The title has a documented origin. Asked where he usually played, Hua Yanjun answered that he played in the street and at the Huishan spring court, and Yang Yinliu connected the piece accordingly during the 1950 field recording. Yang initially described it in his 1956 biography as depicting the moon reflected between the clear waters of the second spring, and revised that in 1980 to describing a remembered landscape. The scholarly reading has since moved further: from programme music depicting scenery, through 'expressing feeling through scenery', to a broad consensus that the work is not a title piece at all. He Luting put it plainly - the elegant name actually contradicts the music, which expresses Hua Yanjun's own life rather than the scenery.
Chen Yingshi's 1963 analysis finds five large sections framed by an introduction and coda, in a gong mode with zhi as the relocated tone, built on 'fish-biting-tail' phrase overlap. Where the pitch material comes from remains unsettled: the competing accounts trace it to the tanhuang repertoire, to Jiangnan folk tune, and to Daoist music, and none has won.
The piece reached a wide public through records rather than concert halls. Lu Ji pressed in the second half of 1950 for the field recording to be pressed as discs, and Tianjin People's Broadcasting Station first broadcast it in 1951. Performers still disagree about how much may be cut, and Huang Anyuan has argued against playing it on the erquanqin, a position Shi Yong contests - a disagreement that continues the older argument about whether the title matches the content.