At these words, everything...became clearer to me. All Beijing knew of Wu Guantian as the greatest living master of the seven-stringed qin - an instrument beloved of the ancients and now so rarely played that I knew its appearance only from pictures. All the same..., on entering the house, we were greeted by silence. There was not the faintest sound of music; nobody and nothing stirred. Luton...led us across the room, still on tiptoe and with a finger glued to his lips. It was not until we had passed through another doorway into a much smaller room that I really began to understand.

The little room was occupied by several people sitting in attitudes of absorbed attention. In the centre a tall, thin old man with a wispy moustache sat bent over a qin lying on a low pearwood table in front of him. I must have been half-way through the door before I realized that he was engaged in plucking from it the sweetest sounds imaginable, for the silken strings gave forth notes softer than the buzzing of a single bee!

His audience consisted of six or seven scholarly-looking old gentlemen dressed in gowns of dark-coloured silk suitable to autumn - deep shades of blue, grey and bronze. Paying no attention to our entry, they sat upright or leaning slightly forward, legs held modestly together under their gowns and hands generally at rest upon their laps. I could have taken them for Taoist immortals rather than human beings. To Pekingese gentlemen of their generation, restless movement and over-casual postures had been made impossible by habits instilled into them from earliest youth....

Zhu and I sat down gingerly on the end of a small divan already occupied by a cherubic old man....Suppressing a smile, I gave my whole attention to the music and was presently entranced. Beneath the maestro's hands, the seven silken strings throbbed and vibrated, producing clusters of infinitely soft notes, now swift, now slow. While his left hand darted up and down the length of the horizontal qin with quick bird-like movements, the inch-long fingernails of his right hand ceaselessly caressed the strings as though five plectrums were being agitated simultaneously. Impossible to describe that unearthly music! It was woven of sighs and murmers, the tinkle of jade ornaments, the wind in the pine-trees, the whispering flight of pigeons. It was ancient and remote, like ghostly music echoing faintly through the silence of a haunted grove, yet not so much melancholy as sweetly solemn with now and then a hint of gentle gaiety...."