He Had Nothing. He Had a Qin.

Xia Yifeng and the Sound of Old Nanjing

He was a Taoist monk from northern Jiangsu who ended up working in a foreign Gospel Hall in Nanjing. He had nothing. He had a qin.

He was also one of the two masters to whom Mei Yueqiang formally bowed as a student in 1952 — and remained so until the day Xia Yifeng died, eleven years later.

A City That Nearly Forgot

The Jinling school of guqin was born in Nanjing when the city was the capital of the Ming dynasty — a place of imperial ceremony, scholarly culture, and living musical tradition. But in 1421, the Yongle Emperor moved the capital north to Beijing. Nanjing became a secondary city, and its cultural life began its long decline.

Five centuries of slow erosion followed. By the time the Republic of China made Nanjing its capital again in the 1920s, the old Jinling qin lineage was barely breathing. Then came the Japanese invasion of 1937, eight years of occupation, and civil war. The chain of transmission, already fragile, very nearly broke.

Xia Yifeng was the exception. He had arrived in the city in 1921 with nothing but his instrument and his training. He stayed through everything. And when the dust settled, he was still there — still playing, still teaching, still holding the line.

This is why Gan Tao called him the founder of the New Jinling school. Not because he invented something. Because he refused to let something die.

A Boy in a Taoist Temple

Xia Yifeng was born on the 21st day of the fifth lunar month, 1883, in Huai'an, Jiangsu. His parents died when he was young. He was raised by his aunt and uncle, attended a private school for three or four years, and at the age of twelve entered the Er Di Shrine — a Taoist temple at the foot of a pagoda in the north of Huai'an city — as a novice monk.

Inside the temple, he learned the transverse flute and kunqu opera from his Taoist teachers. Then, at fourteen, he began studying guqin under Yang Ziyong, a student of the Huai'an master Qiao Ziheng. He took to it immediately. By fifteen, he was already teaching.

The Long Road to Nanjing

In 1920, Xia Yifeng traveled to Shanghai to attend the Chenfeng Lu Qin Gathering, organized by Zhou Qingyun — one of the first formal gatherings of guqin players in modern China. He performed Ping Sha Luo Yan — Wild Geese Descending on a Sandbank. The following year he returned to Huai'an, married Chen Hongru, and moved with his family to Nanjing.

He found work as an administrator at Chongshan Hall, a charitable institution on Jinsha Well Lane. The pay was modest. The life was plain. He wore coarse cloth, ate simple food, and played the qin.

Nanjing suited him. In 1934, when Cha Fuxi, Xu Yuanbai, and others founded the Qingxi Qin Society, Xia Yifeng joined with his students Xu Sen and Zhao Yunqing, and became one of its core members. By 1936, he was recognized as a leading figure of the Nanjing qin world and was named a member of the Suzhou Jinyu Qin Society.

The Voice on the Radio

Sometime in the years after 1945, a radio announcer at the Central Broadcasting Station in Nanjing spoke twelve words into the microphone:

"夏一峰先生，七弦琴独奏，渔歌。"
"Mr. Xia Yifeng. Guqin solo. Fisherman's Song."

What followed was a live performance — no editing, no retakes, no second chances. The sound went out over the airwaves of a city still finding its footing after eight years of war.

That recording survives. In the video above, you can hear it set against footage of Nanjing in 1947 — the same city, the same era, two fragments of a world that no longer exists, brought together for the first time.

Yu Ge — Fisherman's Song — is a piece of the Jinling school, traced by scholars to the Wuzhizhai Qinpu, a qin manuscript collection of the Qing dynasty. In Xia Yifeng's hands, it carries the particular quality that defined his playing: steady, refined, full of feeling without ever forcing it.

The Later Years

In the autumn of 1946, Xia Yifeng was appointed professor of guqin at the National Music Academy in Nanjing. Among those who studied with him during this period were Yang Yinliu and Cao Anhe — scholars who would go on to document and preserve Chinese musical heritage for the next generation.

In 1954, on the recommendation of Yang Yinliu and Cao Anhe, he was appointed as a special research fellow at the Institute of National Music of the Central Conservatory of Music. That same year, he co-founded the Nanjing Music Society with Gan Tao and Zhang Zhengyin, serving as vice president and head of the guqin section.

In 1956, researchers from the Central Conservatory visited him and recorded sixteen of his pieces. These were compiled into the first volume of Ancient Qin Music (Guqin Qu Huibian), published by the Music Press. Among them, Jing Guan Yin — Silent Contemplation — was later included in the landmark Anthology of Chinese Music: Guqin collection, known as the Lao Ba Zhang — the Old Eight Albums — the most important archive of twentieth-century guqin recordings.

Xia Yifeng died on the night of April 2, 1963, at his home in Nanjing. He was eighty years old.

A Line That Still Holds

Gan Tao called him "the founding master of the New Jinling Qin School." The title was not given lightly.

Among Xia Yifeng's students was a young man named Mei Yueqiang — who had first encountered him at a Qingxi Qin Society gathering in 1945, and formally bowed to him as a student in 1952, alongside Zhao Yunqing. In 1956, Mei Yueqiang also formally studied under Liu Shaochun and Xu Tonghua — masters of the Guangling school. He was not abandoning one tradition for another. He was learning both, simultaneously, with full awareness of the distinction between them.

In 1962, he attended Xia Yifeng's eightieth birthday qin gathering. The following year, Xia Yifeng died. The student-teacher relationship had lasted eleven years.

What Mei Yueqiang carried forward was therefore not one lineage but two — and he kept them separate with scholarly precision. In his published recordings and in his personal manuscript collection, the Yiyun Zhai scores, the pieces are divided clearly: Jinling school, Guangling school. Two streams, running parallel, never merged.

Mei Yueqiang's son, Mei Shijun, carries that same precision. I am Mei Shijun's first student.

The line from Xia Yifeng runs here, to this page, to the person writing these words.

A Taoist monk from Huai'an who worked in a Gospel Hall and played the qin on national radio. He had nothing. He had a qin. And somehow, eighty years later, that is enough.