Four foreigners wandered into a teahouse, not far from the Forbidden City, and were mesmerized by a young quqin player making some of the most beautiful sounds they had ever heard.

The Columbian graphic designers requested a song and the musician quickly guessed the perfect piece. Jiu Kuang is a short piece composed by Ruan Ji some 1,800 years ago. It describes the feelings when drunk.

"This music is beautiful!" exclaimed Stella Maria Vieco and Carlos Zapata.

They bumped into the teahouse upon dusk last week and found two college students practising guqin with a young teacher. "It is sweet and spiritual music, where can we buy a CD?" inquired Vieco, while her friends kept taking photos of the antique furniture.

The player was Wang Liang and for five years has been learning guqin from Wu Na and other teachers.

Wu Na is a performer with the China Nationalities Song & Dance Ensemble where she plays the double bass, which she began learning in 1997. Two years before that she had learned cello.

Her real passion and profession is guqin, which sadly has few chances of public performance partly because it is a solo instrument.

"I knew the difficulties so I learned something else to support myself," she said.

Caught in the whirlpools of globalization and modern marketization, guqin and other ancient arts are facing unprecedented challenges.

Wu cherishes another dream: to promote the essence of Chinese culture such as music, literature, martial arts and calligraphy.

After several attempts, she has founded the Silk Cotton House (Sitongguan) and temporarily settled down at the Laijinyuxuan Teahouse inside the Zhongshan Park to the west of the Forbidden City. Several friends have gathered around her to realize this dream.

About 100 students now gather at the teahouse, half of them come from several Beijing universities and they are learning guqin free-of-charge thanks to the generous help of some friends.

"I've almost finished the basic finger work," said Zhang Jinhua with the Renmin University of China, while following Wang Liang's instruction and gliding his fingers on the strings. "I can hardly wait to begin the first melody."

Zhang comes from the countryside in Qingzhou of East China's Shandong Province and was captured by the music upon first hearing six months ago. By cultivating young listeners and players, Wu Na hopes to plant seeds for the future growth of guqin study.

"I will dedicate some 10 years to the study of classic guqin music, but that's a plan when I'm too old to make innovations," said Wu.

"China is experiencing a flourishing period of artistic thoughts, I'm honoured to be one of the people creating a new era."

(China Daily November 7, 2006)