China’s Beethoven·Blind Abing·A Blood-Stained Lament on the Strings Blind Abing, whose real name was Hua Yanjun, was born in the summer of 1893 under the “original sin” of being branded a “bastard.” He died in the winter of 1950, impoverished and ravaged by illness in Wuxi. His extraordinary and tragic life of fifty-seven years was a symphony of struggle between darkness and light—a symphony of endurance, defiance, and ascent. The world would come to honor him as “China’s Beethoven.” Abing was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, and grew up amid the taunts, ridicule, and abuse of those around him. At the age of eight, he was taken into a Daoist temple and raised by his biological father. There, he revealed an astonishing gift for music. Under the care and rigorous discipline of the man who was publicly his master but privately his father, Abing received an excellent education in the musical traditions and culture of Daoism. While still very young, he became a celebrated and much-admired star of Daoist music—the “Little Celestial Master.” But fate had other plans. Abing lost his father as a young man, and on his deathbed, his father revealed the truth. The secret of his illegitimate birth, together with the tragedy of his mother’s early death in bitterness and grief, shattered the glittering world before his eyes. Overwhelmed by rebellion and a profound sense of meaninglessness, Abing lost himself. He began a life of self-exile, descending into an abyss of reckless dissipation. He surrendered himself to drinking, feasting, brothels, gambling, and opium. Eventually, a devastating illness robbed him of his sight, and he was expelled from the Daoist temple. The blow was fatal to the life he had known. He lost everything, was left penniless, and finally found himself wandering the streets. Yet it was precisely this suffering, piercing him to the bone, that destroyed the vanity of his former life and awakened his soul. Blind Abing was reborn from the flames in the midst of darkness. With extraordinary strength of will, he transformed playing music on the streets into a discipline of life and spirit. His anger at the coldness of the human world, his defiance of an unjust fate, and his love of music and creation—all were poured into the erhu and pipa he played in the streets. Few of Abing’s compositions survived. The most representative of them, Erquan Yingyue—Moon Reflected on Second Spring—not only unites China’s ancient Daoist musical tradition with its folk music, but also embodies the spiritual transcendence he attained through suffering. It is the final song of a life that fought for every breath. Much as Beethoven seized fate by the throat in the darkest hour of his deafness, erupted from the depths of despair, and—with the astonishing power of his inner ear—created the Ninth Symphony. Unlike the grand symphonic narratives of Beethoven, Abing’s immortal masterpiece, Moon Reflected on Second Spring, is an inward descent—a soul’s anguished indictment. The brief downward slide at the opening sounds like a sigh on a midnight street, cold enough to pierce the bones. The principal melody then passes through five weeping, lamenting variations, driving repression, grief, fury, and resistance upward, layer by layer, toward their climax. At the end of the music, Abing does not lead us toward the sweeping jubilation found in Beethoven’s works. Instead, at the very summit of anguish and indignation, he allows the voice of the strings gradually to fade away, returning at last to the silence of the night. Blind and forced to make his living on the streets, Abing often went hungry as he struggled at the very bottom of society in an age of chaos. Yet amid a reality scarred and broken on every side, he created immortal music that transcends time and national borders. This series will center on Blind Abing, recounting his turbulent and legendary life, as well as the people and events that surrounded him.