HAN DYNASTY

The qin, or Chinese zither, is said to have been invented by the first of the legendary Five Emperors, Fuxi (2953-2838 BC), when he saw five stars fall towards a wutong tree which was afterwards nested by phoenixes. He chopped down the tree, which he took to have absorbed the essence of Heaven and Earth, and created the classical instrument that has remained so important throughout Chinese cultural history. The very character for music, yue, is made up of the pictograph for 'silk', of which the strings were originally made, over 'wood'. The mysticism surrounding the instrument is such that Confucius deemed it an essential and integral part of man's higher education, practised not to produce 'music' as such, but for the attainment of the lofty ideals of a gentleman. This ethos was further demonstrated by the Jin dynasty scholar Tao Yuanming (365-427), who in the middle of a banquet took out a qin without strings and sang that "so long as you can grasp its mysteries and wonders, you can forget about the sounds produced by mere strings."
See the similar figure illustrated by Yip Shing Yiu in the chapter entitled The Guqin (The Ancient Qin), P.Y.K. Lam, op.cit., pp.212-223.