Reading Jianzipu 减字谱

The guqin is written in jianzipu — "reduced-character notation." Each cluster is a little stack of abbreviated Chinese characters that tells your two hands what to do: which string, which finger, which stopping position, which stroke. It does not tell you the rhythm — that comes from the tradition, the teacher, and your own ear.

How a cluster is built

Read a jianzipu character roughly top-to-bottom. A typical cluster packs together, in shorthand:

• The left-hand action & finger — which finger presses, and where.
• The stopping position — usually a hui (徽) marker, the mother-of-pearl dots along the surface.
• The string number — one through seven.
• The right-hand stroke — the pluck (mo, tiao, gou, and so on) that actually sounds the note.

That is why one small symbol can equal a whole sentence of instruction. Once the strokes from the right-hand lessons and the presses from the left-hand lessons are in your fingers, the notation stops looking like a wall of glyphs and starts reading like directions.

Symbol glossary

This glossary is built automatically from the symbols introduced in each lesson. As lesson write-ups are added, the symbols will collect here in the order you first meet them. Check back as the course fills in — or head to the lessons to start.

Going deeper

For the historical facsimiles — like the famous Shenqi Mipu (神奇秘谱, 1425), the oldest surviving printed collection of guqin tablature — the original woodblock pages are in the public domain and can be studied freely. For an open, technical breakdown of how the reduced characters are assembled as a font, the JianZiPu open-source project documents the glyph-layering system.