In Tasting Mei, we wrote about a memory of Mei Yueqiang’s.
In 1956, in an ordinary guesthouse in Nanjing’s Daxinggong district, he listened to Liu Shaochun play, together with Zhang Zhengyin and Deng Wenquan. Mei was then a young employee at Nanjing’s No. 2 Machine Tool Factory. He had already studied the qin for years. Yet Liu’s extraordinary fingerwork, quiet resonance, and naturally unfolding musical contrasts astonished the young players.
Mei likened them to “qin frogs sitting at the bottom of a well.” Only then did he realize how small the musical world he knew had been.
Previously, we followed this memory toward Mei’s apprenticeship with Liu. This time, we turn toward what made the meeting possible. Why had Liu Shaochun and Xu Tonghua come from Yangzhou to Nanjing? What brought their music within reach of these young players?
At the other end of the story stands Zha Fuxi and the qin survey of 1956.
According to his Report on the 1956 Qin Interview Survey, the musicians’ association assigned Zha to the work, while the Institute of National Music assigned Xu Jian and Wang Di. Together they formed a three-person team. They left Beijing on April 17, visited seventeen places, including Jinan, Nanjing, Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Shanghai, and returned on July 27. Including travel, their work lasted one hundred days.
This was no private round of visits. They sought qin players, documented lineages and repertoires, and organized recordings so that music held in people’s hands and memories could leave an audible record.
Nor did three people make all the recordings alone. The previous year, players and pieces had already been agreed upon with qin musicians around the country. Local broadcasting stations supplied equipment and carried out the recording. The team visited key locations; elsewhere, arrangements were made by correspondence.
But a name on a list was not always easy to find.
The search for Liu Shaochun had reached a point where giving up seemed possible. Zhang Zhengyin provided the turning point. His wife was related to Liu’s family; Zhang knew something of Liu’s circumstances and could supply an address. Through him, Zha finally made contact with Liu.
A family connection that had kept news alive allowed the search to continue. It was part of the chain that led to the encounter in Nanjing.
Mei’s recollection places the guesthouse meeting in “early autumn,” while Zha’s report dates the survey journey from April to July. The difference remains to be clarified; the two accounts should not be forced into a single precise date.
Nanjing, 1956. Front row: Zha Fuxi at the left, Liu Shaochun at the right.
Looking at this photograph, I linger over Liu Shaochun’s lean face, padded robe, and padded trousers. To my eye, the creases suggest clothing long in use. Beside him, Zha’s neatly arranged Zhongshan suit and leather shoes create a striking contrast.
As recounted in the material shared for this essay, they were old acquaintances who had gathered and traveled together in Yangzhou, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. In 1956, they met in different circumstances: Zha leading the survey team, Liu living through hardship. The photograph cannot tell us exactly what either man felt. It does invite a question we too rarely ask of a celebrated musician: under what conditions had he kept this music alive?
In the report’s account of qin schools, Liu Shaochun and Zhang Ziqian appear together as representatives of the Guangling tradition at that time. Finding Liu meant finding more than a person who could play. It meant reaching the pieces, style, and teaching of earlier generations that he carried.
Yet Zha’s attention was not reserved for famous players or polished performances.
Discussing the survey’s nearly two thousand minutes of recordings, he anticipated an objection. Musicians listening to the whole collection might judge a substantial portion of the playing to be below a high standard, and might even question the value of qin music itself. “To look at it in this way,” he wrote, “is incorrect.”
Sound could not be understood apart from the people making it.
Among the eighty-six players whose performances were recorded, many had set the instrument aside for twenty or even thirty years. Some began revising their pieces only after receiving the invitation to record. Uncertain intonation, stiff technique, and fragmented rhythm had to be understood in relation to those lives and years of interrupted practice.
Today, we may hear the imperfections first. Zha asked us also to hear the years behind them.
He did not equate “what was recorded this time” with “what this person knew.” Many players had once performed far more pieces than they could prepare in time. The team therefore listed both recorded pieces and those a player could perform but had not recorded in the musicians’ artistic biographies.
