In 1944, an instrument already more than a thousand years old was taken to a financial house in Beijing as collateral for a loan. Its name was Feiquan, “Flying Spring.” Its survival would depend, once again, on the people who recognized what it was.
In the autumn or winter of 1944, as China approached the final year of its long war against Japan, an old qin appeared at a financial house on Di’anmen Street in Beijing.
It was not brought there for music.
It was brought there as collateral for a loan.
The instrument was called Feiquan, or Flying Spring. By then, it had already survived dynastic collapse, changes of ownership, structural alteration, repeated repair and more than a thousand years of Chinese history. Yet age and fame could not protect it from the pressures of ordinary life. In wartime Beijing, even a Tang-dynasty qin could become something to be exchanged for money.
The renowned qin player and scholar Guan Pinghu was asked to examine it. He recognized its importance. One of his students, Cheng Zirong, then paid a substantial sum to acquire it.
That decision saved the instrument.
The following summer, in 1945, Cheng sent Feiquan to Guan Pinghu for repair. Soon afterward, the war ended. During the unsettled years that followed, the qin remained among people connected to Guan’s circle before eventually returning to Cheng.
This is how an ancient instrument survives.
Not by age alone. Not because wood is immortal. It survives because, at certain moments, someone understands what is about to disappear and refuses to let it go.
A qin from the late Tang
Feiquan is now preserved in the Palace Museum in Beijing. It is generally dated to the late Tang dynasty and is believed to be associated with the celebrated Lei tradition of qin making.
The instrument is 121.6 centimeters long. Its body was made from Chinese fir and covered with a dark, chestnut-toned lacquer. Beneath the lacquer lies a ground prepared with deer-horn powder, a traditional material valued for its hardness, stability and ability to preserve the wooden body beneath it.
Across the surface, time has produced a complex network of cracks. Broad shefu, or “snake-belly,” patterns intersect with finer lines resembling ice fractures. These are not painted decorations. They are the physical record of lacquer, wood, climate and centuries passing at different speeds.
Large areas of reddish lacquer reveal later repairs. The qin does not present itself as untouched. It carries its history openly.
Its thirteen studs are made from shell. The bridge and tail fittings are of rosewood. Its pale jade tuning pegs were described as having the softness and sheen of congealed cream, while the feet are made from green jade.
Feiquan belongs to the lianzhu, or “linked pearls,” form. Along the neck and waist, the outline moves inward and outward in a sequence of rounded curves, like beads joined along a string. Tradition associates the creation of this form with a reclusive scholar of the Sui dynasty.
Compared with the celebrated Tang qins Jiuxiao Huanpei and Dasheng Yiyin, Feiquan has a flatter soundboard. Its neck and waist are already relatively thin, so the maker rounded mainly the lower edges rather than giving the entire upper surface a strongly arched profile.
These details matter. A qin’s dynasty is not established simply because an inscription names an ancient year. Its proportions, internal construction, lacquer, curvature and method of finishing all provide evidence. In Feiquan, those physical features point toward the late Tang.
Words added across the centuries
On the back of the qin, above the long sound hole known as the Dragon Pool, the name Feiquan is carved in cursive script.
The name means “Flying Spring,” suggesting water descending with such force and lightness that it seems to leave the earth. It is an appropriate name for a qin. Chinese writers often compared the sound of strings to water: a spring emerging from stone, a stream moving through a valley, or droplets falling in an empty mountain.
Beside the name are seals and inscriptions left by different owners or admirers.
One large seal reads Yuzhen, “The Resonance of Jade.” A longer inscription praises the instrument through images of water, metal, mountains and cultivated character:
Jade water descends from the high mountain.
A golden sound rises in the empty valley.
The perfected person treasures and enjoys it.
The wise draw near to its purity.
In the harmony of Heaven and Earth,
all things may flourish.
The name Feiquan, the Yuzhen seal and the principal inscription were gilded. The age cracks pass through them, indicating that these carvings have themselves been part of the instrument for a very long time.
Other marks were added later.
One seal claims the date “the second year of Zhenguan,” corresponding to 628 during the reign of Emperor Taizong of Tang. Another bears the name of Lu Zan, a figure associated with the period between the Five Dynasties and the Northern Song.
