Autumn Wind is a short and fun introductory piece to help beginners familiarize basic Guqin finger structures. In this tutorial I go note-by-note to teach how to play this piece.
(DISCLAIMER: I am still a student myself, to fully learn Guqin I recommend finding an in-person teacher but I realize this is difficult if you’re outside of China. I hope this video can help give some basic understanding of how to play this instrument.)
Song of the Taoist Immortal is a simple introductory piece to help you familiarize with some basic Guqin finger structures. In this tutorial I go note-by-note to teach how to play this piece.
(DISCLAIMER: I am still a student myself, to fully learn Guqin I recommend finding an in-person teacher but I realize this is difficult if you’re outside of China. I hope these videos can help give some basic understanding of how to play this instrument.)
OP: The way of wearing the Tang-style hanfu (Qixiong Ruqun) may look simple, but it actually involves multiple layers. Some Hanfu studios now add shoulder straps to make it easier to wear. People who prefer a more historical style still favor the traditional way of wearing it. The types of Hanfu pieces that can be layered(mainly focuses on three representative dynasties: the Tang, Song, and Ming):
I DIY’d some accessories for the Evolution of the Mamianqun project—one of them was the 鹿胎冠 / lu4 tai1 guan1 / deerskin crown or headpiece that was used for the southern Song Dynasty look. This is just some documentation on the (kinda scuffed) design & fabrication process.
What is a 鹿胎冠?
A 冠 or guan is a headpiece worn on the head—you could reasonably translate it to hat, crown, crest, etc. Men and women both wore guan throughout most of ancient Chinese history, though different styles were popular for different time periods and different people. Guan were especially popular during the Song Dynasty, with materials and shapes getting more and more exaggerated as time went on.
鹿胎冠, also called 小鹿冠/xiao3 lu4 guan1/“little deer headpieces,” are 冠 made of deerskin/deer hide. From what I understand from the name these would be made specifically from fetal deer—I assume this is because they wanted to use the dappled pattern on the fur that disappears as the deer matures, though functionally I’m not really sure why fawns wouldn’t work as well.
If you want to see the nitty gritty research stuff with all the sources, stick around until the last section of this post—I put it at the end so people don’t get immediately bored by the citations and stuff.
A few stores in China have made 鹿胎冠, but they’re not super popular styles, so they’re pretty hard to find (and honestly kind of pricey). I figured I’d try my hand at making my own.
Construction Process
First let’s look out how guan are usually made these days. In ancient China they probably would’ve been carved, cast, leather worked, etc. These days, probably in the name of accessibility, guan are often 3D printed, and they look something like this.
I do have access to a 3D printer, but I’m really only trained in technical CAD and I really didn’t want to do sculptural stuff in Solidworks (one of these days I’ll learn Blender), so I went the crafty route instead.
This was done pretty quickly between classes with random stuff I had lying down. For the base, I used an empty roll of packaging tape that I had just used up.
I punched two holes in it with scissors, a utility knife, and a screwdriver (in that order lmao). This is where the hairpins to hold the guan in place will go. This was a significantly longer undertaking than it sounds.
For the main panels, I used the lid of a shoebox I had lying around. I think it was a heavyweight cardstock, somewhere between cardboard and like… greeting card cardstock.
I freehanded a curve on some folded up graph paper to make sure it would be symmetrical, cut it out as a pattern, and traced it onto the inside of the shoebox lid.
Once I cut those out I bent them a little bit to give them some curvature. This was partially just for the aesthetic and partially so that it would mold to the curvature of the packaging tape core when I attached it:
Next I attached the deerskin-patterned fabric to the cardstock pieces. I got the fabric off Etsy, it’s a minky fleece deer print that’s honestly not super realistic (that is absolutely not what deer hide looks like lmao) but it’d work for my purposes—again this was a DIY thing so it didn’t have to be perfect; worst case we don’t end up using it.
I used a razor blade to cut the backing a little bit bigger than each of the cardstock pieces. Probably anyone who’s worked with fur before knows this, but if you try to cut fur with scissors you’ll end up with a mountain of loose fluff that you severed in the process; instead you’re supposed to flip the fabric around and cut only through the backing with a knife or razor blade. Even then I had fluff particles flying around my kitchen for a week lol
I hot glued the cardstock pieces convex face down to the back of the fabric, then folded the edges over and glued them. It was a pretty messy process, especially since I didn’t notch any of it around the curve, but the thickness of the fluff kind of hid it from the outside anyway.
