The Eternal Bone Flute

A bone flute set out from a campfire at the end of the Ice Age,

its notes carried by the bitter winds of Banquan and over the ashes of Lutai;

It murmured before Confucius's lecture hall and cried out amid the war clouds of Red Cliffs;

It heard the jade pendants of Yang Guifei and saw frost on Yue Fei's iron armor.

It never wrote a history book, yet with echoes from its seven holes,

it turned more than five thousand years of dawns and dusks

into a ceaseless river of sound.

Now it rests in your hands:

in its cracks lies the last breath of our ancestors;

in its holes, the heartbeat of all China.