At the age of eight, he started to learn the sanxian, a 500-year-old Chinese three-string, plucked instrument. The song he learned was a song from the Qing Dynasty(the dynasty of his great-great grandfather), it consisted of 13 pieces, with each piece about 20–45 minutes long. He did not learn all of the pieces of the song because his tutor only knew 13 of them (there were more that his tutor did not know); even so, it took him 2 years to master it, with courses of one 2-hour lesson per week. He had already passed on the song to a lecturer in the Central Conservatoire of Music in Beijing, his student also took two years to master it.