A Digression Worth Reading
There is a passage in the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West that has almost nothing to do with the story. In the ninth chapter, the author Wu Cheng'en introduces two minor characters — Zhang Shao, a fisherman, and Li Ding, a woodcutter — who meet in a tavern outside Chang'an, drink until pleasantly drunk, and then spend the walk home composing mediocre poetry at each other, debating whether mountains are more beautiful than rivers or rivers more beautiful than mountains.
The digression runs for over a thousand words. It goes nowhere. It proves nothing. And yet Shi Hong, writing about Master Mei Yueqiang's performance of the guqin piece Yú Qiáo Wèn Dá — The Fisherman and Woodcutter in Dialogue — suggests we read it anyway. Not as literature, but as a scene: two men, free from ambition, wandering home through the autumn air, arguing about beauty for no reason except that they can.
That, he says, is the world this music inhabits.
How "Fisherman and Woodcutter" Became a Symbol
The pairing of fisherman and woodcutter runs deep in Chinese literary culture — but its meaning has shifted over the centuries.
In Tang dynasty poetry, the two figures typically represented withdrawal: men who had left the world of courts and examinations behind, living simply at the margins of civilization. The connotation was largely passive — a retreat from ambition, not a critique of it.
It was not until the Northern Song dynasty that the symbol acquired sharper edges. The poet Zhang Sheng, writing in his Ci poem Lí Tíng Yàn, included the line: "How many dynasties have risen and fallen — all of it now just the idle talk of fishermen and woodcutters." Here, for the first time, the fisherman and woodcutter are not simply men who have stepped away from history. They are its observers — the ones who watch empires rise and crumble, and comment on it all with detached, unhurried clarity.
Shi Hong suspects Zhang Sheng invented this usage. What is certain is that the Yuan dynasty made it ubiquitous. When the Mongol rulers cut off most Han Chinese scholars from any path to official life, those scholars found themselves involuntarily outside the system — and from that position, they wrote. The fisherman and woodcutter became the default symbol of the intellectual in exile: not someone who chose to leave, but someone who was pushed out, and who turned that exclusion into a vantage point.
The guqin, with its long tradition of drawing on literary imagery, absorbed this symbol naturally. To play Yú Qiáo Wèn Dá was to inhabit that vantage point — to sing of mountains and rivers as a way of saying, quietly, what could not be said directly.
Two Versions, Two Worlds
The version of Yú Qiáo Wèn Dá most widely known today comes from the score Qin Xue Ru Men — Introduction to Qin Study — and was made famous by the great twentieth-century master Wu Jinglü. Wu's interpretation is, by any measure, brilliant: elegant, animated, full of what Shi Hong calls the quality of "jade trees in the wind" — graceful, buoyant, a pleasure to hear.
Mei Yueqiang's version is different. He identified it explicitly as belonging to the Zhe school — the Zhejiang lineage — a tradition known for its ancient simplicity and restraint. Where Wu's interpretation dazzles, Mei's settles. It is quieter, more spare, less immediately charming. But within that quietness, Shi Hong hears something else: a faint undercurrent of unease, a hint of something unresolved beneath the surface calm.
It is, he suggests, truer to what the symbol actually means. The fisherman and woodcutter were never simply happy. They were people who had been refused entry to the world they were born to inhabit — and who made their peace with that refusal, more or less.
After receiving the piece from Wang Jianhou, Mei Yueqiang's version was further shaped by two other masters: Xia Yifeng added his own imprint, and the great scholar-musician Cha Fuxi personally guided certain passages — infusing the piece's ancient austerity with a thread of living spontaneity.
A Winter Afternoon in 1990
Shi Hong heard Mei Yueqiang play Yú Qiáo Wèn Dá for the first time in the winter of 1990.
That year, the master held a guqin concert at the former residence of Li Xiangjun in Nanjing's Confucius Temple district. The Shanghai Conservatory's xiao flute master Dai Shuhong had been invited to perform as well. The following afternoon, the painter Dong Xinbin hosted an informal lunch at his home. After the meal, Mei and Dai — in high spirits — played the piece together as a dialogue between qin and xiao.
Shi Hong was sitting close by. But he had drunk two liang of baijiu, and the music reached him strangely — as if from a great distance, as if the sounds of qin and xiao were drifting toward him from the mountains and rivers painted on the wall.
More than a decade later, what remains of that afternoon is not a clear memory but a feeling: a faint, warm haze that time has washed pale but never quite erased.
What the Final Recording Reveals
Over the years, every time Shi Hong watched Mei Yueqiang play Yú Qiáo Wèn Dá, he was struck by the same sensation: the piece always sounded new. Familiar, yet never quite the same twice.
In the master's later years, something shifted. The playfulness gradually receded. In its place came a quality harder to name — a kind of distance, a lightness that was not quite detachment.
But listening again, in recent years, to Mei Yueqiang's final recordings, Shi Hong finds himself hearing something else entirely. Beneath the surface calm, the fisherman and woodcutter have not, after all, fully let go. There is something in the music — a murmuring quality, a sense of an old man turning memories over quietly — that suggests the shadow of ending had already entered the master's awareness, even if he never spoke of it.
Mei Yueqiang was, by temperament, a man of equanimity. But equanimity is not the same as indifference. He was, at his core, a man of feeling.
Did he ever truly forget what he had loved?
Next: One melody, three stories — how a single guqin piece came to carry the names of a musician, a poet, and a princess.
🎵 Watch: Fisherman and Woodcutter — Live at Yuyuan Garden — William Xu performing this piece live at the 4th Yuyuan Silk Society Yaji, April 11, 2026.
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