Classical Diary: The First Voice of Cathay — An Echo Across Ten Thousand Rivers and Mountains (Extra 1)

Prologue: Listening to a “Silent” History

For thousands of years before the invention of the phonograph, music was the most ephemeral art in the world. In the space of a single breath, a sound completed its entire journey from birth to death. This cycle repeated day after day — lingering in the mountains, sounding with the beasts, dancing with human life. And yet the ancestors of Cathay’s creation of, and obsession with, music were already etched deep into the genes of their civilization. From the clear piping of Neolithic bone flutes to the solemn grandeur of Zhou ritual music; from the worldly sentiments of the Han Music Bureau to the final notes of life struck by the celebrated recluses of the Wei and Jin dynasties — this is a musical history of nearly ten thousand years, a “silent” symphony written jointly by texts, images, and objects unearthed from the earth.

This first special issue of Classical Diary will sail upstream, drawing on literary records, archaeological discoveries, and surviving images, to attempt a reconstruction of the magnificent trajectory of Chinese music — from its germination, to its foundation, to its pluralistic fusion — across the long span from high antiquity to the Northern and Southern Dynasties. Regrettably, it may be difficult to find playable audio for this issue of Classical Diary, but every oracle bone character, every passage from the ancient texts, every physical instrument, and every stone-carved mural is a unique echo that has crossed ten thousand rivers and a thousand mountains.

First Movement: The Sound Arising in the Eight Wilds

Before exploring the origins of Cathayan music, a macroscopic comparative perspective on civilizations is essential. The origins of Western — especially European — music can be traced to the early musical remains of the Aegean civilization of ancient Greece (such as the lyre in the frescoes of Crete), where music was mostly tied to courtly entertainment and the chanting of epics. Cathayan music, by contrast, displayed from the very start a strong ritual, functional, and philosophical character.

Now let us cast our gaze past the dynasties of recorded history toward the hazy dawn of Chinese civilization. Music was not hidden from sight; rather, it was interwoven with the survival and beliefs of the ancestors in a more primitive and more essential way. This was an age both “sonorous” and nearly “silent” — sounds had long since rung out beside the flames of sacrifice, in the dances of victory, and in the rhythms of labor, only to dissolve at once into the winds of history. Yet the bone flutes and clay xun in the hands of archaeologists, the fragmentary phrases scattered through historical documents, and the frozen dance postures on rock paintings and pottery patterns together build a bridge to the earliest music of Cathay. The core of music in this period can be summed up as a long foundation-building, a passage from the “voice of shamans and spirits” toward the “source of ritual music” .

Concerning the origin of music, ancient Chinese texts already offered simple speculations long ago. The Lüshi Chunqiu, “Chapter on Ancient Music” records: “When Zhuxiang ruled the world of old… Shida made the five-stringed se zither, drawing in yin qi.” In The Music Canon, Volume 20, there is likewise the account that “Emperor Yao commanded Zhi to make music, and Zhi imitated the sounds of forests, mountains, streams, and valleys in his songs.” All these legends point to the ancient conception that the origin of Cathayan music lay in imitating nature and harmonizing yin and yang.

The Theory of Labor Rhythms: Beyond the record in the Huainanzi, “Chapter on the Response of the Way,” which directly depicts call-and-response cries in collective labor — “Now those who lift great timbers: the one in front calls ‘ye-hu’ and those behind answer in turn — this is the song of shifting heavy loads and summoning strength” — the passage in substance reflects the sonic form of rhythm and coordination in primitive production.

The Theory of Shamanistic Sacrifice: Ancient texts repeatedly show the close union of music-dance and sacrifice. For example, the Rites of Zhou, “Grand Director of Music” under the Office of Spring, records the use of “the six lü, the six tong, the five tones, the eight timbres, and the six dances in the grand combined music, to summon the ghosts and spirits.” The “Nine Songs” of the Songs of Chu likewise records: “Qu Yuan, banished, wandered and hid in that region, harboring grief and bitter distress, his sorrowful thoughts seething; going out he saw the rites of the common people’s sacrifices and the music of their songs and dances, and finding the words vulgar and crude, he composed the tunes of the Nine Songs — upward setting forth the reverence due to the gods, and downward revealing his own pent-up grievances, lodging his remonstrance by allegory.” This, too, is a literary recreation of shamanistic ritual music-dance, and all of it shows music’s central function in communicating between the human and the divine and in performing rites.

