Yang Zongji in the modern era asserted that Guangling San is actually "The Melody of Nie Zheng Assassinating the Han King" (see fn.1, #10), whereas Dai Mingyang recognizes it as Nie Zheng killing the minister of Han.
What is said in Qin Cao surely has sections which do not inspire belief, as when it says that the piece about Nie Zheng killing the Han king was written by Nie Zheng himself; that "when Nie Zheng played the qin in the palace, horses and cows stopped to listen;" and so forth.
Now, since we know that before Xi Kang, as early as the Han dynasty (this period could be just about the same era as the creation of [the musical piece] Guangling San), the story in the qin song about Nie Zheng carrying out an assassination is the one about
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The Guangling San in Shen Qi Mi Pu is a traditional tablature dating from the Northern Song or earlier; Xilutang Qintong Tablature B approaches being a Southern Song or early Yuan volume, and Xilutang Qintong Tablature A is a Ming dynasty version by someone who made a relatively large number of adjustments and revisions.
If we take the Song dynasty tablatures Gu Yuan by Jiang Kui as well as Kaizhi Huang Ying Yin and the five modal preludes from Shilin Guangji [these being the only other examples of simplified qin tablature prior to Shen Qi Mi Pu], and compare these to the Shen Qi Mi Pu tablature, we unfortunately find that Gu Yuan and Huang Ying Yin are small songs containing lyrics, and that there is no way to compare their melodies and right hand finger techniques, [and] each of the pieces of the five modal preludes we suspect of being overly