Hua Yanjun is known as A Bing (阿炳). His best-known piece is The Moon Reflected on the Second Spring, and the story of how it was named comes out of the 1950 field interview in which Yang Yinliu asked him where he usually played.
Yang Yinliu's 1952 Abing Quji (《阿炳曲集》, first published by Wanye Bookstore) collected six of his pieces together with twelve first-hand accounts from those who interviewed him - the first substantial written record of his life, and the source later Chinese scholarship cites most often. Yang's own 1980 statement that Hua's earliest grounding was Daoist music, and was family-transmitted, is one of several explanations on offer; Qian Tiemin's Abing yu Daojiao (《阿炳与道教》) argues the connection runs through his whole life.
Hua described his own method without crediting any single teacher: 'Perhaps it came from the Daoists, perhaps from the Buddhists, perhaps from what I heard in the street... in all these years I have heard music I liked, and whoever taught it I learned from. Too many people have taught me a tune or two to count.' The survey behind this page notes that what he heard went into him, but that what he played was none of those things in particular.