Read The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry Online
Authors: Tony Barnstone
A purple fortress, high wind, powerful bows,
—kings and princes out hunting on horseback.
Summoning eagles and quivering arrows they come back late.
Two white wolves hang facedown from a saddle.
I come to this serene pond in the forest
to kill the endlessness of an idle day.
Gushes of wind mess up duckweed traces.
Falling leaves disperse fish shadows.
Dewdrops are cool on a clear dawn.
Lotus flowers look cold in deep autumn.
I have no one to reveal my thoughts to.
I stand alone, my heart reflecting itself.
Silver nails pluck fifty icy strings;
wind hurries through Sea Gate,
stretching goose formations.
How many complaints are there from old lovers?
Like moonlight filling my boat by the Yangtze River.
AFTER THE EXPULSION OF THE MONGOLS, CHINA WAS RULED
by the Chinese again in the Ming dynasty, though it was to fall to outsiders yet again with the invasion of the Manchus and the founding of the Qing dynasty. Zhu Yuanzhang, a former monk who had led a rebellion against the Mongols, became the first Ming emperor, taking on the name Hong Wu. He reinstated the imperial examination system, but as the writing of poetry was no longer required, Chinese poetry continued its decline from its height in the Tang and Song dynasties.
Hong Wu was one of three emperors of China with peasant roots. Sympathetic to the plight of the lowly, he instituted low land taxes and shifted the economy's focus from trade to agriculture. Hong Wu reigned from the capital in Nanjing, but under the third Ming emperor the capital was moved to Beijing, and the Forbidden City (so named because it was forbidden to the common folk) was built there as an imperial palace. It was also during the Ming that the Great Wall was reconstructed and expanded into the massive structure we know today.
Hong Wu had come to power by rebellion. As he feared losing power in the same fashion, he violently suppressed those he suspected of fomenting conspiracy and revolt. Hong Wu and his successors micromanaged their empire, delegating little except to the trusted eunuchs, who became exceedingly powerful during the Ming. The eunuchs vied for power with the scholar elites and even formed a secret police to spy upon the rival scholars, the Mandarins. They utilized torture and execution and in the 1620s executed more than seven hundred scholars.
The Ming was a prosperous dynasty, reaching its peak in the
early fifteenth century, as new crops were cultivated, the empire spread and collected tribute from neighboring countries, and the population rose to around 100 million people. Seeking to maintain China's cultural purity, the government forbade the Chinese to travel beyond the empire's borders and prohibited trade with foreigners. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and English traders smuggled and forced their way into the lucrative Chinese market. Christian missionaries came in tandem and achieved recognition in the Ming court, where some Jesuits found employment as astronomers.
Despite the isolationist policies of the Ming, the empire was porous and surrounded by enemies. In the sixteenth century Japanese pirates and Mongol invaders from the north began to erode the empire. War with Japan over Korea in the late sixteenth century and widespread peasant uprisings to protest high taxation in the early years of the seventeenth century culminated in the fall of the dynasty. In 1644 the last emperor of the Ming committed suicide, and the capital at Beijing fell to the rebel leader Li Zicheng. The rebels were driven out, however, when the commander of the Ming army collaborated with the leader of the Manchu army. The Manchus, who had been encroaching upon Ming territory since the 1580s, then seized power and founded a new dynasty, the Qing.
The Ming was famous for its porcelain, and it was also a time of great work in theater and fiction. Printing techniques advanced, fostering the dissemination of literature, the popularization of vernacular short stories of many sorts, and the development of massive and extraordinary novels, most notably
The Journey to the West
, a rollicking, hilarious account of how a stone monkey traveled to India and brought the Buddhist scriptures back to China;
The Plum in the Golden Vase
, an intricate, sexually explicit masterpiece; and
Three Kingdoms and Water Margin.
In poetry, the Ming's difficult political climate worked to suppress innovation. In fact the Ming is generally regarded as a period of mediocrity in Chinese poetry, despite the prodigious quantity of poems it produced. As one critic observes, “Ming literature is striking in many ways for its routine nature and lack of imagination. The Confucian scholarly class, who seem to have been little more than a decadent middle class, upheld and aggravated an absurd system
of examinations that favored their own inertia.”
1
The dominance in the Ming of the Old Phraseology School (an antiquarian movement) led to self-conscious imitation of the forms, lines, and themes of great poetry of the past at the expense of originality and creativity. While many Ming poets were content with imitating the height of Chinese poetry in the High Tang, there was also an individualist practice among Ming poets, particularly among such painter-poets as Zhang Yu, Gao Qi, Tang Yin, Shen Zhou, and Yuan Hongdao, who were open to influence from the Song dynasty poets and usually more at home with self-expression than the poets of the Old Phraseology School. As Jonathan Chaves points out, “The sheer quantity of Ming poetry, the quality of so much of it, and its stylistic richness and diversity all cry out for serious attention.”
2
With his friend Gao Qi (also included in this volume) and two others, Zhang Yu was known as one of the “Four Distinguished Men of Wu.” Like many high-profile literary men of the early Ming dynasty, a time of purges and political repression, he suffered an unhappy fate. Faced with arrest, he chose instead to commit suicide.
Relay boats come, sounding like thunder.
One is just leaving, another demands to be rushed in.
How dare we delay any of them?
The officials are furious when we don't furnish them right
with painted screens, embroidered quilts, and red carpets,
but spring dreams are short and the boats are soon gone.
