A female qin player who carried two traditions in her hands
In the history of the modern guqin, some musicians remain visible through books, recordings, and long biographies. Others survive in a few lines of archival record, a handful of recordings, and a photograph in which their place in the tradition can still be felt.
Xü Tonghua (胥桐华, 1905–1969) belongs to the second kind.
Her story is brief in the surviving sources, but the musical path it describes is unusually important. She first learned the qin from the Sichuan tradition. After moving to Yangzhou, she studied with the Guangling qin master Hu Zifu. Her playing therefore stood between two worlds: the Pan-Sichuan tradition and the Guangling tradition.
A Daughter of a Boat People Family
Xü Tonghua was born in 1905. Her ancestral home was Danyang, Jiangsu, and she came from a family of boat people.
Her first teacher was an elderly Mr. Zheng from Sichuan. His full name has not been preserved in the available record. What remains clear is that her earliest qin education came through the Sichuan tradition, a tradition known for its strong regional character and distinctive musical voice.
Later, after moving to Yangzhou, Xü continued her studies with Hu Zifu (胡滋甫), a qin master of the Guangling School. She did not abandon one tradition for another. She carried both with her.
This is why Xü Tonghua matters in the history of Mei Yueqiang's teachers. Her place in his lineage was not simply that of a player who transmitted a few pieces. She represented a meeting of musical worlds: the Pan-Sichuan tradition she first received, and the Guangling tradition she encountered in Yangzhou.
In the Room with Hu Zifu
This photograph preserves something that a lineage chart cannot. Hu Zifu is seated at the qin. Liu Shaochun and Xü Tonghua stand nearby, watching.
It is a small scene, but it carries an entire network of transmission within it. Hu Zifu represents the Guangling tradition of Yangzhou. Liu Shaochun would later become one of the decisive Guangling teachers in Nanjing. Xü Tonghua stands beside them as both student and transmitter, a musician whose own path had begun in the Sichuan tradition.
Music is often described as a line from teacher to student. In real life, it is also a room: people sitting, listening, watching one another's hands, and carrying what they have heard into the next part of their lives.
The 1956 Recordings
In the autumn of 1956, Mei Yueqiang went with his senior fellow disciple Zhang Zhengyin and his second fellow disciple Deng Wenquan to a small hotel in Nanjing. There they met Liu Shaochun and Xü Tonghua, who had come from Yangzhou to Nanjing to make their recordings. The three young musicians were overwhelmed by the two players' artistry and decided to become their students. From that encounter began Mei Yueqiang's study of the Guangling tradition.
At the invitation of Zha Fuxi, Xü Tonghua also took part in the national survey and recording of qin players. The project was one of the most important efforts of the twentieth century to preserve the voices of living qin musicians before they disappeared.
Eight pieces were recorded from her playing:
- Guqin Yin
- The Phoenix Seeks Its Mate
- Confucius Studies the Book of Changes
- Ploughing at Xin and Fishing at Wei
- Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank
- The Drunken Fisherman Sings at Dusk
- Fisherman and Woodcutter Ask Each Other
- Puan Mantra
One more piece belongs to the story of her transmission to Mei Yueqiang: Autumn Night Reading the Book of Changes (Qiūyè Dú Yì) was taught by Xü Tonghua to Mei. It became one of the pieces through which her distinctive strand of learning continued into the next generation.
Listen: Mei Yueqiang plays Autumn Night Reading the Book of Changes, a piece transmitted to him by Xü Tonghua.
She could also perform Three Variations on the Plum Blossom Theme and Three Variations on the Yang Pass Theme, among other pieces. The surviving record describes her as a player who could perform more than ten famous qin pieces.
Zha Fuxi once praised her performance of Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank with four words: “It has developed a style of its own.”
That is a restrained form of praise, but a serious one. He was not merely saying that she played accurately, or that she had learned the piece well. He was recognizing that something in her performance had become hers.
A Song Dynasty Qin in the Family
Xü Tonghua also possessed a Song-dynasty qin that had been passed down through her family.
We do not yet know the instrument's name, its precise history, or how it sounded beneath her hands. But even this brief record changes the picture. Xü was not only a performer moving between teachers. She belonged to a family that kept an old instrument, and she carried that material inheritance into the modern qin world.
A qin is never only an object. It is a history of wood, lacquer, hands, rooms, and time. When an old qin passes through a family, it carries more than its age. It carries the family's decision not to let a voice disappear.
The Later Years in Yangzhou
Between 1961 and 1963, Xü Tonghua frequently performed qin pieces at reception concerts hosted by the Yangzhou municipal government.
By then, the traditions she had received were no longer separate names in a lineage chart. They had become part of her own playing: Sichuan learned in her youth, Guangling learned in Yangzhou, and a personal style formed through decades of listening and practice.
She died in 1969.
What remains of her public record is small: a portrait, a photograph beside Hu Zifu and Liu Shaochun, eight recorded pieces, the memory of a Song-dynasty qin, and Zha Fuxi's judgment that her Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank had become her own.
But a tradition is not measured only by the amount of paper left behind.
Sometimes a musician's place in history survives in the distance between two schools — in the space where one tradition enters another, and something new begins to sound.
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