Even the titles that had not yet become sound were carefully preserved.
They were not empty entries. They were leads for further searching, study, and transmission. What one recording session could not capture should not therefore vanish from the record.
The historical importance of this work goes beyond adding recordings to an archive.
A score can remain on a shelf. But the knowledge of how to turn it into music also lives in a person’s hands. When that person is gone, something a written page cannot fully preserve may disappear with them.
The 1956 survey was an act of rescue: finding people while they could still remember and play, listening to them, and preserving their sound.
But preserving sound was only one part of the task. The people who carried it also needed the means to live, practice, and teach.
Zha’s report notes that Guan Pinghu and Wu Jinglüe had already received government support before the survey and had entered research and teaching posts. Their assistance must not be mistaken for a consequence of the 1956 journey.
The account supplied for this essay places Zha behind earlier efforts to help Guan Pinghu, who had resorted to pawning a leather coat to meet his living expenses. It also describes his subsequent advocacy for employment and paid work for qin musicians. These episodes point toward a broader concern: recording endangered music and supporting its living bearers belong together. The precise chronology and arrangements deserve fuller treatment in later essays.
Material support is not the opposite of artistic commitment. It is one of the conditions that allows such commitment to continue. Musicians may preserve an art through hardship, but we should not demand that a tradition survive forever on their hardship alone.
Recordings preserve earlier sound. A viable livelihood gives new sound, and new teaching, a chance to follow.
In Zha’s report, state support and encouragement helped players take up the qin again. For people who had long set it aside, this was more than an administrative arrangement. Their music was being heard, recorded, and valued anew. In that sense, a light had reached them.
What I want to honor is Zha’s initiative. As recounted in the material provided for this essay, he sought state support for the undertaking and personally helped carry it out. He did not simply wait for the music to disappear.
Xu Jian, Wang Di, the broadcasting stations, and local helpers made the work possible together. Recognizing their contributions does not diminish Zha’s. His crucial role was to help bring the undertaking into being and turn concern into action, searching into encounters, and encounters into surviving sound.
In my judgment, Zha Fuxi made an immense contribution to the history of the qin. The work of 1956 was not merely a survey of an old instrument. It was a major rescue effort for a living art and for the people who carried it.
His greatness lay in recognizing the danger and acting upon that recognition. He helped secure support, took part in the search himself, and understood that the value of a musician’s knowledge could not be measured by the polish of a single performance. He saw living inheritance where others might have heard only imperfect playing.
He also understood a truth that preservation must never forget: music lives in people. Protecting the qin meant not only preserving their sound, but caring about the conditions under which they could continue to live, practice, and teach.
Support, equipment, and cooperation all mattered. But first, someone had to recognize that waiting could mean losing the chance.
Zha’s awareness, judgment, and action helped bring a neglected art and its steadfast bearers back into public view and renewed support. He did not merely document what was disappearing. He helped create the conditions for its continuation.
That is why I regard 1956 as one of the great moments in qin history, and Zha Fuxi as one of its great contributors. Acknowledging the many people who made the rescue possible is entirely compatible with affirming the magnitude of his contribution.
This essay honors that contribution without attempting to encompass it all. What Zha Fuxi did for the qin extends far beyond the story of 1956.
Sources: Mei Yueqiang’s recollections of Liu Shaochun’s teaching and excerpts from Zha Fuxi’s Report on the 1956 Qin Interview Survey. William Xu supplied the accounts of Zhang Zhengyin’s role in locating Liu, Zha’s initiative and advocacy for musicians’ livelihoods, the earlier acquaintance between Zha and Liu, and the identification of the Nanjing photograph. Observations about clothing and demeanor are William’s reading of the photograph, not documentary evidence of the sitters’ emotions.
This is Seven String Qin’s 200th article, marking the milestone with a tribute to the great Zha Fuxi and his actions in 1956.
0 comments