On a string and a prayer

After taking a risk by dropping out of school at the age of 16, two decades later, Yang Lan has crafted a comfortable life by playing, teaching and making guqin, Wang Ru reports.

When Yang Lan first became attracted to guqin, a zither-like seven-stringed traditional Chinese instrument, he was 16 and he didn't really know much about it.

It was 2003 and a poetic scene in a film about swordsmen, in which a character plays the guqin in the mountains, struck a chord with the boy. Born in Anlong county, Guizhou province, where more than 66 percent of the county is mountainous, he has a special affection for mountains, and the scene intrigued him to learn more about the instrument.

Guqin has existed for over 3,000 years and represents China's foremost solo musical instrument tradition. In the same year that Yang developed an interest in it, guqin music was proclaimed as an oral and intangible heritage of humanity by UNESCO.

Yang got to know legends related to the instrument, like how ancient thinker and writer Ji Kang of the Three Kingdoms (220-280) period played Guangling San, a guqin composition, before his execution and announced it would be lost forever.

The boy was further attracted by the cultural connotations of the ancient instrument, though he admits the attraction is more about imagination, instead of the instrument itself.

But the imagination really established a relationship between him and guqin. After years of exploration, he finally makes a living by playing and making guqin, and he has just published a book about his experience with the instrument.

At 16, shortly after his epiphany, Yang decided to drop out of school and pursue a music career. He had learned to play guitar, and told his parents he would go to Beijing and become a rock musician. But, in his heart, he wanted to move to Shaolin Temple located at the foot of the Songshan Mountain in Central China's Henan province to learn guqin, a place which perfectly matched the scenes in the film that initially attracted him to the instrument.

His parents were bitterly opposed to him quitting school, but they could not persuade the boy, who was resolute, and eventually gave way. In the autumn of that year, Yang left home and embarked on a life as a wanderer.