A nanyin rehearsal above a Quanzhou alley

The pipa player tuned her instrument before any of us spoke. We had climbed two flights of narrow wooden stairs above a shop selling joss paper on Tongzheng Alley, and the room at the top smelled of camphor wood and the faint cooking-oil residue that lives in every Quanzhou building older than the war. Cai Yajun, fifty-one, was already seated on a low stool with her pipa held horizontally across her lap, the way Tang court painters drew it eleven hundred years ago, not upright on the thigh in the modern style. She lowered her ear to the strings, plucked a phrase, adjusted a peg, plucked again. The room arranged itself around the sound without anyone moving.

Nanyin means southern music, and the name is a small joke at the expense of geography. The repertoire it preserves is the music of the Tang and Song courts, brought south by families fleeing the An Lushan rebellion in the eighth century and the Jurchen invasions in the twelfth, and kept alive in Quanzhou's amateur guilds ever since while the original northern forms decayed and were lost. What is performed in this studio on a Thursday evening is, by any honest accounting, closer to what was heard in Chang'an in 750 than anything performed in Xi'an today. The musicians do not make this claim aloud. They consider it a matter of record.

The ensemble that gathered around Cai Yajun that night was four players and a singer. The xiao, a vertical bamboo flute longer than a man's forearm. The erxian, a two-stringed fiddle held upright on the thigh. The sanxian, a three-stringed lute with a snakeskin face. The pipa itself, held sideways across the lap. And the singer, a woman in her sixties named Su Yueying, who held a pair of small wooden clappers called paiban and used them to keep a beat so slow that visitors often mistake the pauses for stops.

A score lay open on the low table between the players. It was written in gongche notation, the character-based system that predates Western staff notation by something like a thousand years, and the characters running down the page in vertical columns named pitches and finger positions but not durations. The durations live in the bodies of the players. Cai Yajun told us later that learning a new piece takes between three and six months because the score teaches you only what to play, never when. The when comes from sitting beside someone older who already knows, and watching the rise and fall of her wrist until your own wrist learns the same weather.

“The when comes from sitting beside someone older who already knows, and watching the rise and fall of her wrist until your own wrist learns the same weather.”

The piece they were rehearsing that night was Zhi shang xi gu, A Branch Above the Western Valley, a setting from the suite called Mei Hua Cao, Plum Blossom Manuscript. The text is a Song-dynasty lyric. The melodic frame is older. The first phrase, when Su Yueying began it, was a single syllable stretched across perhaps eighteen seconds, the vowel bending slowly through three pitches while the pipa traced an ornament around it that I could not have transcribed. We sat very still. The ornament was not decoration. It was the phrase.

Quanzhou's port history is the second reason this music survived. Through the Song and Yuan, the city's foreign quarter held Arabs, Persians, Tamils, and Javanese, and its own families went out to Manila, Penang, Taipei, and the coastal towns of what is now Indonesia. They took the music with them. Nanyin societies still meet, weekly, in Manila's Chinatown, in Singapore's Telok Ayer district, in Lukang on Taiwan's western coast, in a hall above a coffee shop in Penang's Armenian Street. The diaspora kept the repertoire intact during the years when the mainland could not. Cai Yajun's own teacher, who died in 2019, had learned three suites from a returning emigrant who had carried them out to Java in 1948 and brought them back, on a cassette tape, in 1988.

This is the practical answer to the question of why a music a thousand years old still sounds local. It is local. It is also, simultaneously, maritime, a music that has been carried across the South China Sea so many times that the salt of those crossings has settled into the playing style.

We sat with the ensemble for about three hours. The rehearsal was not theatrical. They played a phrase, stopped, discussed a fingering, played it again. Twice, Cai Yajun corrected the erxian player, a man in his thirties named Lin Jianwei, by lifting his bowing hand half a centimetre and adjusting the angle without speaking. He nodded. They went on. The paiban in Su Yueying's hands kept a beat that, when I tried to count it, came in at roughly forty-eight to the minute, slower than a resting heartbeat, with deliberate silences inside the measure where the music sat in the room and looked at us.

Toward eleven, the rehearsal ended without ceremony. Cai Yajun laid her pipa flat on a brocade cloth, the strings up, and covered it with a second cloth, the way you might cover a dish. Su Yueying tucked the paiban into a cotton bag. Someone opened the window, and the smell of the alley, frying garlic and damp stone and the faint salt of the estuary three kilometres south, came up into the room. Lin Jianwei walked us down the stairs and into the lane, where the joss-paper shop had closed and the cat from the threshold had moved to a different doorway. We stood there for a moment without speaking, listening to the city be itself, and then we said goodnight.