For the exposed sides of the packaging tape core, I cut out two rectangles of fabric to wrap around the sides. I punched holes in the fabric to clear the hairpin hole—I just made an X with the razor blade and made sure I could poke the hairpin through— and then did a circle around the hole with hot glue to support it structurally and make sure it didn’t collapse on itself.
I folded this over the top edge of the base, stuck the hairpin through to make sure all the holes were aligned, and then glued down the edges.
Next step is to put the two cardstock pieces on. I wanted them to lean outwards a little bit, so that the top was a little wider than the bottom, so to achieve this effect I added a strip of hot glue to the top edge of the base to prop the cardstock up and form an angle, like a shim. This took a few rounds of hot gluing/waiting for it to dry/putting another layer on top to increase its thickness and exaggerate the angle a bit more.
It’s sort of hard to see with all the fur, but the effect when I glued on the front and back pieces was that because the bottom was closer to the base than the top, they leaned outwards at a slight angle.
At this point I got tired and decided to resume work tomorrow. I thought it looked a little bit plain, though, so I wanted to add some pearl beads. I didn’t record the process of gluing the pearls down, but I added a line of them along the inside “seam” of each cardstock piece (some of them fell off though rip) and attached three to the front & back as decorations.
In hindsight I really should’ve punched holes in the cardstock and fabric and attached the pearls with wire, because the hot glue was really just clinging onto the fur fibers and the pearls were constantly in danger of falling off. Also the back was uh. Very much not aligned. But it’s fine!!!
~ Error Analysis ~
If I had more time I probably would’ve tried to figure out a prettier way to disguise the inside of the two cardstock pieces. They were white and I added that string of pearls, so it wasn’t too bad, but I think it would’ve been nice if I’d done a fabric backing or something like that.
Also, I realized while I was cutting the fabric that the pile of the fabric was in fact directional—the way I cut it, the fur fibers were kind of going from right to left. Initially I cut it like that because I wanted to align the bottom of the cutout with the non-fraying edge of the fabric, but it wasn’t until I’d already glued the fabric down that I realized the fur looked like it was kind of growing in the wrong direction. I didn’t really care enough to start over though lol.
The other thing is that, even though they were lined up perfectly and the glue circles ensured they wouldn’t collapse, the holes for the hairpins were pretty much invisible from the outside because of the length of the fur. Every time I wanted to insert the hairpin I was stabbing the shit out of the side for like five minutes before I found the hole. Eventually I figured out that I could feel the glue circle from the outside with my fingers so I’d have to locate the holes by touch first and then stab the hairpin through after, so it wasn’t too much of a problem in the end.
On the day of shooting we realized that I maybe should’ve made more hairpin homes though, possibly one in the front/back too. Even with two hairpins, the guan wasn’t very structurally secured on Emily’s (the model for the Song Dynasty set, ig: @/yoursgrim) hair, because there were only two points of contact. Three or four would’ve been more stable.
Research (More Nerdy Details)
The reason we know about deerskin guan is partially coincidental: it’s because they were temporarily outlawed during the northern Song Dynasty, and people recorded legal history and political stuff religiously. There are multiple historical sources pointing to the same edict, so it’s pretty clear that these things existed, even though there aren’t any physical artifacts (that I know of at least) still intact.
One source is the 麈史/zhu3 shi3/“Stag History” by 王得臣/wang2 de2 chen2/Wang Dechen, a record of various events during the northern Song Dynasty. The Chinese Text Projects has a copy of it that you can view here. There’s an English version of the site you can access by clicking English in the top left, but the text itself is still in Chinese so I’m not sure how helpful it really is.
There’s a section in the first volume regarding the construction of women’s headwear that states:
At first materials were used such as gold-coated platinum, or the hides of fetal deer, or tortoiseshells, original source: Yang Youzhe. Or for decoration colorful silk drapes could be added, to form the shape of clouds, mountains, and similar things. Now the use of fetal deer and tortoiseshell is prohibited, so animal horn is used instead, and can be decorated to look like imitation tortoiseshell.
Another source is the 宋朝事實/song4 chao2 shi4 shi2/“Truthful Events of the Song Dynasty,” another historical record of the Northern Song compiled by 李攸/li3 you2/Li You, an author from the Southern Song. Most of it was lost to history, though; the copy we have today was compiled during the Qing Dynasty, and it’s incomplete. You can read it here.
The third chapter recounts the outlawing of deerskin guan closely. An official states that:
Many people use fetal deer to make guan headpieces, as well as official’s wives wearing deerskin guan into the palace, to the extent that they [fetal deer] are being hunted everywhere, their livelihoods hurt and ended. This should be immediately prohibited.
