Sometimes history turns on a meeting that almost did not happen.
In the early autumn of 1956, two Yangzhou qin players, Liu Shaochun and Xü Tonghua, came to Nanjing at the invitation of the qin interview team from the Music Research Institute of the Academy of Arts under the Ministry of Culture. The national survey was seeking qin players whose music could be recorded and preserved.
Mei Yueqiang went to visit them at an ordinary hotel near Daxinggong with his senior fellow student Zhang Zhengyin and his second senior fellow student Deng Wenquan. Among qin players, such a meeting was naturally an occasion to make friends through the instrument. They listened to the two older musicians play.
What they heard left them astonished.
Mei later described Liu Shaochun’s playing as possessing extraordinary command, a quiet and settled tone, and a natural capacity for drama and change. The three young men, he admitted, felt like frogs at the bottom of a well. Only after hearing a true master did they understand how small their own patch of sky had been.
After that visit, Zhang, Deng, and Mei privately decided that they had to find a way to keep Liu Shaochun in Nanjing so that they could study with him for the long term. Through Zhang Zhengyin’s persistent efforts, and with strong support from the Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Culture, Liu was invited to teach at the Nanjing Music Society. He was later appointed to teach at the Nanjing University of the Arts.
That decision changed more than Liu’s location. It changed the future of Guangling qin music.
Zhang Zhengyin came from a prosperous family and lived in a spacious home. When Liu first arrived in Nanjing, he stayed at Zhang’s house. Mei Yueqiang began going there every day. He had already studied the qin for twelve years under four teachers, but he knew almost nothing of the finger techniques and style of the Guangling tradition.
He was young and eager to learn. By day he worked. Every evening and on holidays, he went to study with Liu until late at night. When exhaustion overcame him, he slept in the same bed as his teacher, their feet touching. This continued for more than three years.
Mei later wrote:
“By day I worked. Every evening and on holidays, I went to study qin with my teacher until late at night. When I became exhausted, I would sleep in the same bed with my teacher, our feet touching. This continued for more than three years. Under my teacher’s careful instruction, I finally began to understand something of the Guangling art.”
The place became known simply as “San Liu Jiu”—Number 9, Liuheli, on Santiao Lane. In that small home, the lights stayed on day and night. The transmission of a tradition did not take place in an abstract classroom. It happened after work, late at night, in the space between fatigue and sleep.
Liu was gentle and approachable. He did not speak often, but when he did, his words carried weight. He placed particular importance on basic training. For Mei, this meant learning things he had never encountered before: the balanced use of square and round movements, the timing of yin, rou, zhuo, and zhu, the range and philosophical application of dramatic movement, and the natural handling of light and heavy, slow and fast.
Before Liu would teach him Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme, he set a condition. Mei had to master the long suo passage. He would not begin the piece until Mei could play it thirty times in succession without a mistake.
Mei went home and practiced through the night. He slept for only two hours before dawn, then continued practicing through the following day. That evening, Liu looked at him with disbelief.
“Have you really mastered it? How did you practice?”
Mei told him what he had done. Liu asked him to play. He counted: one, two, three...
When he reached thirty, Liu smiled and said in the Yangzhou dialect:
“Goodness! That is no small achievement. You kept your word. I will teach you.”
The lesson was not simply about endurance. Liu wanted the right hand to become reliable before the student entered the expressive world of the piece. Technique had to become secure enough that it would no longer interfere with feeling.
When Mei asked Liu to teach him Qiao Ge, the master asked a different question:
“Have you studied martial arts?”
Mei said that he had practiced martial arts as a child and had also practiced standing meditation. He demonstrated the movements for Liu by the riverside. Liu was pleased.
“Good. I can teach you.”
Liu practiced martial arts himself. When Mei shared a bed with him while studying, he would sometimes practice his internal exercises before sleep. Mei remembered seeing his body give a sudden shiver, while the joints in his body cracked one after another.
Only after learning Qiao Ge did Mei understand why Liu had asked about standing and martial arts. He recalled that Liu’s playing could be like wind in the palm and lightning in the finger, slow as clouds flowing over water, with the ability to gather and release. The magnificent power of Liu’s Qiao Ge was not accidental. It came from the union of bodily discipline, breath, and musical thought.
The body, the mind, and the hand had to become one.
Liu also taught that qin pieces were not good or bad in terms of size. They were only long or short. Every piece had its own feeling. A player had to know the fingering, but also understand the emotional character and meaning of the piece. Different music required different force, speed, and feeling. One could not play every piece in the same manner.
This was the larger lesson hidden inside the thirty repetitions and the standing practice. Liu was not training Mei to reproduce a set of movements. He was teaching him how to make technique answer to the nature of each piece.
The encounter had another consequence. Because Liu was found in time and persuaded to remain in Nanjing, he was able to participate in the national recording project. His surviving recordings preserved some of the most important sounds of the Guangling tradition. What might otherwise have remained a private sound in a small circle entered the permanent memory of Chinese music.
A recording preserves sound. A teacher preserves the conditions in which sound can continue.
Without Zhang Zhengyin’s efforts, Liu might have returned to Yangzhou after the recording work. Mei might never have studied with him night after night. The national archive might still have preserved some of Liu’s music, but the living transmission of his Guangling technique and artistic spirit would have taken a different path.
We should be careful with such counterfactuals. History cannot prove what would have happened. But it can show us how close a tradition sometimes comes to being interrupted.
In the early autumn of 1956, three young qin players heard a master in an ordinary hotel near Nanjing’s Daxinggong. One of them had the connections and persistence to keep him in the city. Another was ready to spend three years studying through the night. The result was not merely a recording project or a teaching appointment. It was the opening of a transmission line.
The frog at the bottom of the well had finally found a larger sky. And the sky, this time, was not an idea. It was a teacher who had been found just in time.
Based on Mei Yueqiang’s memoir “Reminiscences of Two or Three Episodes in Studying with Mr. Liu Shaochun,” written in Yangzhou in August 2001.
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