In the photograph that opens this story, one man stands out before you can read a single name. It is a gathering of the Guangling Qin Society in Yangzhou, printed in a Shanghai weekly in 1935. Everyone else — a dozen qin players and their families — wears a long gown. One man wears a Western suit, a tie, and round-framed glasses. His name was Gao Zhiping. He founded the Guangling Qin Society, served as its first president, was written about in the newspapers of his day, and then, for reasons no one has fully explained, dropped out of the history of the school he helped to build.
The gathering in the Xuyuan garden on Shou West Lake, March 1935, welcoming the visiting masters Peng Zhiqing and Zha Fuxi, as printed in a Shanghai weekly that year. The original caption notes that the picture was taken by Zhang Ziqian. Gao Zhiping stands in the group — the man in the Western suit.
A music teacher in the new style
Gao Zhiping was born in 1905, a generation younger than Sun Shaotao, the Guangling master under whom he would eventually study. In the early 1930s he was the music teacher at the private Zhengyi School in Yangzhou — a product of the new-style education spreading through China in those decades, teaching in a modern school, at home with newspapers, radio, and Western instruments.
When he began organizing a qin society at his school in the spring of 1934, the local paper introduced him to its readers in a sentence that tells you exactly who he was: a contemporary musician, the paper wrote, who had gone deep into the new music, and who had also gone very deep into the ancient music. Not one or the other. Both.
A society, with rules
On May 28, 1934, the Guangling Qin Society held its third regular meeting at the Zhengyi School. The members adopted a charter of ten articles and elected the man who had initiated the whole undertaking — Gao Zhiping — as president, to run the society's affairs. The charter is a wonderful document to sit with. Research membership was open to anyone of upright character who owned a seven-stringed qin and would keep the rules, alongside sponsoring members and corresponding members for those who lived in other provinces. There were no membership dues; special expenses were shared. The society held a members' concert on the last Sunday afternoon of every month, and a business meeting every month.
The concerts happened, and the papers kept count. In June 1934 the society gave its fifth concert in the Xuyuan garden: more than twenty players, several hundred visitors, sixteen pieces played from the middle of the afternoon until eight in the evening. At that concert, more than twenty players arrived carrying three qins between them — in those years a single instrument was that hard to come by. In November, at the society's tenth concert, with over a hundred visitors from other places, Gao stood up and explained what the society was for: the seven-stringed qin, he said, was the ancestor of China's ritual music, and that was why it was precious, and that was why they had organized themselves around it.
By March 1935 the society was preparing the first anniversary of its founding — which fixes that founding, by the papers' own arithmetic, in the spring of 1934.
The busiest year
March 1935 was the society's brightest month. It sent Gao and three members to play at a provincial music festival. And it welcomed visitors: the Shanghai masters Peng Zhiqing and Zha Fuxi came to Yangzhou to see the society for themselves, and the members — Gao hosting, as president — welcomed them with a full day of playing in the Xuyuan garden and a photograph to remember it by.
The papers followed him even offstage. That June, a Yangzhou paper reported that Gao now held a post at the Examination Yuan in Nanjing — the national government's examination office — but was still running the society's affairs, traveling back to preside over the monthly meetings, and playing himself: Mo Zi Bei Si and Liang Xiao Yin. The next month, a Nanjing paper announced a radio broadcast of Gao playing the qin on the air, under a headline that still reads like a whole review: “Gao Zhiping plays the qin over the airwaves — every note desolate, every sound a lament.”
The book about the saw
And then there is the detail that always stops me. In 1936, the Kaiming Bookstore in Shanghai published a book by Gao Zhiping: a practical method for playing the musical saw — the Western novelty instrument, a woodworker's saw drawn with a bow, the thing variety performers were doing on stages in those years. The first president of the Guangling Qin Society, the man who told a room of qin players that the seven-stringed qin was the ancestor of ritual music, wrote a how-to manual for the saw.
I love this man precisely here. The old argument about the qin is that it belongs to the ancients, that you must approach it in a long gown and in the manner of a hundred years ago. Gao Zhiping is the standing answer to that. He taught at a modern school, worked in a government office, went on the radio, and wrote a book about the musical saw — and in the same years he founded and ran a society for the seven-stringed qin and played it with every note desolate. The tradition does not need you to dress like its ancestors. It needs your hands.
The war, and the forgetting
In 1937 the war came. The Examination Yuan moved west to Chongqing, and Gao went with it. The society's affairs lapsed, and the Yangzhou that had crowded into a shrine to listen fell into the years of occupation and scattering I wrote about in Sun Shaotao's story. When Gao came back to Yangzhou in the winter of 1945 and met Zhang Ziqian, the diary line is hard to read: Gao, the master's last student, had not played for nearly ten years. He tried the Ping Sha Luo Yan — a piece every Guangling player grows up with — and found he had forgotten most of it. After the war he settled in Shanghai, and there the record runs out.
Why did no one remember?
Here is the question the whole story sits under. The newspapers announced his presidency. Dozens of society members watched him run the society for two years. He stood in front of hundreds of visitors and explained the qin. It was public, witnessed, printed — and yet today, when the history of the Guangling school is written, his name is nearly absent. The older accounts name Sun Shaotao as the society's founder-president, and Gao Zhiping, the man who convened the first meetings and signed the charter as its initiator, disappears between one paragraph and the next. This is not a mistake that only happened long ago: most accounts written in Chinese today still give the society to Sun Shaotao, and the society's own centenary, in 2012, was celebrated on the old dating.
I don't have a full answer, and I won't invent one. Part of it is the war, which scattered everyone and everything. Part of it is that he left no school, no recordings, and no lineage of his own — only one book, about the saw. And part of it, I suspect, is the way fame works on a lineage. Sun Shaotao taught Zhang Ziqian and Liu Shaochun, and those two students became famous — and if the students were that good, the teacher must have been greater still, which makes the story that carries his name sound the most credible. Sun was, after all, the master whom the whole society, Gao included, looked up to. But founding a society is not a qin contest. It is done by whoever calls the first meeting, drafts the charter, and presides month after month. The newspapers did not record who played best. They recorded who ran the society.
Whatever the reason, this article is here because the newspapers kept their record: a man in a suit, standing in front of his society, asking an audience to hear the oldest music in the room.
The newspaper records and the photographs reproduced here come from a recent scholarly study of the founding and early years of the Guangling Qin Society; the founding year given here, 1934, follows that study and the 1930s papers it collects. Gao Zhiping studied under Sun Shaotao, his last student by Zhang Ziqian's account, which makes him, in the plain arithmetic of transmission, a fellow student of Liu Shaochun in the line that leads to my own teacher.
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