Later the book quotes the consequent imperial edict outlawing deerskin guan:
“…Court officials and their families may not wear deerskin guan, and henceforth no one may kill fetal deer or make deerskin guan. If this edict is violated, the crime should be reported, [and] the criminal severely punished, those who report the crime of hunting fetal deer, shall be awarded twenty strings of money; and those who report the crime of wearing or making deerskin guan, shall be awarded fifty strings of money, to be paid by the perpetrator’s family.” After [this edict] fetal deer were no longer of use, so their hunters also disappeared.
*Preserved the location of punctuation in the translation to make it easier to match up with the quote, I know it reads kinda weird in English
So clearly they got banned sometime in the Northern Song Dynasty. Fast forward to Southern Song, though, and we see evidence of deerskin guan still in use. 夢粱錄/meng4 liang2 lu4/Dreaming of Liang was a book written by 咸淳/xian2 chun2/Xian Chun in 1274, one of the last years of the Song Dynasty. You can read it here. The thirteenth chapter’s last section, 諸色雜貨/zhu1 se4 za2 huo4/Miscellaneous Goods, describes various goods and services often for sale during this time period. Among those were streetside services for fixing and cleaning tools and accessories, including:
…fixing pots and pans, barrels, fixing shoes, fixing futou headwear, fixing guan, also taking combs, dyed ivory combs, stringing pearls, fixing and cleaning deerskin guan, fixing or honing knives, polishing mirrors, these were all services available from street-side workers, that could be all be called/requested on demand.
So clearly somewhere in between these guan getting banned and 1274, deerskin guan must have regained popularity, if people were regularly offering cleaning and mending services for them specifically (my guess is that similar to us needing to dry clean fur coats and stuff they probably needed specialized care because of the delicate material). It’s reasonable then to assume that there was a resurgence of 鹿胎冠 sometime near the very end of the Song Dynasty.
Now, while I’ve convinced myself that deerskin guan were probably pretty popular during this time period, there aren’t actually a ton of references for how exactly they would’ve looked, so I figured I’d just try to make a version of a guan whose shape I already knew, but covered with deer fur fabric.
Going back to 麈史，there’s a lengthy description of how different styles of guan evolved over time, one of which is the 山口冠/shan1 kou3 guan1/Mountain-Opening Guan, which is described as:
又以團冠少裁其兩邊，而高其前後，謂之山口。（卷上，35）
The round guan could also be shortened on two sides, and heightened at the front and back, to be called “Mountain-Opening.”
Assuming the round guan is… somewhat round, we can conclude that the 山口冠 is a tall guan with a very tall front and back, and openings on the left and right, which are shorter. We can connect this to a famous painting, 招涼仕女圖/zhao1 liang2 shi4 nv3 tu2/Painting of Gentlewomen Cooling Off, a painting that was exhibited in 2020 by the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan. It was painted by 錢選/qian2 xuan3/Qian Xuan during the Southern Song Dynasty.
We can see in this painting that the woman on the left is wearing a tall guan that matches the description of the 山口冠: the front and back are very tall, while the left and right are shorter. This guan is transparent, so we can also see that it’s attached around a bun/topknot, which clues us in as to how exactly it’s staying on people’s heads.
That’s how I decided that I’d use this image as a reference and make a 鹿胎冠 with the shape of a 山口冠 :)
OP: Two-Minute Quick Hanfu Hairstyle. Many find Hanfu hairstyling tricky because you usually need those extra hair buns to bulk it up. But today, I’m gonna show you a simple real-hair-only Hanfu hairstyle. Once you get familiar with it, you can do it really quickly. This style looks light and natural, perfect for everyday Hanfu. You can wear it with or without hair accessories — and if you do like them, just add a couple for a pretty touch. (cr 烦恼全吴女士)
How to make chinese pidan(century egg) by 花木紫Huamuz
Think of it as a ‘fermented cheese’ of the egg world. It’s preserved, has a strong flavor, and is meant to be eaten in small amounts as a appetizer, not by itself. Pidan’s very rich and heavy. One or two wedges are enough for most people. Eating too much can be overwhelming for your palate and stomach. It’s often diced and mixed in cold dishes with a sharp, vinegary sauce. The acidity helps cut through the richness. The most popular dishes featuring century egg are century egg with tofu, century egg and lean pork congee, and mashed chili with century egg.