The Theory of Emotional Expression: This theory stands out in the classic texts that expound the origins of poetry and music. The Book of Songs (Mao’s Version) says: “When feeling stirs within, it takes form in words; when words are insufficient, one sighs over it; when sighs are insufficient, one sings it out at length; and when singing at length is still insufficient, unknowingly one’s hands dance and one’s feet stamp.” This clearly traces the process from the natural outpouring of inner emotion to the emergence of song and dance.

The Theory of Signal Transmission: Although direct records are scarce, a line in the Book of Songs such as “the gong-man strikes the drum” in the Lesser Odes, “Gathering the Madder,” which depicts instruments directing advance and retreat in the army, can be seen as an extension of the signal function into the military sphere; and in high antiquity the drum and the war drum were used for alarm and muster, which likewise reflects the practical origin of sound tools in conveying information within communal life.

Taken together, these theories depict music’s complex and primal functional web in primitive society — it was at once a tool for organizing labor and transmitting information and a medium for sacrificial communion with the gods and for the expression of emotion, with these multiple roles interwoven in the daily life and spiritual world of the ancestors.

Fortunately, material evidence keeps turning legend into tangible history. The most revolutionary discovery comes from the Jiahu site at Wuyang, Henan. Dozens of bone flutes made from the ulnae of cranes have been unearthed there, dating back roughly 7,800–9,000 years. They are not merely deliberate instrument-making; they possess astonishing musical capability. Most of the bone flutes can play a complete heptatonic (seven-note) scale, and some even contain chromatic semitones, showing that the ancestors already had a highly self-aware grasp of interval relationships — far beyond mere signaling. The sudden emergence of the Jiahu bone flutes pushed the documented history of musical civilization in China — and indeed in all of humanity — dramatically earlier. They prove that at the very dawn of Chinese civilization, the ancestors’ perception and creation of pitch and scale had already reached a considerable height: these were no simple sound-making toys but deliberate tools of spiritual expression.

Echoing the clear piping of the bone flutes is a far more widespread instrument across the sacred land of China: the clay xun ocarina. It developed from the early single-hole xun (as at the Hemudu site in Zhejiang) to the two-hole xun (capable of a three-note sequence), and on to the mature three-hole xun of the Xia and Shang periods (as at Huoshaogou in Gansu and Yinxu in Henan), which could produce a complete pentatonic scale and more. The five-hole xun unearthed from the tomb of Fu Hao at Yinxu shows superb craftsmanship: its range already exceeds a tenth, and its expressiveness is rich. For example, the xun from Fu Hao’s tomb at Yinxu, Anyang, Henan, is made of gray clay pottery, with a smoothly polished surface, a round blow hole at the pointed apex, and five finger holes on the lower belly — three on one side arranged in an inverted “pin” pattern, and two on the other side, left-right symmetrical.

Meanwhile, the tuo drum (a wooden drum covered with crocodile hide) from the Taosi site at Xiangfen, Shanxi, and the stone chime (qing) from the Dongxiafeng site at Xiaxian, Shanxi — an early single stone chime (te qing) — represent the rhythmic and deep-bass register. In particular, the various te qing, in their making from chipped to polished, gradually became more regular in form, prefiguring their transition from practical utensils to great ritual instruments. These archaeological finds scattered across the Yellow River and Yangtze basins together point to one fact: the seeds of music had already sprouted at many points across the vast land of China.

