By Shi Hong
Around 1993, Master Mei settled permanently in Yangzhou. He sold the qin that had accompanied him for many years — the one named Haiyue Qiucheng ("Sea-Moon Autumn Clarity") — and used the proceeds to purchase two small rooms in Jiandao Lane off Dongguan Street.
The rooms were cramped, yet always full of life. As long as Master Mei was home, there was rarely a day without visitors. In the inner room, a tatami mat had been laid against the wall for out-of-town students to sleep on temporarily; the old man himself slept in the loft above. By the window facing the lane stood a qin table; the remaining space was just enough for a folding square table in the middle of the room, whose primary purpose was playing cards.
Mornings were relatively quiet — usually one or two students came to study the qin. As noon approached, idle friends would begin to arrive, sometimes bringing cooked dishes and beer from the end of the lane. What served as a dining room was already reduced by a third, taken up by the kitchen and bathroom. With a refrigerator beside the door and the dining table pushed to the center, eight people would sit crowded on all four sides, each with their back against the wall, with no room left even to pass through. Master Mei ate with complete concentration. He had a saying of his own for this: "Savoring, not craving." Each piece of fish or meat he placed in his mouth, he would close his eyes and chew slowly. He said that only by shutting out the distractions of eye and ear could one truly taste the flavor. As for the students and young people around him — the clinking of cups, the shouting of drinking games — he heard none of it. Master Mei had no interest in alcohol.
What is curious is that, though Master Mei never touched a drop of wine, the two qin pieces he played on the subject of drinking were both remarkably fine.
After settling in Yangzhou, Master Mei was occasionally invited by schools to give lectures. On such occasions, he loved to use Jiuguang ("Wine Madness") as his example, playing as he spoke. His Jiuguang did not begin with the usual sense of intoxication, nor did it carry any suggestion of drowning sorrows in drink. Instead, in just over two minutes, it painted a vivid and delightful scene of life: from the decorous seating at the start, to the mutual toasting and rising warmth of the gathering, then the boisterous drinking games, then those who could hold no more stumbling in their steps, being helped home, until finally only the soft sound of breathing remained. It could truly be seen as a lively and harmonious "Night Banquet at Yiyunzhai."
After a brief introduction, the piece enters a gently swaying tipsy motion. This sway becomes the natural momentum of the music, yet never forces it forward — the listener feels that one could pause and linger at any note, that every note is in motion yet maintains at every point an elastic balance, like walking a tightrope. In the two or three phrases before "The Immortal Exhales Wine Breath," there is a brief moment of imbalance — what Master Mei described as the stumbling cross-step of someone rising suddenly from their seat. When teaching in schools, he would often actually stand up and demonstrate that drunken gait.
What the piece embodies is Master Mei's everyday appreciation of the pleasures of life. The old man was by nature optimistic; in his Jiuguang, there is only a smile — no grievance. A friend who once heard Master Mei's recording of Jiuguang said: "It feels like drinking wine made of joy." I could not agree more.
Master Mei's Jiuguang is a mimetic portrait in miniature. His Zuiyu Changwan ("The Drunken Fisherman Sings at Dusk"), by contrast, is a song that transmits the heart itself.
In the sound of the qin, the old man has entered a realm entirely free of constraint. The music begins at ease, moves at will — phrase following phrase, note sending note — dwelling nowhere, going nowhere, with not the slightest hesitation from beginning to end. There is no deliberately constructed climax, yet from start to finish a vast and distant spirit runs through it all, never wearying the ear. A simple theme, repeated through simple variations for more than half the piece's length, yet never feels the least bit redundant. In his later years especially, he reduced melodic variation further and further, arriving in that spare and flowing simplicity at a state of complete harmony between man and heaven.
In Master Mei's earlier recordings of Zuiyu, there is a peculiar interval relationship: the major second between the principal tones of the melody reaches approximately 230 cents — far wider than the equivalent interval in any of the common tuning systems. After repeated listening, the only words that come to mind are "ancient spirit to the bone." Yet curiously, listening again to his later recordings, one finds that at some point the tuning had undergone a profound change. That extraordinarily wide major second has disappeared; in its place, a considerable portion of the melodic skeleton now approaches pure intonation. The result is something that belongs to no era — one cannot tell where it comes from, nor where it is going. It has become, if anything, even more seamlessly whole.
I once asked Master Mei: whose transmission was this Zuiyu from? The old man said: "Forgotten." This made it stranger still. No wonder Master Mei could paint drunkenness through the qin with such penetrating truth — for the truly great intoxication that transcends the mundane requires no wine at all.
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