To return is not to go back. It is to arrive — for the first time — at the place you were always meant to be.
In the autumn of 1956, a chance encounter changed everything.
The qin master Liu Shaochu of Yangzhou had come to Nanjing at the invitation of the Chinese Music Research Institute, to record for posterity. Mei Yuqiang, then already an accomplished player of the Jinling tradition, went along with his fellow students Zhang Zhengling and Deng Wenquan to pay their respects. What they heard stopped them in their tracks.
Liu Shaochu's playing was unlike anything they had encountered. The three students quietly resolved, among themselves, to find a way to keep him in Nanjing — to study with him properly, at length. Through Zhang Zhengling's considerable efforts, the Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Culture was persuaded to invite Liu to teach at the Nanjing Music Society, and later at the Nanjing Academy of Arts.
Liu stayed at Zhang's home in those early days. And so Mei Yuqiang came every day — morning, evening, and holiday alike — studying deep into the night, sometimes sleeping at the foot of his teacher's bed when exhaustion overtook him. Three years of this. And from those three years, Mei wrote later, he finally began to grasp the essence of the Guangling tradition.
The River That Holds All Streams
Guangling — the ancient name for Yangzhou — sits at the crossing point of China's great north-south waterways. This geography shaped its music. The Guangling tradition absorbed the austerity of the north and the elegance of the south, the directness of the Sichuan tradition and the refinement of the Jinling tradition, until it became something that could not be reduced to any single tradition.
Mei Yuqiang understood this not merely as a stylistic observation, but as a spiritual principle. To study the Guangling tradition was not to add another school's techniques to one's repertoire. It was to learn how to hold contradictions together — roundness and angularity, softness and strength, restraint and abandon — without forcing them to resolve.
Listening to Liu Shaochu's recordings, Mei noticed something: the same pieces he had played for years sounded different in his teacher's hands. More spacious. More at ease. The music had room to breathe.
This quality, Mei came to understand, was not a technique. It was a disposition — one that matched his own nature, which his students would later describe as open, unhurried, and impossible to force into any mold not his own.
Sixteen Characters
From a lifetime of listening, absorbing, and playing, Mei Yuqiang distilled his qin ideal into sixteen Chinese characters:
綺麗細膩，剛柔相濟，跌宕多變，音韻井茂。
Exquisite and refined. Strength and softness in balance. Dramatic and ever-changing. Tone and resonance in full bloom.
These words are sometimes quoted as a description of the Guangling tradition. But they are more accurately understood as Mei's personal artistic credo — the standard he held himself to, the horizon he spent his life moving toward.
He was also, all his life, a devoted listener of Peking opera. The old saying goes: "Silk is not like bamboo; bamboo is not like the human voice." The voice, in Chinese aesthetics, is the most direct. Mei's playing carried something of that directness — a quality his students called rou wei, the flavor of flesh and blood, of human warmth. The way a note entered and withdrew, the slight vocal quality in the sustain — these were the most personal signatures of his art, the things that made listeners feel, without quite knowing why, that someone was speaking to them.
The Return
Mei Yuqiang spent most of the last decade of his life in Yangzhou — the city of Liu Shaochu, the home of the Guangling tradition. He said, in his own words, that he had come to return to Guangling what he had received from his teacher's hands.
But what he gave back was not the same thing he had been given. It had passed through him — through the Jinling refinement of his early training, through the Zhejiang austerity he had absorbed along the way, through the Peking opera he had loved since youth, through three years of sleeping at his teacher's feet, through decades of solitary practice and quiet listening.
What he returned to Guangling was richer than what Guangling had given him.
His bond with the Guangling tradition, the writer concludes, was thus made complete — yuanman, the Chinese word for a fullness that is also a kind of perfection, a circle closed without remainder.
This article is an English adaptation based on the original Chinese essay by Shi Hong, from the memorial volume Mei Yuqiang: A Collection of Commemorative Writings.
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