Century Egg with Tofu: The silky, mild tofu is the perfect counterbalance to the intense flavor of the century egg. It’s typically dressed in savory soy sauce and a drizzle of chili oil, creating a cool, refreshing, and utterly delightful dish. Century Egg & Lean Pork Congee: This is a warm and comforting rice porridge (congee). The century egg melds into the congee, enriching it with a deep, complex flavor and a wonderfully creamy texture. It’s the ultimate comfort food. Mashed Chili with Century Egg: Diced century egg is often tossed in cold dishes with a bright, vinegary dressing. The acidity cuts through the egg’s richness perfectly, creating a balanced and appetizing start to any meal.
Guqin piece 仙翁操/Xian Weng Cao (Song of the Taoist Immortal) - Pt 1/6:
Going step-by-step over how to play the first 2 bars of this piece of music. This is a short, simple piece used as an introductory piece for students to get used to some of the basic Guqin finger structures.
(not really a tutorial bc I don’t go over how to hem/seam stuff together but close enough)
Yesterday @dragonaeve asked about the pattern for the triangle pleat moxiong in the server so I thought I’d just post it in here too lol, it’s dead easy to make (coming from the clothing designer who can barely actually sew)
Some data from 花山墓 for your viewing pleasure:
Here, off Twitter but data has been corroborated with at least 3 other sources, shown is 菱形朵花紋絹抹胸, the last one in the table. This one doesn’t have a chest band but a lot of people prefer having it these days bc of friction and also wear & tear purposes so I added it
onto the making
Step One: Make Some Wrecked Angles
Cut out 4 rectangles:
1x MAIN BODY: H = however long you want the garment to be (usually 30-60cm), W = your chest circumference * 1.5
1x CHEST BAND: H = chest band width (usually 3-5cm) * 2, L = (chest * 1.5) - (d¹ * 2)
2x RIBBONS: H = ribbon width (2-4cm) * 2, L = ribbon length (usually like 50-150cm, kinda whatever)
¹ d is half the difference value in the top/bottom lengths. You can either do a triangle pleat, inverse box pleat, or no pleat. The bigger the d value is the more pronounced the curvature. See next step for d value.
ALSO ADD SEAM ALLOWANCE AND STUFF
Step Two: Choose Your Fighter
Choice 1: No Pleat
d = 0. You don’t have to do anything queen sit back n relax
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Choice 2: 三角褶 Triangle Pleat (aka dart)
d = 5cm if you’re mimicking the Huashan artifact but most people like to go smaller than that so u can adjust if u want
Fold that shit in half (wrong side out)
2. Sew this line to make this triangle in the corner (w = d, h = 2*d)
3. Unfold it (still wrong side out)
4. Either press the triangle thing to one side or squish it flat.
Tada
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Choice 3: 工字褶 Inverse Box Pleat
d = ~2-5cm ish up to you
Fold that shit in half (wrong side out)
2. Make a W that’s d/2 tall
3. Flip it and reverse it
4. Open the book and smush the ears flat
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Step Three: Make A Sandwich
(You can add interfacing to the chest band first if u want it makes it easier. The ribbons are just tubes)
Obviously hem stuff and sew things together like normal lol otherwise that’s it
Optional Toppings:
Make a vertical slit in the chest band at the 1/3 point for the ribbon to pass through when u tie it
If you don’t got them Tang Dynasty sized titties, add loops for straps and/or sew straps directly onto the band
Add a lining (literally just another big rectangle that u sew to the main body and then proceed as usual)
Use different fabrics for the band and the body for funsies
Add trim between the band & body for decor
No chest band, sew ribbons directly to main body (more accurate to Huashan moxiong)
Fabric not wide enough for the main body? Sew a bunch of smaller rectangles together to make One Big Wrecked Angle. Make them out of different fabrics if you’re feeling adventurous
Use already-made hair ribbons or satin ribbons for ribbons if u don’t wanna sew tubes
Once the inside of the Guqin is carved out, and the outer surface has been shaved down, some Guqin makers will include a step using fire to singe the inside of the Qin.
This is called 火斫: 火/huo = fire 斫/zhuo = split/strike/hack wood (斫/zhuo is the term used specifically for making Guqin)
This step serves 3 purposes: 1) Singe off any small wooden slivers that are still attached to the inside of the Qin. Too many of these will affect the sound of the Qin as it interferes with the vibration of the sound.
2) Remove moisture to prevent the wood from cracking or changing shape later on.
3) Make the Qin look older (做旧).
There are 2 methods to doing this step: 1) Using a blow torch, and then sandpapering off the singed layer. 2) Using a flammable liquid.