The musical practices of high antiquity and the Three Dynasties (Xia, Shang, and Zhou) injected a decisive auditory gene into Chinese civilization, and its essential spirit finally crystallized in the unique system of the “Eight Timbres” (ba yin) . The classification by material — metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, earth, hide, and wood — was far more than a taxonomy of instruments; it constructed a complete cosmological symbolic system: the solemnity of “metal and stone” laid the authoritative foundation of the ritual-music order; the mellifluence of “silk and bamboo” nourished the soul of melodic art; and the “gourd, earth, hide, and wood” gathered together the manifold sounds ranging from heaven, earth, mountains, and rivers to the rhythms of daily life. This system elevated music from a merely auditory art into an order-framework that bridged Heaven and humankind and regulated ethics, turning “rites and music” from a concept into an operable, performable body of institutions.

Within this system, many of music’s distinctive traits took shape and developed. The ultimate pursuit of the melodic line of “silk and bamboo” established the aesthetic path of Chinese music centered on horizontal unfolding; the precise tuning of “metal and stone” drove a unique tradition of temperament theory, whose impetus always served instrument-making and ritual-music practice. More importantly, the “Eight Timbres” linked the sound of each material to natural elements and philosophical ideas, giving material and ritual support to the Confucian ideal that “great music is in harmony with Heaven and Earth” and to the Daoist realm of “heavenly sounds” (tianlai). From then on, Cathayan music was no longer merely an expression of emotion but the sonorous embodiment of cosmic order, profoundly shaping the three thousand years of ritual-music civilization and artistic spirit that followed.

Second Movement: Shamans Communing with the Gods

Before the birth of writing, music and dance were one undivided whole. The painted pottery basin with a dance pattern unearthed at Sunjiazhai, Datong, Qinghai provides the most vivid pictorial evidence. The inner wall of the basin is painted with three groups of dancers, five in each group, holding hands, moving in step, their head ornaments and trailing tails streaming in the same direction. This is by no means ordinary entertainment; scholars generally believe it depicts a sacrificial or shamanistic rite. In the worldview of the ancestors, ordered rhythm, collective movement, and specific cries or chants possessed great power to bridge Heaven and Earth, summon the spirits, pray for fertility, or drive away evil.

The Correct Meaning of the Spring and Autumn Annals records: “The Emperor said: ‘Kui! I charge you to preside over music, to teach the heirs of the nobles… that spirits and humans may be harmonized.'” Though polished by later hands, this passage precisely captures the core function of early music: “the harmony of spirits and humans”. Music (music-dance) was the medium through which shamans — the early intellectuals and priests — achieved “communion with the gods”; it was the spiritual bond that sustained the cosmic order and the safety of the tribe. One may infer that the earliest “musicians” were very likely the shamans or chieftains of the tribe, who held the “code” for conversing with supernatural forces — specific tones, rhythms, and dances.

This tradition of the “unity of shamanism and music” profoundly shaped the underlying code of ritual, functionality, and collectivity in the genes of Cathayan music. Music was never merely an auditory art; it was an embodiment of social behavior, cosmology, and structures of power. It laid a far-reaching psychological and cultural foundation for the later Zhou dynasty’s systematic and politicized codification of music.

Third Movement: Kings Extol Their Merits

As tribal confederations evolved toward early statehood, music’s function began to expand from pure “communion with the gods” toward “praising the king.” The legendary Da Xia (celebrating Yu the Great’s taming of the floods) and Da Huo (celebrating Tang of Shang’s overthrow of Jie) — though their actual forms can no longer be known — are hinted at in the literary records as evidence that music had become an important tool for extolling the achievements of leaders and asserting the legitimacy of regimes. The line in the Zhouyi, hexagram Yu (Enthusiasm), “the ancient kings made music to exalt virtue, and offered it in abundance to the Supreme God, that their ancestors and fathers might share in it,” likewise reveals music’s role in sacrificing to ancestors and pleasing God so as to consolidate rule.