These marks do not all belong to the same historical moment. In particular, “Zhenguan, second year” should not be treated as reliable proof that the qin was made in 628. Ancient objects often accumulated prestigious dates, seals and attributions as they passed from one owner to another.
A qin’s back is therefore not a birth certificate.
It is closer to a manuscript that many generations have written upon.
The body remembers what the surface conceals
Modern CT examination has revealed something that cannot easily be seen from the lacquered exterior.
Inside both the Dragon Pool and the smaller sound hole, the Phoenix Pond, sections of square wood were added to the central part of the bottom board. The work is now almost invisible from the outside.
Researchers believe the two openings may originally have been square. At some later point, they were altered into the elongated rectangular forms that had become more common.
This means that even the shape through which Feiquan released its sound was changed during its long life.
The instrument was also opened for repair in the Qing dynasty. The 1936 Jinyu Qinkan, in its record of ancient qins then known to collectors, noted an ink inscription stating that the instrument had been restored by Wang Kunyi of ancient Wu. That inscription can no longer be seen, but the record suggests that the body had once been opened and worked on internally.
Feiquan was not preserved by remaining untouched.
It survived because people were willing to open it, repair it and sometimes alter it. Each intervention saved something while changing something else. This is the difficult truth behind many ancient instruments. Preservation is rarely pure. To keep an object alive, one generation may have to leave its own hand upon it.
From a private collection to Guan Pinghu
During the Republican period, Feiquan belonged to the collector Li Boren, who recorded the circumstances of acquiring it in his writings.
Then came the war years and the episode on Di’anmen Street.
When Guan Pinghu examined the qin in 1944, he was not merely identifying an antique. Guan was one of the twentieth century’s most important qin players. He understood old instruments through scholarship, craftsmanship and sound.
A qin is not fully known by looking at it.
Its structure must be read through the hands. The height of the strings, the response of the soundboard, the movement of vibration through the cavities, and the relationship between lacquer and wood all reveal things that photographs cannot.
Guan’s student Cheng Zirong acted on that judgment and acquired Feiquan. In the summer of 1945, Guan repaired it.
The timing is striking. China was emerging from eight years of full-scale war. Cities had been occupied, families displaced, collections scattered and countless objects destroyed. Yet amid those events, a teacher and a student still found time to rescue and repair one old qin.
To someone who did not understand it, Feiquan might have appeared to be a damaged wooden instrument covered in cracks.
To them, it was a surviving voice.
The final gift
More than three decades later, in the spring or early summer of 1979, Cheng Zirong was living in his native Pinglu.
He wrote to China’s national leadership and expressed his wish to donate Feiquan to the country. The matter was subsequently handled through the national cultural authorities, and the instrument entered the collection of the Palace Museum.
There it remains today.
Its journey into the museum did not begin with an imperial command or an archaeological excavation. It began, in its final stage, with a private owner deciding that the instrument should no longer belong only to him.
That act completed a chain of preservation.
An unknown Tang craftsman shaped the wood. Later owners carved names and seals into its back. Repairers opened its body and changed its sound holes. Li Boren collected it. Guan Pinghu recognized and restored it. Cheng Zirong paid to rescue it during wartime, protected it for decades and finally gave it to the nation.
The Palace Museum is where Feiquan now rests, but the museum is not the whole reason it survived.
It survived because, before it entered the museum, individual people repeatedly chose to carry it through danger.
What survives in an old qin
Feiquan is sometimes described through its measurements, materials and age. All of these are important. But none fully explains its power.
What makes this instrument extraordinary is not that it has remained unchanged for more than a thousand years.
It has not.
Its lacquer has cracked. Its surface has been patched with red lacquer. Its interior has been opened. Its sound holes appear to have been reshaped. Inscriptions from different centuries have accumulated on its back. Some marks preserve history; others complicate it.
Feiquan survived not as a frozen object, but as a body continually negotiated between loss and repair.
In 1944, it became collateral for a loan.
In 1945, a qin master placed his hands inside it and repaired it.
In 1979, its owner gave it away so that it might belong to a larger history.
The wood survived because the lacquer protected it. The lacquer survived because people repaired it. The instrument survived because someone always arrived before it was too late.
That may be the deepest meaning of an ancient qin.
It is made once by the craftsman.
Then it is made again by everyone who refuses to let its voice disappear.
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