Hong Kong, summer 2022. A box of white-cut chicken, a Tang dynasty qin, and an afternoon that connected three generations of masters.
That day, I did not eat lunch.
I had arrived in Hong Kong a few days earlier, stranded while waiting for a flight back to the mainland. The pandemic had made travel unpredictable, and I was stuck. But the delay gave me something unexpected: time — to seek out a man I had never met, whose teacher had been one of the greatest scholars of the twentieth century.
His name was Tang Jianyuan. His teacher was Rao Zongyi.
Before I knocked on his door, someone gave me a piece of advice: do not bring a gift. He will not accept it. But if you must bring something, bring white-cut chicken.
So before I found his apartment, I found the chicken. I was unfamiliar with Hong Kong's streets, so I left early, located a shop, and arrived at his door with the box in hand — and an empty stomach I intended to fill at lunch, after the visit.
The nameplate outside Professor Tang's studio: Tang's Qin Music Garden, 173 North Xiyangcai Street, 2/F.
Arriving at Professor Tang's door — white-cut chicken in hand.
I pressed the doorbell. Next to it, two handwritten notes were taped to the wall. The first read: If the doorbell does not ring, pull the hand bell on the right. The second: This is a double unit. Please wait eight to ten seconds for someone to walk from the far end. Thank you for your patience.
Not "please wait." Not "approximately." Eight to ten seconds. And a backup bell, in case the first one failed.
The note beside the doorbell. Eight to ten seconds. And a backup hand bell.
I waited. I counted. The door opened.
Professor Tang lived in two apartments knocked into one — an extraordinary luxury in Hong Kong, where space is measured in square feet and priced accordingly. But even two apartments were not enough. Books covered every surface. Ceramics filled every shelf. Guqin hung on walls and leaned against furniture. The kitchen was stacked with scrolls. The bathroom required careful navigation between lacquered boxes and wrapped parcels.
He was a man who had spent a lifetime collecting, and the collection had long since won.
Oracle bone script dictionaries, bronze inscription studies, a string of prayer beads. One shelf among many.
Guqin, tea ware, ink stones — and a Mickey Mouse doll. The collection had long since won.
He accepted the white-cut chicken with genuine pleasure and placed it in the refrigerator. Then he put on water for pu'er tea, and we sat down to talk.
That was just after one o'clock in the afternoon.
I had come with questions. Not polite questions — real ones, the kind that had been sitting unanswered for years.
One concerned a qin called Haiyue Qiucheng — "Autumn Clarity over the Sea and Moon" — a Ming dynasty instrument that had once belonged to Mei Yueqiang, my teacher's teacher, the tenth-generation master of the Jinling school and eleventh-generation master of the Guangling lineage. In the early 1990s, Mei had sold it. He used the money to purchase two small rooms in Yangzhou's Jiandao Lane — the space that would become the Mei Yueqiang Memorial Hall, a place where the tradition could be taught and preserved.
He had sold a qin to save the qin tradition.
I had always known this story. What I did not know was who had bought it.
Professor Tang made several phone calls. He came back with an answer: the buyer was Liu Chuhua, a Hong Kong collector, who has kept it carefully ever since.
Reading aloud from the Mei Yueqiang memorial volume — the passage about Haiyue Qiucheng — to the man who was there when it happened.
The man who sold the qin to preserve a tradition. The man who bought it and was transformed by it. Haiyue Qiucheng had passed between them, and both were the better for it.
Professor Tang had been present at the making of history I had only read about.
In the early 1990s, he had traveled repeatedly between Hong Kong and Nanjing, working with a recording engineer to document Mei Yueqiang's playing. The logistics were formidable — equipment, permissions, the particular difficulties of that era. But the recordings were made. They were eventually released by Hugo Productions in Hong Kong, under the titles Guangling Qin Yun and Jinling Qin Yun.
I had grown up listening to those recordings. I had also read Professor Tang's memorial essay about Mei Yueqiang in the collected tribute volume — and now I was sitting across from the author, hearing him speak of events that had taken place thirty-six years earlier. The man who had helped make those recordings possible was pouring me tea.
He also told me something about his own teacher, Rao Zongyi, that I have thought about many times since. When Tang Jianyuan studied qin with Rao as a young man, Rao did not teach him fingering. He did not teach him technique. He taught him aesthetics — how to listen, how to perceive, how to understand what a qin was for.
Fingering can be learned from notation. Aesthetics must be transmitted from person to person, across a table, over tea, across years.
In the late afternoon, Professor Tang suggested we go downstairs to eat. I had not mentioned my hunger — it would have been impolite — but six hours of pu'er tea on an empty stomach had begun to make itself known.
We walked to the restaurant. Only then did I remember: my health code was yellow. Professor Tang could go in. I could not dine indoors.
So we didn't eat at all. We went back upstairs. He made more tea. We kept talking.
He brought out a Tang dynasty qin — the Jihou Zhong, an instrument of extraordinary age and provenance. It had come from Taizhou — and so, as it happens, had I. He placed it before me and, without quite asking, made clear that he would like to hear me play.
The Jihou Zhong — a Tang dynasty guqin in Professor Tang's collection. It was on this instrument that I played Lao Meihua Sannong that afternoon.
I played Lao Meihua Sannong — the old version of "Three Variations on Plum Blossoms," as transmitted through the Mei school. When I finished, Professor Tang was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: The qin tradition of Mei Yueqiang has someone to carry it forward.
I did not know what to say. I still don't, entirely. There was pride in hearing those words, and there was weight. Chuán bù xí hū — have you truly practiced what was passed to you? That question does not go away. It only becomes more serious.
We talked on through the afternoon — about qin, about oracle bone script, about Nanyin, about ceramics, about the craft of making instruments, about how to appreciate old qin. Most of all we talked about qin, and about Mei Yueqiang, and about Xiao Mei. He told me that when he came to Nanjing in 1990 to make the recordings, my teacher — Mei Yueqiang's eldest son, Mei Shijun — was still a young man. Tang Jianyuan was seven or eight years his senior. He had called him Xiao Mei ever since…
With Professor Tang Jianyuan, Hong Kong, 2022.
At eight o'clock, I finally said that I should leave — aware that he had not eaten either, and that I was the reason.
Before I went, he asked me a favor. He had a book — his own work, Qin Fu, a substantial volume on the guqin tradition — that needed to reach his student An Baoyan in Shenzhen. The pandemic had made it impossible for him to travel there himself. The teaching center was waiting for it.
Would I carry it?
It weighed five or six jin. I said yes without hesitating.
I took a taxi back to the hotel. I was shaking. My blood sugar had long since bottomed out. I searched the room and found the leftover rice from that morning, cold in its container. I ate it standing up.
Then I slept — and did not wake for more than thirty hours.
When I finally came to, it was nearly noon on the third day. My flight back to the mainland was in two hours.
I packed Qin Fu carefully, got to the airport, and made the flight.
I have thought often about what passed between us that afternoon — not just the stories, not just the history, but the quality of attention that made it possible. A man who measures his own doorbell in increments of eight to ten seconds does not do anything carelessly. He gave me seven hours of his time, his knowledge, his tea, and finally his trust.
I carried his book to Shenzhen. I carry what he taught me still.
That afternoon in Hong Kong, something moved — quietly, the way qin music moves — from one pair of hands to another.
That is how it has always worked. That is how it will continue.
傳不習乎。
Have you truly practiced what was passed to you?
I am still working on the answer.
— William Xu
Seven String Qin
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