The material foundation of this shift was the arrival of the Bronze Age. Although the physical evidence for Xia dynasty bronze instruments remains disputed, the glorious bronze culture of the Shang dynasty undoubtedly brought revolutionary change to music. The oracle bone script already clearly contains such characters as “yue” (a pan-pipe-like instrument, now lost), “gu” (drum), and “qing” (stone chime). The bronze nao bells unearthed from the tomb of Fu Hao at Yinxu — in sets of three or five — mark the maturity of melodic bronze percussion instruments. These great vessels were no longer mere sound-making tools but symbols of power, wealth, and sacred order. They laid both the technological and the conceptual foundation for the magnificent bell-and-chime orchestras and the ritual-music institutions of the Western Zhou.

Fourth Movement: The Music Within a Character

The search for the origin of the character “le/yue” (music/joy) is the key to understanding the ancestors’ conception of music. The mainstream interpretations of the oracle bone form of “樂” are two: the first, held by Luo Zhenyu and others, is that the pictograph depicts silk strings suspended from a wooden frame, its original meaning being a musical instrument; the second, held by Guo Moruo and others, is that it depicts ripened grain hanging from its stalks and leaves, from which the feeling of joy is derived. Either way, both point to an auspicious association — whether the delight of qin and se playing in harmony, or the celebration of the five grains in full harvest. As the Record of Music in the Book of Rites says: “Music (yue) is joy (le) — something human feeling cannot do without.” From the very moment of its birth, music was bound up with the most fundamental joys of survival and emotional needs of humankind.

Finale: Gazing Across Past and Present

Looking back at the sounds buried by time, what we hear is not silence but the first pulse of the genes of civilization deep in history. The seven clear notes blown from the Jiahu bone flutes long ago carved into the veins of Cathay an eternal longing for melody; the solemn echo of the Taosi tuo drum and stone chime bound music tightly to the order of Heaven and Earth, giving every note the weight of communion between the human and the divine. From the reverence of shamans treading song to commune with the spirits, to the majesty of kings casting bells to inscribe their achievements, those sounds that dissolved amid sacrificial fires and beacon smoke never truly fell silent — they became the genes of ritual music, settling into the philosophical echo of “great music is in harmony with Heaven and Earth,” and, in the bronze vibration of the bianzhong bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng, they reached an astonishing summit of human achievement in tuning theory.

Though the music of high antiquity has gone with the wind, that river of sound-waves carved jointly by bone flutes, clay xun, tuo drums, and stone chimes still surges beneath the strata of civilization. It flows past the tender warmth of “qin and se at hand” in the Book of Songs, past the joys and sorrows of the Han and Wei “xianghe” songs, and at last gathers into an epic written in sound. And today, when we listen to modern singers re-sing the ancient poems of the Book of Songs, the longing, the joy, and the vastness that have crossed three thousand years still stir real ripples in our hearts — and this may be the most moving continuation of the ancient musical soul: the original melodies may be lost, but that longing to settle life with music and to bridge Heaven and humankind has long since become an echo in our spiritual homeland that never fades away.

Afterword

It nearly killed me! Writing this special issue of Classical Diary filled me with unease and guilt. As a child of Cathay, my knowledge of the development of Chinese music is far weaker than my knowledge of Western music. Throughout the entire writing process, confusion and ignorance were my leitmotif — and I believe they are the leitmotif of many of my compatriots as well. As an extension of Classical Diary, this special series focuses on the course of our country’s musical development, and this first installment centers on the period before the Christian era — a history now more than ten thousand years long. The modern interpretation of the Book of Songs recommended at the end is also one of the albums the BLOG owner loves most, and I hope it lets everyone feel the power of music contained in our long history and culture, and the way culture develops, multiplies, and is passed on from voice to voice without cease. (9,677 characters in full)

References

Shidian Guji — Ancient Texts Online Reading Platform
He Nu, former team leader of the Taosi site: on the “observatory platform” and why Yao made his capital at Taosi | Interview_Sina Finance_Sina
Exploring the Stone Chime Instruments at the Site of the Xia Capital
Multi-function Chinese Character Database — Analysis of Oracle Bone Components