Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150-1650: The Chin, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties
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Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150-1650: The Chin, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties
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Overview
Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry offers the only historical survey, in any language, of this important span of Chinese poetry. Written by the foremost Japanese sinologist of this century, and translated here in a lucid analogue to his famous prose style, the work provides a brief but comprehensive review of the period's literary history, a sketch of its political and social history in relation to literature, and a rendering of more than one hundred and fifty poems.
Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691605487 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Library of Asian Translations , #1020 |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150â"1650
The Chin, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties
By Kojiro Yoshikawa, John Timothy Wixted
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06768-1
CHAPTER 1
Chinese Poetry of the Later Imperial Dynasties
I hope to outline in this volume and in a subsequent one the history of Chinese poetry from Chin and Yuan times, through the Ming period, up to the end of the Ch'ing dynasty — that is, from the mid-twelfth century until our own. This volume treats roughly the first half of this period, until the end of the Ming dynasty. It marks a continuation of my earlier study of Sung period poetry.
What is meant by "poetry" here is the term shih in its narrow sense in Chinese. That is to say, it refers to poems in the three genres of poetry that took final shape in T'ang times: "old-style poems" (ku-shih), "regulated verse" (lü-shih), and "quatrains" (chueh-chü). It is my intention to outline briefly how such writing continued the earlier poetic tradition and in what ways it developed over the nearly eight-hundred-year span of the Chin, Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties.
Heir to the tradition of earlier ages, poetry was the most important literary form of the Chinese people. Over the period under consideration, it continued to display uninterrupted development through a staggering number of poets and poems. Its development gives the lie to the overly rash estimation of "Oriental stagnation" and reflects the continued material and spiritual development of Chinese civilization. Poetry was a literary form having an ancient tradition, and the writing of poetry carried with it a consciousness of being the guardian of tradition. But at the same time poetry was also the literary form that expressed most faithfully both the new emotions springing up spontaneously from within the people over succeeding ages and their reactions to new realities they were daily confronting.
Yet the poems of what is here called the later imperial dynasties were written under circumstances that differed from earlier times in two ways. First, poetry became a literary form in the production of which a broad stratum of people participated. Most leaders in the world of poetry were ordinary townsmen rather than officials. In the history of earlier Chinese poetry poets, until the end of T'ang times or even until the end of the Northern Sung, were as a rule "specialists" in poetry; at the same time, they were either government officials or were striving to become such. Han Yü and Po Chü-i in T'ang times, as well as Ou-yang Hsiu, Wang An-shih, and Su Shih in the Northern Sung, besides being poets representative of their respective periods, were ministry-level officials in their time; and China's most famous poets, Li Po and Tu Fu, sought rank in government and failed. This situation began to change in the thirteenth century, from the final years of the Southern Sung onward. In the last chapter of my previous volume on Sung poetry, I noted that poems of the late Southern Sung were written not by officials but by townsmen. This marked the beginning of a future trend; with each later dynasty, the situation became more pronounced. In Yuan times, the Mongol regime restricted the participation of Chinese in government, which served to turn the energies of a still greater number of townsmen in the direction of poetry. Again in Ming times, because the structure of government was such that men of townsman origins more readily came into their own, the phenomenon of a broad stratum of people participating in the writing of poetry became even more pronounced. And the pattern carried over into the subsequent Ch'ing period.
Of course, officials of the time also wrote poems. Indeed, the writing of poetry was a necessary prerequisite for qualification as an official. But officials of the later imperial dynasties were degree holders (at least hsiu-ts'ai, or "flourishing talents," i.e., preliminary graduates) who came from the ranks of townsmen and obtained government position after having participated in the public government-service examination. A distinguishing characteristic of Sung and later Chinese society was the disappearance of the aristocratic order. This characteristic was special not only to this period in China, it also distinguished China from the rest of the contemporary world. Although the system of inheriting position by birth existed to some degree through T'ang times, it had disappeared by the Sung. The officials of later dynasties were ordinary townsmen who gained their position in government not through family status but by individual ability. As a result, their lives were never completely cut off, either physically or psychologically, from the lives of ordinary townsmen. This being the case, officials of townsman origins frequently became the leaders of townsman poetry, which in turn helped stimulate a further increase in the number of townsman poets. Over this nearly eight-hundred-year period there quietly unfolded a situation in which thousands to tens of thousands of poets, or at least people having minimal ability to write verse, became conscious of themselves as writers of poetry. The area of highest density for this was in the provinces of the lower Yangtze Delta, namely in Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Anhwei, as well as in Kiangsi. But with variation of density it prevailed throughout the empire.
What has been discussed above is the first and main feature differentiating poetry of this period from earlier Chinese poetry. As it is something I feel scholars until now have insufficiently stressed, it should be pointed out first as the most important feature of the age.
