The one score that had to leave home to survive

Claim (verbatim)

The Jieshi diao Youlan (碣石調幽蘭, "Solitary Orchid in the Jieshi Mode") is the oldest surviving piece of Chinese instrumental music written down in full - a qin (seven-string zither) piece preserved not in the abbreviated jianzipu tablature that later became standard but in longhand wenzipu (文字譜), where every finger movement is spelled out in running prose. It is attributed to the sixth-century master Qiu Ming (丘明), and the sole witness is a Tang-period manuscript that survived not in China but in Japan, held in the collection now at the Tokyo National Museum and brought to Chinese scholarly attention only when Yang Shoujing repatriated a copy in the 1880s. Every other complete qin score in the transmitted tradition - the roughly 150 handbooks gathered in the Qinqu jicheng (琴曲集成) - uses the compressed jianzipu invented afterward; the Youlan is the tradition's only surviving longhand score, and it survives by exile. That is the survival-abroad channel in its purest form: the mother-format of qin notation is extinct in its homeland's transmitted corpus and legible today only because one manuscript left the country. Prediction restated: across the entire printed handbook corpus the wenzipu longhand score is a singleton - the Youlan and nothing else - and the piece re-enters Chinese handbooks only as a modern re-transcription traceable to the Japanese manuscript, never as an independent pre-modern Chinese witness.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: surveying every score in the Qinqu jicheng (琴曲集成, the multi-volume Zhonghua shuju / Music Research Institute reprint series) by notation format, exactly one piece - the Jieshi diao Youlan - will be transmitted in longhand wenzipu (文字譜) while all other complete scores are in abbreviated jianzipu, and no handbook printed before 1900 will carry the Youlan as an independent witness (every pre-1900 appearance being absent, so the piece's Chinese handbook attestations date only from post-1884 re-importation of the Japanese manuscript). Primary clause: the wenzipu format is a corpus singleton. If the Qinqu jicheng contains more than one pre-modern wenzipu score, the conjecture is false; if the format census cannot be completed for at least 120 of the roughly 150 handbooks, the test voids for coverage.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Qinqu jicheng (琴曲集成) reprint series as the handbook corpus - census each handbook's notation format (longhand wenzipu vs abbreviated jianzipu) and check the earliest datable Chinese witness of the Youlan against the Japanese manuscript facsimile (Tokyo National Museum; the Yang Shoujing line of transmission). A single additional pre-modern wenzipu score, or a pre-1884 independent Chinese Youlan witness, kills it.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

That the Jieshi diao Youlan is the sole surviving wenzipu score is the textbook fact of qin studies, stated wherever the piece is discussed: van Gulik presents it as the only longhand tablature extant, the Qinqu jicheng opens its first volume with the Tang scroll precisely because nothing else like it exists among the 140-odd handbooks, and the re-importation history - Yang Shoujing's discovery in Japan, the 1884 Guyi congshu facsimile, and all later Chinese versions (Yang Zongji's Qinxue congshu realizations onward) descending from it - is the published provenance narrative. Both halves of the primary clause are already stated in print; only the mechanical handbook-by-handbook confirmation is left.

• R.H. van Gulik, The Lore of the Chinese Lute: An Essay in Ch'in Ideology (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1940)
• Qinqu jicheng (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1963-; rev. 30-vol. ed. 2010), vol. 1, Jieshi diao Youlan facsimile and Zha Fuxi's prefatory survey
• Guyi congshu (Tokyo, 1884; Li Shuchang and Yang Shoujing), which reprinted the Youlan scroll and began its Chinese re-transmission

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.