John Thompson is the best known performer of early music for the Chinese silk string zither, the music instrument most favored by Chinese philosophers and aesthetes (in Chinese: qin ["chin"] or guqin ["goo-chin"]). After a college degree in Western musicology (early music) and graduate studies in ethnomusicology, he began in 1974 to study China's silk-string guqin zither as played at present. Since 1976 he has focused on early repertoire, personally reconstructing over 150 melodies published in 15th and 16th century handbooks.