Zhao Yunqing and the Jinling School
Mei Yueqiang had five teachers. The third was a woman.
Her name was Zhao Yunqing. In 1952, the same year he formally bowed to Xia Yifeng, Mei Yueqiang also became her student. She was fifty-four years old. He was twenty-three.
She had been playing the qin for decades.
In 1937, a journal called Jinyu Qin Kan — the Today's Qin Society Publication — compiled a directory of guqin players across China. Among the entries was a photograph. Two women in a plum grove: one standing, one seated cross-legged on a stone, a qin laid across her lap.
The caption read: “Playing until the plum blossoms filled the moon.”
The standing woman was Zhao Yunqing. The woman playing the qin — her identity was not given. For nearly eighty years, no one knew who she was.
Her name was Sun Jiquan, wife of the qin master Hu Yingtang. She and Zhao Yunqing had studied under the same teachers. They were colleagues, perhaps friends. The photograph caught them together in a quiet moment that history almost forgot.
A Name With Ambition in It
Zhao Yunqing was born in 1898 in Wu County, Suzhou — the heart of the old Jiangnan scholarly culture. Her given name was Zhao Jin; her courtesy name, Yunqing, was the name by which the qin world knew her.
The name was not chosen carelessly. Yun means cloud; qing means blue or green — but together, yunqing reverses to qingyun, a classical phrase for soaring ambition and a life lived above the dust of ordinary things. The History of the Southern Qi uses it: “The body dwells behind red gates, but the heart travels the rivers and lakes; the form enters the purple halls, but the will is in the blue clouds.” Wang Bo’s Prelude to the Pavilion of Prince Teng echoes it: “Though reduced to hardship, hold firmer still — never let the will in the blue clouds fall.”
She carried the name well.
The Qin
Zhao Yunqing studied first under Wu Jinyang, then under Xia Yifeng — the founding master of the New Jinling school. In the Jinyu Qin Kan directory, she registered her repertoire as “Qiu Hong, Yu Ge, and more than ten pieces.” In the column for school affiliation, she left it blank — perhaps because her training crossed lineages, or perhaps because she saw no need to be categorized.
Wang Shengxiang, visiting Nanjing in the early 1950s, wrote of her: “She has recently returned to the qin. Yi Gu Ren, Pu An Zhou, Liang Xiao Yin — all are now in her hands. Her finger strength is firm, her rhythm fluent. She is a worthy student of Xia Yifeng and Wu Jinyang, and she approaches the study of the Yushan school with genuine humility.”
She kept two named qin. The first, Chang Feng — Long Wind — was a cloud-harmony style instrument, large and resonant, its lacquer surface showing interleaved red and black, said to date from between the Tang and Five Dynasties. The second, Ming Zhu — Bright Pearl — was a smaller Zhongni style, its surface lacquered black with plum-blossom crack patterns, made by Zhang Chonghe in the Chongzhen period of the Ming dynasty. She named her studio the Shuang Qin Guan — the Hall of Two Qin — after them.
The Students She Left Behind
Zhao Yunqing taught three students whose names are now well known in the guqin world: Mei Yueqiang, Liu Zhengchun, and Gong Yi.
Mei Yueqiang formally bowed to her as a student in 1952 — the same year he also formally studied under Xia Yifeng. Liu Zhengchun, one of the great Nanjing qin scholars of the twentieth century, listed her among his five teachers. Gong Yi, in a 2011 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily, said simply: “When I was in Nanjing, I studied with Xia Yifeng, Liu Shaochun, Wang Shengxiang, and Zhao Yunqing.”
Liu Zhengchun’s manuscript collection opens with Gu Qin Yin — an old introductory piece. His note on it reads: “This piece was transmitted by Zhao Yunqing. Revisiting it in the early 1990s, I found it short in length but deep in meaning. In preparing this edition, I found it necessary to correct six places in the original score.”
The piece she taught is still being corrected, still being played.
An Elegy
Zhao Yunqing died in early 1960, or perhaps slightly before. The qin scholar Cha Fuxi wrote an elegy for her:
Thirty years on the qin stage, always in the cold —
waiting for the bright age, grateful at last for shelter.
But then the Xie song came too soon to take her,
and amid the sounds of Hu Jia I mourn the lady gone.
She was in her early sixties. Her husband Xu Zhisun outlived her by some years, then also died. Their two daughters, Xu Shishou and Xu Shiqiang, remain the last trace of the household.
The Hall of Two Qin is gone. The two instruments — Chang Feng and Ming Zhu — passed into other hands long ago.
What remains is a photograph: a plum grove, two women, a qin laid across a stone. And three students who carried what she gave them for the rest of their lives.
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