That tale has now been reworked into a new, experimental presentation, to be performed as part of Arts Festival Dunedin.
The story is more than 2000 years old, says Wu Na in a phone interview from Beijing.
She is one of China's most accomplished players of the guqin, the ancient seven-string zither, and will be performing the work in Dunedin with composer and pianist Gao Ping and Kunqu opera singer Dong Fei.
The composition is based on the story of Bo Ya, a guqin player who felt no-one understood his music.
One day when he was playing his guqin in a boat on a river, he heard a rhythm in the distance that accompanied his music perfectly.
''He thought `there must be someone who really knows what I'm playing' and he followed the sound to the mountain,'' Wu Na said.
The distant accompanist turned out to be a woodcutter called Ziqi, who Bo Ya thought would be too uneducated to understand.
However, when Bo Ya played music about a high mountain, the woodcutter described the mountain.
They became good friends and Bo Ya visited him annually, but when Ziqi died, Bo Ya broke his instrument, declaring nobody else understood his music.
When Wu Na's old friend, composer and pianist Gao Ping, who taught composition at the University of Canterbury, returned to China three years ago, they enjoyed meeting over a cup of tea and talking about music and projects they could do together.
''We wanted to do something with guqin and he always had a dream he wanted to do Gao Shan Liu Shui - High Mountain Flowing Water. He said this time he doesn't want to do the composition and he really wanted to do some improvisation,'' she said.
''We have done a lot of rehearsal so it's not really improvisation. We have a confirmed structure and know what kind of music we should be playing in each part. Only the notes and melody will be improvised each time but the structure is there.''
Wu Na (36) started learning guqin when she was 8 and the following year went to Beijing to study it at the Central Conservatory of Music, where she learnt both traditional and Western music.
Opera singer Dong Fei will sing poems related to the story, director Sara Brodie said.
There was a strong tradition in Kunqu of men specialising in the Dan or female roles, she said.
''We are using different styles in the piece and he will be wearing traditional dress but not the full regalia. We are playing on the duality of feminine and masculine and revealing his masculinity as well as his femininity - which, quite frankly, makes me feel masculine.''
Gao Shan Liu Shui - High Mountain Flowing Water is primarily a musical performance but also has a theatrical element. With visuals and translations of the poems by video artist Jon He, who is on a doctoral scholarship at Victoria University, it would be a visual and aural feast, she said.
