On June 10, 1945, Zha Fuxi recorded the guqin at the Recording Laboratory of the Library of Congress. Eighty-one years later, its catalog still records that day.
That spring, he had traveled to the United States as deputy general manager of the Central Air Transport Corporation, joining a Chinese delegation to study civil aviation. He also brought a Song-dynasty qin named Hanquan, or “Cold Spring.”
Hanquan (“Cold Spring”), the Song-dynasty qin that accompanied Zha Fuxi on his American journey. Back view at left; playing surface at right.
Alongside his official duties, another journey unfolded: a journey with the qin.
At institutions including Pomona College and the University of California, Berkeley, he performed and spoke about this ancient Chinese instrument. The guqin was far from universally familiar even in China. For many American listeners, it offered an encounter with something new.
Unfamiliarity need not prevent listening. One could hear the music before knowing its history, its notation, or the stories behind its titles. There was no need for an immediate revelation. Curiosity was enough for a beginning.
There were reunions, too. In Chicago, Zha visited Chen Mengjia and Zhao Luorui, close friends from wartime Kunming. Zhao, a scholar and translator of English-language literature, had studied the qin with him and practiced on Hanquan. Invited to play for friends in Chicago, he asked her to join the performance. An old musical friendship continued on American soil.
A page from Zha Fuxi’s correspondence with Chen Mengjia. The date of this page has not been established.
Another friend, the linguist Yuen Ren Chao, asked Zha to record Xiao Xiang Shui Yun at his home. The qin sounded not only in institutions but also among friends.
The Library of Congress recordings gave this journey a more enduring trace. Accounts of the visit list pieces including Xiao Xiang Shui Yun, Pu An Zhou, Mei Hua San Nong, Yi Gu Ren, Ou Lu Wang Ji, and Yu Ge. The sound could outlast the gathering that first heard it.
One member of the Berkeley audience was the young Hans Frankel, later a distinguished scholar of Chinese literature. In 1948, he married Zhang Chonghe, a pupil of Zha’s. On hearing the news, Zha gave Hanquan, which had remained in America, to the couple as a wedding gift.
The man who had once sat in the audience now shared his home with the performer’s pupil and the very instrument he had heard. How lucky he was.
Only some thirty years later did Zha learn, through a letter from Zhang, that Frankel had attended that Berkeley performance. Frankel remembered the playing as possessing a meditative absorption and beauty, descriptions expressed through the vocabulary of his later studies in Chinese culture.
We do not have to know Chinese culture before finding beauty in the qin’s sound. But entering its language, poetry, and traditions can deepen that understanding. Frankel’s story offers a glimpse of that distance: from a seat in a Berkeley audience to a life shared with Zhang Chonghe, with Hanquan becoming part of their home. What had once been unfamiliar became part of everyday life.
Introducing the qin to peoples of other cultural traditions has been a responsibility that some musicians have willingly taken upon themselves. Zha was one of them. He was not the first to play the qin in America, but he carried it along his own path, giving new listeners a chance to hear it.
We need not measure such a journey by the size of its sensation. Sometimes recognition begins with a little curiosity.
Sixty-six years after the visit, Hanquan sold at auction in 2011 for RMB 5.175 million, roughly US$800,000. The instrument continued its journey. The sound of that American visit, too, had left a trace.
Sources: Library of Congress catalog record, Chen-hu Cha recordings of Ch’in music; Yan Xiaoxing’s essay on Zha Fuxi and Zhang Chonghe, including its quotations from Zha’s correspondence; additional biographical and auction material supplied for this article. The dollar amount is a rough conversion, not a verified auction-day exchange-rate calculation.
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