Yu Boya and Zhong Ziqi #
The legend goes that one day more than 2,000 years ago Yu Boya, who was a great Qin player, was travelling by the Hanjiang river when the rain began to fall so he was blocked. Then, Yu started to play the Qin. Zhong Ziqi, who was a woodcutter, listened to the music which attracted him to Boya’s location. Each time Yu played, Ziqi completely understood. First it was ‘Continous Rain Lament’ and then ‘Collapsing Mountains Melody’. Yu and Zhong were happy to meet each other and they became blossom friends and made an appointment to meet there in a year. So one year later, Yu went there but Zhong was dead. Yu was so sad that after playing “Altas montañas” (Gao Shan) and “Corrientes de agua que fluyen” (Liu Shui) in front of Zhong’s tomb, he broke his Qin and his strings.
This friendship history appears on the Zhu Changwen’s book about Qin History (Qin Shi), 11th century. The book has a few treatises and more than one hundred biographical essays from emperor Di Yao to Chen Zhuo, a famous qin player at the end of the Tang dynasty.
Informations sources