The second difference between the poetry of the later imperial dynasties and earlier verse is the growing use of past poetry as a model to be followed in the writing of one's own verse. From the Yuan dynasty on, this tendency became much more pronounced. Such a development was perhaps inevitable, given the spread of poetry writing and the increase in the number of poets. Generally speaking, over the period under discussion it was T'ang poetry that served most as the literary model to be followed. In T'ang times the three genres of poetry, old-style verse, regulated verse, and the quatrain, had become fully established. It was natural that, in terms of both diction and emotional content, T'ang poetry was often looked back upon as a model. Respect for T'ang poetry rose from the end of the Sung on into the Yuan dynasty. And in Ming times, especially in the sixteenth century during the time of the so-called Old Phraseology (Ku-wen-tz'u) movement, T'ang poetry became the model to be emulated to the exclusion of all others. In cases where it was felt that the imitation of T'ang poetry, with its emphasis on the lyrical, was not adequate to treating realities that were daily growing more complicated, the more discursive and rationalistic poetry of the Sung became the secondary model to be followed; and even from among T'ang poets, writers whose style was closer to Sung poetry, like Po Chü-i, were added as models. It is not until quite late, in the final years of the Ch'ing dynasty, that the exclusive use of Sung poetic models first developed.
These two distinguishing features of Chinese poetry of the later imperial dynasties — the increased number of poets and the use of poetic models — were either new to the history of poetry or were much more in evidence than before. Each had its good and bad effects on the writing of the age.
As a bad feature of the new milieu, the use of literary models often produced insipid, weak, carelessly written, vapid, or lifeless poems that merely imitated the external features of their models. The increase in the number of poets and their fecundity made this all the more likely.
Yet there were good features as well. The increase in the number of poets afforded greater occasion for the emergence of reflective, discerning writers. For such poets literary models worked in a positive way as something that heightened poetic intensity. Especially important is the fact that a large number of townsmen took part, as poets of some ability, in the production of literature. They formed a newly ascendant social stratum (comprising a different percentage in each dynasty) that sought to express its vitality first of all in poetry. It was they who first sensitively absorbed the new realities taking shape around them and gave expression to them. In addition, the Neo-Confucianism that Chu Hsi and others had established in Sung times became the philosophy of life for the townsmen of the period. This philosophy taught people broadly of their responsibility as members of society, "In the rise and fall of the Empire, the common man shares responsibility." This awareness is often found operative in the poems of individual townsmen. In short, the main feature of the poetry of the period is that it was an expression of the state of mind of successive generations of a new social stratum.
As a result of the mixture of these good and bad features, the poetry of the later imperial dynasties can be judged, on the whole, to have had a healthy development and to have continued to comprise, as poetry had before, the heart of Chinese literature.
Here again, two points should be kept in mind. First, although T'ang poetry served as a literary model, the despair and excess of sorrow that were often evident in T'ang poems were not, for the most part, carried on in later dynasties. The self-awareness ordinary townsmen had of being a newly ascendant stratum in society acted as a restraint to such a tendency. In my previous volume on Sung poetry, I discussed in some detail the fact that the poetry of Su Shih early broke with the sorrow and despair that had been nearly universal in the poetry that preceded him. Of townsman origins himself, Su Shih was the forerunner of poetry in the later dynasties.
Second, the poems of the period that excelled were not the ones that were simple expressions of feeling; these frequently could not avoid being repetitions of the poems they were modeled upon. Rather, the poems that excelled were descriptive of, or written in reaction to, new realities. Stated simply, theme is more interesting in the poetry of the period than expression; what is being written about is more compelling than how it is written. There already was such a tendency in Sung poetry, and it continued and became more general in later periods.
There was an additional new factor that, more than any other, contributed to poetic intensity: the former submissiveness of non-Chinese peoples toward the Chinese with whom they came in contact disappeared, and serious clashes between Chinese and non-Chinese frequently took place. In the thirteenth century, the destruction of the Chin and Southern Sung dynasties by the Mongols; in the seventeenth century, the overthrow of the Ming regime by the Manchus; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the oppression of the Ch'ing dynasty by the West — each of these occasioned a most intense poetry in the form of poems of reaction or resistance by Chinese.
This volume will emphasize the process by which poetry over the first five hundred years of the later imperial period became the literature of a broad stratum of society. Because this has been touched upon little by earlier scholars, I will lay particular stress on it. Also, in light of the fact that poetry of the time was largely modeled on earlier poetic writing, I will describe what those models were and how they changed over time. Finally, I will attach importance to the fact that this was a period of discord producing an intense poetry of reaction or resistance. Such was already the case during the period under discussion in the following chapter.
