Master Zha loved collecting “scraps.”
The quotation marks matter.
He called his collected writings Soubo Ji (溲勃集). It is not a grand title. But in his preface he explained exactly why he chose it: he borrowed the image of a good physician from Han Yu’s Jin Xue Jie, one who gathers materials of every kind and keeps them ready for use.
Then he added three plain words in Chinese: “重资料也.” Materials matter.
Those words are the key to the book.
In Han Yu’s passage, the physician collects precious medicinal substances alongside humble ones: niu sou, ma bo, even the hide of a worn-out drum. Their uses cannot be judged by their appearance or price alone. A good physician knows not only the value of rare ingredients, but also when ordinary ones may be needed.
This was the idea Master Zha borrowed.
He was not declaring his materials worthless. He was refusing to discard them merely because they seemed small.
The preface to Soubo Ji. Photograph by the author.
A monumental book is likely to find someone willing to preserve it. But what about a passing observation, an old story, or a recollection not yet put into order? Everyone present knows it, so no one thinks it needs recording. It seems too minor to write down. When those who knew it are gone, there may be no one left to ask.
Some gaps in qin history began this way.
Master Zha understood the danger. In his preface he recalled twenty years of unusual things heard and seen. What he had managed to record amounted to less than a tenth. As his illness worsened, even that fraction became harder to preserve.
Having heard something is not the same as leaving it behind. Having witnessed it is not the same as saving it. A person’s memory does not automatically become the next generation’s knowledge.
Only when something is written down and kept can others carry it further.
He was doing this work under the pressure of illness. He had hoped to put himself at the service of the world, but his body would not cooperate. Every few days he had to withdraw from demanding affairs and rest at home. Unable to stop thinking, he returned to the old arts for occupation and relief.
His physician said this was good for his health. Master Zha asked a further question: could something benefit his health and also benefit the world?
His answer was to preserve materials, following the good physician who keeps even humble ingredients ready for use.
This was not a decorative slogan. It was a practical choice made by a sick man. When he could not be out in the world, he could put things in order. When he could not do everything himself, he could leave materials behind.
In the preface he asked, in effect: even if I die before I can use these things, who can say that, when a flourishing age seeks its cultural inheritance, they will not be treasured as national treasures?
It did not matter if he himself never had the chance to use them. Someone later might.
To me, this is the most moving part of Soubo Ji. He did not measure the value of preservation only by what his own research could accomplish, or by the length of his own life. He imagined people who would one day search for this culture, and asked whether anything would still be there for them to find.
Today’s “scraps” might be tomorrow’s treasures.
Yet Master Zha was not a man of modest words alone. In the same preface, discussing those who could sing and play, understand the older musical traditions, and both research and speak about them, he made a striking claim: “有之则余一人耳.” If there was such a person, he wrote, it was himself alone.
This was his own assessment, not a ranking we need to endorse. Nor need we soften its edge. Read the next sentence, and its purpose becomes clear:
“以是，余于收蓄之责无旁贷矣.”
For that reason, he could not pass the responsibility of collecting and preserving to someone else.
He was not saying: therefore, the glory belongs to me. He was saying: therefore, I cannot leave this task to others.
The title could be humble. The responsibility could not be set aside.
A second page photographed here records another aspect of that responsibility. In his September 25, 1961 preface to the privately printed Soubo Ji and its companion Bieji, he explained that growing circulation among friends had brought risks of misunderstanding and loss. He therefore paid to have the writings printed. The page records just twelve copies, distributed among teachers and friends, with one retained for himself.
The preface to the privately printed Soubo Ji and Bieji, dated September 25, 1961. Photograph by the author.
He also kept earlier drafts without correcting them into the shape of his later thinking. “人生百年总在今是昨非之中度过”: throughout a lifetime, what seems right today may reveal yesterday’s errors. He allowed readers to see that process rather than hiding it.
When we wrote about Zhang Ziqian’s Caoman Suoji, we encountered a related impulse. The books differ in form. Zhang’s journal preserves qin life through daily records; Master Zha explicitly declares the importance of materials and keeps them for future use. Neither title announces itself with monumental grandeur. Yet later readers can discover in them a qin world they never personally knew.
Qin history is not only a sequence of famous names, important handbooks, and decisive dates. It is also how people met, listened, taught, and carried an old art through ordinary life. When those details disappear, the larger history becomes thinner.
English-speaking readers might think of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives. Aubrey recorded personal recollections, conversations, habits, and details of people’s lives. Much of his work took the form of notes rather than finished biographies. Those apparently incidental records became valuable materials for understanding his seventeenth-century world.
Soubo Ji is not a Chinese Brief Lives. Their contents and forms are different. But Aubrey offers a bridge to Master Zha’s purpose: official works and major events alone cannot tell us everything about a vanished world. Details outside the grand narrative deserve to survive as well.
That is the point of soubo here. Not worthless waste, but materials whose importance may not yet be recognized. Their keeper cannot know every use a fragment might have. He can know that discarding it takes a possibility away from the future.
Writing this, I realize that this blog, too, is a kind of soubo.
A story about a teacher. The history of an old qin. The sound of a piece. A gathering of players. A journey made with an instrument beside me. We write these things down, one by one, and translate them into English so that readers in another language may encounter them.
Not every post is a great essay. Not everything announces its importance at once. But without a record, some things remain only in one person’s memory.
I would not place this blog on the same level as Master Zha’s work. Yet in his words about keeping materials ready for use, I recognize a direction for our own.
We need not wait for something to be declared important before we preserve it.
And this is not only for qin players. Everyone has things no one else can leave behind for them: something a parent said, a childhood lane, a small lesson from a teacher, someone who seemed ordinary at the time and can never be met again.
Write some of it on paper, too. The internet makes recording and sharing easy, but posting something is not the same as preserving it. Accounts can become inaccessible; pages can disappear. Paper is not eternal either. Still, a notebook on a shelf needs no password and no platform to remain in business. Someone who comes after us can simply open it.
It need not become a famous book. We need not wait until old age. Write a little of what you remember. Keep a few words you once heard.
We leave these things not only so that someone can study them. Sometimes it is enough to let another person know: someone lived here, heard these sounds, and cherished these people.
Master Zha left his soubo. We can leave our own small records.
They are the traces each of us leaves in the world.
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