Happy Monday everyone,
Thank you for subscribing to Wu Fei’s Music Daily. This is the 209th episode — The three moon gates.
This guzheng-vocal improvisation was recorded yesterday.
I would like to dedicate this piece to the memory of the neighborhood, the place where I grew up and became a young musician — Prince Gong’s Palace 恭王府 in Beijing, which was originally built in 1777. China Conservatory of Music was located inside of this palace when I was a high school student there for several years. It has been a museum and tourist attraction since 2008. My school had to move out then. My parents’ first house was only a mile west from Prince Gong’s palace (see photo below) literally on the same street.
I showed my 8-year old daughter photos of me with my teachers and classmates when I was 16 in the middle of the much-more-worn palace buildings that were my classrooms and recital halls. She was fascinated.
Prince Gong (1833–1898), who owned this royal mansion and garden, was an influential and controversial statesman of the Qing Dynasty. In the conservatory, there were a lot of interesting and crazy stories about the palace. I remember it being a magnificent, mysterious, huge compound. In winter, it became scary for my classmates and I to walk from our practice building to our evening study classroom. It was always dark, cold, windy. We had to walk through three different moon gates to get to the classroom, which was a palace building 大殿.
We had heard a lot of ghosts stories about the palace. No one dared to walk alone in the cold dark evening passing through giant gates, high walls, hearing the 300-year old pine trees’ whistling in the wind. In my memories, the moon was always high and bright in the sky. The deeper we walked inside the compound, the less street light there was. My classmates and I always had to sprint through the last stretch between the second moon gate and the third moon gate because the alley was pitch dark, and closed off by super high walls that made us feel suffocated. But then we always had big laughs as soon as we rushed through the last moon gate that opened up to the big court yard where our classrooms were lit up, and full of students’ life. It was the best time of my youth growing up in this palace.
You can read more about Prince Gong’s Palace (or Prince Gong’s Mansion) here, Prince Gong’s Folly, edited by Claire Roberts and my dear friend Geremie Barmé published by China Heritage Project, The Australia National University.
Wu Fei 吴非
wufeimusic.com
I visited my high school in 2002 when it was still inside the palace. On the white board it says 中国音乐学院附中 China Conservatory of Music High School. I had already moved to the US by then.
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