CHAPTER 2Chin Dynasty Poetry: Reaction to the Mongol Incursion, 1150–1250
The Mongol Storm
The most important event in thirteenth-century Chinese history, indeed of world history of the time, was the series of foreign conquests carried out by Mongol tribes under the leadership of Chinggis-qan (Genghis Khan) and his successors, which swept the world like a violent storm. China, being situated next to the Mongol homeland, was of course affected. To the east, the Mongols reached Japan, where they were referred to as Genko, or "Yuan bandits"; to the west, they swept over the western fringes of Asia, pressing on as far as Eastern Europe. The Chin dynasty, which had been established by Jurchen tribes in North China, fell victim to the Mongols in the first half of the thirteenth century, and its demise gave rise to Yuan Hao-wen's poetic laments. Meanwhile to the south, the Southern Sung dynasty was temporarily beyond the reach of Mongol depredations, and poetry by ordinary townsmen prospered there amid a regional peace. But forty years later, during the latter half of the thirteenth century, the onslaught extended south and destroyed the Southern Sung, bringing all of China under Mongol domain. Such were the circumstances under which poems of resistance by Wen T'ien-hsiang and others were written.
Poetry written in reaction to the Mongol incursions is the main subject of this and the following chapter. This chapter will discuss it as it appeared in the first half of the thirteenth century in North China after the fall of the Chin dynasty. In terms of actual time, it coincides with the period of the Southern Sung treated in the final chapter of my earlier volume, An Introduction to Sung Poetry.
It was at the beginning of the century, in 1206, that Chinggis, or Temiijin, was installed as qan (khan). First he set his sights on the Chin, which occupied the territory stretching from Manchuria across North China. No more than nine years later, in 1215, he forced the capitulation of the Chin capital of Peking (called Chung-tu, or Central Capital) and seized the area north of the Yellow River. The Chin dynasty, transferring its capital south of the Yellow River to Pien-ching, or present-day Kaifeng, gained a temporary lease on life because the Mongols turned their attention west and swept on to Europe. Under Chinggis-qan's son, Ögödei, they again turned eastward and destroyed the Chin dynasty, bringing all of North China under Mongol control. The year was 1234.
The Mongol onslaught was violent in the true sense of the word. Those towns that requested submission when first encircled by Mongol troops would be passed over. But those that prior to surrender had attempted even slight resistance had their entire populations slaughtered, the only exception being made for those with special skills, such as carpenters and actors. For town after town forced into surrender within the Chin domain, the rule was strictly enforced.
This is given concrete illustration in "Hsiao-tzu T'ien-chün mu-piao," or "A Tomb Inscription for the Filial Son, Mr. T'ien," which was written for T'ien Hsi by his friend, the Yuan poet Liu Yin (who is discussed in chapter 3). On the seventeenth day of the twelfth lunar month, 1213, the city of Pao-ting in Hopei surrendered to the Mongols and all of its inhabitants were driven outside the city walls. T'ien Hsi and his father were among their number. In the evening the command was given to kill all old people. Soldiers lined them up in a row and carried out the order with gusto. There were ten to twenty men ahead of T'ien Hsi's father. Taking advantage of its being dusk, T'ien Hsi stood in his father's place, putting his hands to the ground and stretching out his head. Receiving two knife blows, he passed out and, when he came to, it was midnight. Two days later a second command was issued. This time the slaughter was to be carried out with no regard to age. As an artisan, T'ien Hsi was exempted from execution and taken in custody to nearby An-su. There, upon learning of his father's death, he returned to search for the body, escaping notice by the Mongol army. Fording rivers by night, he temporarily buried the father's remains in his mother's grave.
Lines like the following, which appear in Yuan Hao-wen's poetry, are no poetic exaggeration.
Tenderly, wild vines enwrap bones of the slain;
Why does the setting sun cast light on empty city walls?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150â"1650 by Kojiro Yoshikawa, John Timothy Wixted. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- Acknowledgments, pg. ix
- Translator's Preface, pg. xi
- Introduction, pg. 3
- Chapter 1. CHINESE POETRY OF THE LATER IMPERIAL DYNASTIES, pg. 8
- Chapter 2. CHIN DYNASTY POETRY: REACTION TO THE MONGOL INCURSION, 1150-1250, pg. 15
- Chapter 3. SOUTHERN SUNG LOYALIST POETRY, 1250-1300, pg. 44
- Chapter 4. THE MATURATION OF YUAN POETRY, 1300-1350, pg. 76
- Chapter 5. THE EARLY MING, 1350-1400, pg. 102
- Chapter 6. THE MIDDLE MING (I): STAGNATION AND REVIVAL, 1400-1500, pg. 121
- Chapter 7. THE MIDDLE MING (II) : THE AGE OF OLD PHRASEOLOGY, 1500-1600, pg. 137
- Chapter 8. THE LATE MING, 1600-1650, pg. 177
- Afterword, pg. 191
- Index, pg. 197