A sorrowful zither plays the Song of the Xiang River. Every note describes
fully the blues of its waves. Her slender fingers delicately convey the hidden
bitterness by dancing on the thirteen strings 2. At the party, her
eyes, like the autumn water, betray her tender feelings. The jade pegs are lined
in slants like flying wild geese. When the melody saddens her, her eyebrows
lower 3 as if they are Spring mountains
4 weighed down by
dark clouds.
1
During the Song dynasty, the geisha girls who mastered the zither were
Qing-qing and Wu-qing. Whenever they came on stage warming their hands, the
audience all stood up mesmerized by their beauty. One guest wrote a poem for the
girls. It says, "Good zither music no longer exists now that Qing-qing has
died./ The image of zither queen now falls to Wu-qing's fair wrists and red
veil./ The entire audience is silent./ They are immersed in the dirge of wild
geese (pegs) lined by the thirteen strings." The geisha girl this poem describes
was an excellent zither player like Qing-ing or Wu-qing.
2
A zither has thirteen strings. Each string represents one month. The
thirteenth string represents the extra month in the Chinese lunar leap year.