If you follow the Guangling tradition back from my own teacher, you arrive fairly quickly at a man who never held an important post, never grew rich, and never left Yangzhou. He ran a small private school to pay for food. His name was Sun Shaotao, and without him the Guangling school as we know it would probably not have survived the twentieth century.
A family that already had the qin
Sun Shaotao was born in Yangzhou in 1879 and lived at number 6, Zhang Huizi Lane. He came from a family of qin players — his father, Sun Tansheng, was a well-known Guangling master — so the instrument was in the house before he could reach it. He was a bright, studious child, and the education took: classical prose, calligraphy, the chanting of poetry, and Kunqu opera, which he loved to sing. He enjoyed looking at flowers. He graduated from the provincial teachers' college at Rugao.
In his early twenties he began moving in the circle of the Yangzhou qin players Xie Shiqin and Ding Yutian, and spent several more years in close study of the instrument. What he came away with was the complete Guangling transmission, and by common account no one of his generation played it better.
Poor, and unwavering
Work was hard to find. He set up a private school and taught children for a living, and the household stayed poor. None of that touched the qin. The old account of his life uses a phrase I like very much: he was addicted to it. Morning and evening he practiced, and he never once broke the habit — not for poverty, not for anything.
In 1926, with his friends Hu Zifu, Wang Fanggu, Xia Youbai and others, he founded the Guangling Qin Society. Because he was the finest player among them, the others simply made him president. He ran the society for more than twenty years, and at its height it had over fifty members.
Guangling Qin Society gathering at Meihua Ling, beside the Shi Gong Shrine, 1936. Back row, from left: Liu Shaochun, Zhang Boru, Sun Shaotao, Zhu Jingwu, Qiu Miaozhi.
Hand on hand
He taught patiently, drawing students out rather than drilling them. He also worked out a refined method of changxian — singing the melody of a piece aloud, with the voice standing in for the strings, so that the hands would have something to remember it by.
The sentence in his biography that I cannot get past is this one: he treated his students as his own children, and with every piece he taught, he demonstrated it over and over, took it apart in detail, and put his hand on the student's hand for every single yin and every single nao — the small vibrato and the wider rocking vibrato, the ornaments that are the whole character of the qin and cannot be written down. He would not stop until the thing had passed directly across.
That is the entire mechanism of this tradition, described in one line. Nothing about the qin travels through paper alone. A hand finds the note, and another hand is on top of it.
The great gathering
When the society was founded, Sun presided over a large Guangling qin assembly. Players from other schools heard about it and came from all over; among the guests were the famous qin figures Zha Fuxi and Peng Shouqing.
He had planned it carefully. He asked each member of the society to play one piece he was proud of, and then took the weight of the evening on himself, playing several pieces in a row. The room, by the old account, was on its feet. Nothing like it had been seen before.
What he handed on
He trained a great many players. Three names carried the tradition forward: Zhang Ziqian, later president of the Jinyu Qin Society in Shanghai and one of the most celebrated Guangling masters of the century, who died in 1991; Liu Shaochun of Yangzhou, one of the tenth-generation inheritors of the school, who died in 1971; and Zhai Xiaobo, the student who excelled at changxian, who died in 1988.
Sun Shaotao died in 1949. He left no fortune and no official record worth mentioning. What he left was a society, a method, and a line of players through whom the Guangling school is now heard well beyond China.
A schoolmaster in a back lane in Yangzhou, too poor to stop teaching children, practiced every morning and every evening for fifty years and put his hand on other hands. That is how a tradition gets across a century.
The biographical account followed here is Mei Yueqiang's essay “Sun Shaotao, President of the Guangling Qin Society.” Mei Yueqiang was my own teacher's father, and Liu Shaochun was his teacher — which makes Sun Shaotao, in the plain arithmetic of transmission, the teacher of my teacher's teacher's teacher.
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