opened the qin to discover its secret.
The sound came from the space between the two sound pools. The middle rose slightly, forming the nay in, the inner sound-bearing structure, shaped like a scallion leaf. The sound seemed ready to leave through the sound openings, but was held and turned back. It circulated, returned, and continued. That, Su Shi believed, was why the resonance lasted so long.
He called it a secret that was not easily transmitted.
Other writers described the sound of Lei qins in less technical language. Ouyang Xiu wrote of a Lei qin called Jin Hui: “Its sound is harmonious, and it has resonance to spare.” Liu Chang praised the Lei qin in verse, imagining it as an instrument that secretly moved mountains and rivers into the ancient qin called Haozhong.
Across these accounts, a recognizable sound emerges: warm, rounded, balanced, and unusually long in its after-ring.
North Lei, South Zhang
The Lei family was not the only great name in Tang qin making. In Jiangnan, the maker Zhang Yue stood beside them. Later writers spoke of “Northern Lei and Southern Zhang.”
Ouyang Xiu wrote of a Zhang Yue qin called Jin Hui: “Its sound is open and reaches far.” Shen Kuo recorded a story about a Zhang Yue qin owned by the Yue musician Tao Daozhen. The wood was said to have come from a cedar coffin in an ancient tomb, and its sound was remarkably firm and powerful.
Chen Yang, writing in the Book of Music, offered a more precise comparison. The qins of Lei Xiao and Guo Liang were “clear, elegant, and deep.” Those of Shen Liao and Zhang Yue were “hollow-sounding and loud.” Huang Tingjian later wrote that Lei Wei and Zhang Yue were the standards by which qin making should be judged: without excellent wood, one should not make a qin.
A Ming dynasty record summarized the contrast this way: Lei qins were solid, warm, clear, and elegant; Zhang qins were firm, bright, powerful, and penetrating. The two makers did not represent a simple opposition between good and bad. They represented two different ideals of sound.
The important point is that later makers treated Lei and Zhang not merely as famous names, but as technical standards. Song craftsmen used them as models for the making of official qins.
Finding the Right Wood
A story preserved by Zhao Xigu in the Southern Song work Dongtian Qinglu Ji tells of the King of Wuyue, Qian Chu, who loved to play the qin. He sent an envoy into the mountains to look for fine timber.
One night at a temple on Mount Tiantai, the envoy heard the roar of a waterfall as if it were just outside the curtain. In the morning he searched for the source of the sound. Beneath the waterfall was a stone, and above it stood a sun-facing pillar. He wondered whether it might be paulownia. When he cut into it, he found that it was.
He persuaded the monks to exchange the pillar, took the wood from its sun-facing side, and had it made into two qins. The two instruments were called Xifan, “Washing Away the Dust,” and Qingjue, “Pure and Supreme.” They were said to be unmatched treasures. Later they entered the imperial collection.
Whether the story is read as history or as a craft legend, it carries the same conviction as the story of Lei Wei listening to a pine. Fine qin wood was not simply harvested. It was discovered through attention.
The Survivors
Most famous qins have disappeared. A few, however, have crossed the centuries and still meet us in the present.
The Chunlei, or “Spring Thunder,” once belonged to the collection of Song Emperor Huizong and was listed among the finest instruments in the Xuande palace collection. After the fall of the Northern Song, it was taken north and later became part of the collection of the Jin emperor Zhangzong. After Zhangzong's death, it was buried with him. Eighteen years later it emerged again, reportedly without the slightest damage, and was praised as the foremost of all qins.
Two qins called Dasheng Yiyin, “The Great Sage Left His Sound,” are also associated with the Lei family. One is held by the Palace Museum. Its catalogue calls the form Lingji, while the scholar Zheng Minzhong argued that it should be identified as Shennong. The other belonged to the collection of Wang Shixiang and is in the Fuxi form.
These instruments are not merely museum objects. They are surviving witnesses to a period when the qin was being made with a level of ambition that later generations treated as a standard.
Before we ask how the qin's playing technique and repertory could be transmitted to later generations, one last page of historical record deserves to be seen.
A Qin Is Made Twice
朱长文, the author of Qinshi, wrote that a qin has four kinds of beauty: good material, good making, a masterful finger, and a correct heart.
The first two belong to the maker. The last two belong to the player and the person being formed through the music.
This is why the history of qin making cannot end with wood, lacquer, and structure. The Old Book of Tang observes that although the musical fashions of the Northern Zhou and Sui became crowded with foreign and popular repertories, qin players still transmitted the old sounds of Chu and Han. The instrument survived because someone continued to teach how to make it speak.
A fine qin can survive in a collection. Its lacquer can outlive dynasties. Its inscriptions can tell us who made it and where. But its music survives only when a player receives it, understands it, and places it into the hands of another person.
A qin is made twice: first by the craftsman who turns wood into an instrument, and then by the teacher who turns sound into inheritance.
That is why the Tang dynasty remains a peak period in the history of qin making. It produced extraordinary instruments, but it also gave later generations a standard by which to listen, build, compare, and pass the art onward.
And that is why the story of the Tang qin eventually becomes the story of every teacher and every student who refuses to let an old sound disappear.
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