Tasting Mei is a series of essays on the guqin tradition as remembered through the life and teaching of Master Mei Yuqiang. This is the tenth installment.
In April 2025, William traveled to Jilusai — the Han dynasty frontier fortress in Bayannur, Inner Mongolia, through which Wang Zhaojun passed into exile two thousand years ago. He played Qiusai Yin there, in tribute to those who came before. The photograph and video below were taken at the site.
Three Names for One Piece
In the long history of the guqin repertoire, it is not unusual for a single melody to travel under different names. But the piece known today as Qiusai Yin — the Lament Beyond the Autumn Frontier — carries this tendency to a remarkable extreme. Over the centuries, it has borne three entirely different titles, each attached to a different historical figure, each belonging to a different gender and station in life.
The first name is Shuixian Cao — the Song of the Water Immortal. Its subject is Boya, the legendary qin master, and the story behind it is told in the Yuefu Guti Yaojie: Boya studied the qin under Master Cheng Lian for three years and achieved great technical skill, yet something essential was still missing — a quality of spiritual concentration, of inner stillness. His teacher told him: "My own master, Zi Chun, lives on an island in the sea. He alone can move a man's innermost nature." He took Boya by boat to the island of Penglai, left him there, and rowed away, saying he would return with his teacher. Days passed. No one came. Boya stood alone on the shore, gazing out at the empty sea. He heard only the sound of waves breaking against the rocks, the wind moving through the mountain forests, and the cries of birds. Overcome, he said aloud: "My teacher is moving my nature after all." He took up his qin and played. When the melody ended, Cheng Lian returned — and Boya had become the greatest player in the world.
The second name is Saoshou Wen Tian — Scratching One's Head, Questioning Heaven. Here the subject shifts entirely: the figure is now Qu Yuan, the poet-statesman of the Warring States period, whose great work Tian Wen — Questions to Heaven — addressed a series of unanswerable cosmological riddles to the sky. But the piece bearing this title is not really about Tian Wen itself. It is about Qu Yuan the man — his thwarted ambitions, his exile, his grief at being misunderstood by those in power.
The third name — Qiusai Yin, the Lament Beyond the Autumn Frontier — belongs to Wang Zhaojun, the Han dynasty court lady who was sent as a bride to the chieftain of the northern steppes. Her story has been told and retold across two thousand years: a woman of beauty and talent, passed over at court through the malice of others, sent far beyond the borders of civilization to a land of wind and grass and unfamiliar skies.
Three Figures, One Loneliness
At first glance, these three figures seem to have little in common. Boya is a musician; Qu Yuan is a statesman and poet; Wang Zhaojun is a woman of the imperial court. Their circumstances are entirely different. And yet the melody that carries all three names is the same.
This is not a coincidence. It is a statement.
The Li Sao — Qu Yuan's other great work — contains the line: "The women of the court, jealous of my beauty, spread slanders and called me wanton." The parallel with Wang Zhaojun's fate is unmistakable: both were undone by the envy of those around them, both suffered the particular injustice of being misrepresented to those who held power over their lives. As for Boya, abandoned on his island — though he ultimately benefited from the experience — the moment of abandonment itself, standing alone on a desolate shore with no prospect of return, is a loneliness that speaks across the centuries to anyone who has ever felt cast aside.
What the three names share, beneath their surface differences, is a single emotional truth: the experience of being alone with one's gifts in a world that does not know what to do with them.
The Chinese Ear
The fact that one melody can carry three such different stories is itself a kind of cultural testimony. It reflects something deep in the Chinese musical sensibility: the understanding that music does not illustrate — it resonates. A great melody does not depict a specific scene or tell a specific story. It creates a space in which many stories can live.
The philosopher Ji Kang put it this way: "The effect of harmonious sound on the human heart is like the effect of fermented wine on human nature. Wine is made of sweet and bitter, but the drunk man's response is joy or anger — his joy and anger arise from within himself, not from the wine. To say that sound has sadness or joy is like saying that wine has the capacity for joy or anger."
True resonance, in other words, comes not from the surface imagery of a piece but from the faintest trembling in the deepest part of the listener's own heart. The music does not tell you what to feel. It finds what is already there.
This is why Qiusai Yin can be Boya's desolation, Qu Yuan's indignation, and Wang Zhaojun's grief — all at once, and none of them exclusively.
Master Mei's Version
Among the many recordings of Qiusai Yin in the guqin tradition, Master Mei's is distinctive. In temperament, it is what one might call relatively "worldly" — the emotional expression is direct and concentrated, without the studied restraint that some listeners associate with the highest refinement of the art. There are those with more "elegant ears" who might find it too unguarded. But listening to it, one feels something that bypasses the usual filters entirely: a quality of directness, of emotional truth, that the heart cannot evade.
This is because Master Mei had long since stopped caring about the convention of "restrained expression." His playing is a kind of self-address — a private monologue that happens to be audible. Whether it is the quiet murmuring of a man lost in sorrow, or the sudden release of feeling like a long song thrown into the wind, every ornament, every vibrato, every sigh and pause pulls at the listener's nerves. It is very difficult not to be moved.
Listening deeply to Master Mei's Qiusai Yin, one often forgets the beautiful woman with her pipa, riding sadly beyond the frontier. Instead, one finds oneself sinking into a feeling that might be described as: who is there to hear when the string breaks? And in his later recordings especially, the playing grows lonelier still — until, in the end, one can no longer say with certainty whether the old master is playing Qiusai Yin, or Shuixian Cao, or something that has no name at all.
A note on transmission: Master Mei wrote in his essay "An Outline of the Guangling School's Performance Style" that Xu Qi compiled the most influential Guangling score, the Wuzhizhai Qinpu, which collected thirty-three pieces — twenty-one from the Chengjiantang Qinpu, and twelve from the Jinling, Wu, and Sichuan schools. Among those pieces were works such as Mozi Beisi, Puan Zhou, and Qiusai Yin, which had become canonical pieces of the Guangling tradition. The Wuzhizhai Qinpu's entry for Qiusai Yin does indeed note its origin as "Jinling school." More than two hundred years later, Master Mei received this same piece from his teacher Xia Yifeng — placing it squarely in the Jinling lineage rather than the Guangling. And yet in Master Mei's actual playing, the piece breathes with an unmistakably Guangling spirit. This historical coincidence is not only interesting. It is, in its quiet way, profound.
Originally written in Chinese by Shi Hong. Translated and adapted by William Xu.
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