Ancient Chinese musicians wrote down scores by "Gongchi", a traditional Chinese musical notation. The Gongchi notation emerged during about 581-907 and is thought by some people to be connected with reed instruments with characters "shang", "chi, gong, fan, liu, wu and yi "representing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 on the modern simplified notation respectively.

Its rhythm is called ban and yan, representing downbeat and upbeat respectively. Usually, the symbol 、 or x stands for ban, o for middle yan and · for small yan.