The oldest native instrument of China, the guqin is a seven-string plucked monophonic instrument known for its ornamented melodies and nuanced performing style. Despite its long association with the literati, its musical form remains undertheorized as relevant discussions tend to be descriptive rather than analytical. Contextualized by perspectives on performance practice, organology, and Chinese culture, this presentation proposes a hierarchical framework for understanding guqin’s phrase structure with examples from the eighth to the seventeenth century, to be performed live. While the native tablature notation (jianzipu) does not directly communicate such information as rhythm or phrasing, the interpretive practices by various guqin Schools share enough common features to inspire a formal framework. Extending from ancient treatises, I define guqin’s phrase components as basic articulations, compound articulations, and elaborative gestures, which are congruous with the timbral qualities and pitch content they generate such as motives and elaborated notes. Invoking the Chinese philosophical and literary idea of “harmony,” and taking the qin-song (singing while playing the guqin) practice into account, I propose that the reiteration of pitch classes realized contrastingly in musical parameters such as articulation, register, timbre, and ornamentation is the fundamental organizing and developing principle both within and between phrases in guqin music. In addition, phrases can be complicated by transformations such as elision and expansion. I hope this framework can assist the rendering process (dapu) of many uninterpreted ancient scores and the idiomatic composition of new pieces.