In August 1938, Zhang Ziqian began to keep a diary about the qin.
The country was at war. Players who had once met regularly were scattered. Instruments and scores could be lost; a gathering that had taken years to build could disappear. Zhang could not know which of his friends he would see again, or what would become of the music they shared.
So he began to write things down.
He called the record Cao Man Suo Ji, which might be rendered as Notes on Qin Playing. The word “notes” sounds modest. What he intended to preserve was not. In his preface, he listed the things he would record: gatherings, playing, practice, visits to fellow qin players. Great events and small ones alike belonged on the page.
He hoped that qin players would not scatter for good, and that the work of the qin would not decline. If he could keep writing, he thought, the accumulated notes might one day be of use to someone studying its history.
He was right.
What a Musician Notices
On November 9, 1938, Zhang came home to find his family out and the house unusually quiet. He played more than ten pieces over two hours. In the diary, he described the ease he felt in body and mind, and the rare pleasure of playing until the distinction between himself and the instrument seemed to fall away.
Another writer might have considered that evening too private to record. Zhang understood that it, too, was part of qin history. Music does not live only in a published score or a celebrated performance. It also lives in the hours when someone sits down alone and plays.
But his diary did not remain inside that quiet room.
On January 4, 1941, the Jinyu Qin Society gave a public performance. Tickets sold out, and some people who wished to attend could not be seated. Zhang recorded the preparations, the arrangement of the stage, and the decision to install sound equipment because listeners at the back might otherwise have trouble hearing.
That single practical concern tells us a great deal. The players wanted an audience, and they were thinking about that audience’s experience. The diary does not tell us exactly how successful the equipment was. It does let us see the work behind a public qin performance: finding a room, welcoming listeners, arranging a stage, and asking whether the music would reach the last row.
The People Between the Dates
Across its pages, Cao Man Suo Ji follows more than Zhang’s own playing. It records the people who met through the qin, the pieces they studied, and the efforts required to keep a society together.
Such details are easy to overlook while they are happening. A friend visits. Players gather to compare a piece. Plans are made for a performance; then plans change. But when years pass, those small entries become a map of relationships that might otherwise be lost.
The diary also makes room for difficulty. In an entry dated September 19, 1959, Zhang wrote of his efforts to support the qin society and of a planned performance disrupted when several participants could no longer take part. He worried about how the society could be gathered together again.
This was not the voice of a man writing only to celebrate the qin. He recorded the uncertainty of trying to sustain it.
A Life on Paper
Zhang continued his notes until 1963. The diary does not cover his entire life, but it carries the attention he gave to the qin across twenty-five years.
Many people of his century played the instrument. Zhang also stopped to record the people around it: what they practiced, how they met, what they tried to preserve, and what stood in their way. His contribution was not only to perform, teach, and help organize qin life. It was to leave later readers a way to see that life from within.
A performance ends. A gathering disperses. Even a musician’s memory changes with time. Zhang wrote because he understood that what seemed ordinary today might be irreplaceable tomorrow.
He wanted the players not to scatter and the work of the qin not to fade. He could not ensure either outcome by writing a diary. But because he wrote, their names, their meetings, and some part of their living world remain with us.
That is why Cao Man Suo Ji is more than one qin player’s private notebook. It is a diary written across a lifetime, and a record left for those who came after.
Source: Li Fengyun, “琴人终不散，琴事终不衰｜张子谦与《操缦琐记》,” originally published in Nanfengchuang (2006), reproduced by Zhonghua Book Company on Douban. Dated diary entries should be checked against the published Cao Man Suo Ji before publication.
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