An Introduction about Qín and Qí in China Culture

Qín refers to the musical instrument of the literati, the gǔqín. Although it exclusively meant this instrument in ancient times, it has now come to mean all musical instruments, but essentially it refers to gǔqín only considering the context.

The gǔqín is a seven-stringed zither that owes its invention to the Chinese society of some 3,000 years ago. During the reign of the imperial China, a scholar was expected to play the gǔqín . Gǔqín was explored as an art-form as well as a science, and scholars strove to both play it well and to create texts on its manipulation. Gǔqín notation was invented some 1,500 years ago, and to this day it has not been drastically changed. Some books contain musical pieces written and mastered more than 500 years ago. Gǔqín is so influential that it even made its way into space: the spacecraft Voyager launched by the U.S. in 1977 contained a vinyl style record of a gǔqín piece named ‘Flowing Water’. The fact that the gǔqín’s name breaks down to ‘gu’ (old) and ‘qin’ (musical instrument) reveals the instrument’s great antiquity.

Qí refers to a board game, which is now called Go (围棋), literally meaning “surrounding game”. Current definitions of qí cover a wide range of board games and, given that in Classical Chinese qí could also refer to other games, some argue that the qí in the four arts could refer to xiangqi although it is considered more a popular “game of the people” than weiqi, which was a game with aristocratic connotations. Many theories exist regarding the origin of wéiqí in Chinese history. One of these holds that wéiqí was an ancient fortune telling device used by Chinese cosmologists to simulate the universe’s relationship to an individual. Another suggests that the legendary emperor Yao invented it to enlighten his son. Certainly wéiqí had begun to take hold around the 6th century BCE when Confucius mentioned wéiqí in his masterpiece Analects, sometimes erroneously translated as “chess.”