A captain kneels on the floor, persuading an imperial envoy:
“Please don't be too happy or too offended,
since ancient times heaven and earth have been like a relay station
with countless people rushing past.”
*
The relay boats, like the Pony Express in the United States, were a system for sending missives, messengers, and officials throughout the empire.
Gao Qi came from Suzhou, in Jiangsu province, and is thought of as the premier poet of the Ming dynasty. He was a precocious youth, and as a teen formed a poetry group called the “Ten Friends on the North Outskirts,” or the “Ten Talented Ones.” Along with three literary friends (including the poet Zhang Yu, also represented in this volume), he was known as one of the “Four Distinguished Men of Wu.” His reputation is that of a townsman poet, a poet of humble origins, and he was part of a tradition of townsman poetry in the region of Suzhou that included the painter-poet Shen Zhou. He gravitated toward the poets of the High Tang and of the Han and Wei dynasties, anticipating the Old Phraseology School that was to emerge in another two centuries. His extraordinary facility as a poet allowed him to imitate convincingly the styles of past poets. He might have been associated with the government of Zhang Shicheng, whose regime was conquered by the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. Only seven years after the founding of the Ming, Gao Qi was executed on slight pretext, only thirty-eight years old.
Where is my sorrow from?
I suddenly see it when autumn comes.
It's hard to name it when I try to speak.
In confusion I just know it.
Is it that I'm afraid of aging?
Or complaining about my busy humbleness?
It is not the sigh of poor scholars;
can it be the sadness of being exiled?
If you say I'm counting days till my return—
I have never left my hometown!
If you say I'm sad over separation—
I have never lost sight of my beloved.
I compared my sorrow to autumn grass,
and yet cold dews could not make them wilt.
I liken it to smoke and mist,
yet even autumn wind could not drive it off.
Just let me ask since the arrival of this sorrow
how many days have passed?
When I lived by the west brook,
I enjoyed the spectacular mountains and rivers there.
But when I returned to the east garden,
I sighed over the grass and trees' withering.
Who ever comes to see me when I live here, a nobody?
Only sorrow is my companion.
Most people find ways to entertain themselves,
never tired of outings and banquets.
But I alone have this sorrow,
walking to and fro, for what?
In the sound of this flowing stream I hear a spinning wheel.
A stone bridge. A dark springtime of flowerless trees.
From what place does the wind carry this sweet smell?
Tea baking at noon in a cottage over the hill.
By a slant bamboo table behind a screen the bed hides.
I lie watching new swallows visiting a poor house.
Nothing on my mind, I live an idle life,
worrying whether this rain will hurt apricot blossoms.
Shen Zhou was the foremost Ming dynasty painter as well as a distinguished poet and calligrapher. His father was a landowner in the village of Xiangcheng (north of Suzhou), where Shen Zhou lived his entire life despite his extraordinary talent. He lived in the ancestral estate on which he was born until 1471, when he built his own home in the area. He worked as a village head and tax collector and took on painting pupils, many of whom (such as Tang Yin) went on to achieve fame themselves. As a poet Shen Zhou was influenced by Bai Juyi, Su Shi, and Lu You. His subject matter (as in his painting) often dealt with farming life in the villages of his area.
In green water a red mountain leans on my vine walking stick.
The setting sun lingers west of the small bridge.
I chant poems low, and from the brook a bird startles up
and is lost in a swirl of deep clouds, singing.
A hollow wall where a dim lamp-wick glows;
by the unused steps, insects sing chaos.
The River of Stars is shadowed by a thin edge of cloud.
Clear dewdrops are silent among thousands of trees.
In lake country, autumn water brims;
people drift off as wild smoke spills into the sky.
Who knows how to forget worries?
I face green mountains alone and think of old monk Zan.
Zhu Yunming came from a literary family in Changzhou prefecture, Suzhou. Born with six fingers on one hand, he took on the literary name Zhishan (“extra knob”). He was known as one of the “Four Gentlemen of Wu.” A talented and intelligent youth who was able to compose poems by the age of eight, Zhu passed regional exams and became an official. He was the magistrate of Xingning, Guangdong, and earned a reputation for just governance and for moral leadership in education. He was not a proponent of neo-Confucianism or of Daoist rituals and beliefs and was critical of scholar-officials for what he saw as their puffery, hypocrisy, and even outright betrayal (he was very critical of Zhao Mengfu, for example, for agreeing to serve the government of the Mongol invaders). He became the assistant prefect of Ying-tien (Nanjing), and after retiring devoted himself to scholarship and to writing.
In addition to poetry, Zhu Yunming wrote random meditations, stories, histories, and anecdotes. He was also a painter and a master calligrapher who specialized in the “mad grass” style. As Yoshikawa Kojiro notes, “His actions were as free and uninhibited as his calligraphic style. In return for his services as a calligrapher he most welcomed being recompensed with female companionship. If the payment happened to be in cash, he would squander it drinking with his cohorts, which may account for why he was pursued by creditors whenever he stepped out the door.”
1
A nonconformist and a freethinker, he became the subject of a number of stories, and ultimately of a novel,
The Romance of Zhu Yunming.
Resting my body in a monk's cloud chamber,
1
my dreams relax.
Pine trees and cranes rise between screen and pillow.
A beautiful pheasant makes a long song.
My hand pushes the window, and mountains fill my eyes.
1
Yoshikawa Kojiro,
Five Hundred Years of Chinese Poetry, 1150–1650
, translated by John Timothy Wixted (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 126–27.
1
“Cloud chamber” is a term for a monk's bedroom.
A famous landscape painter and calligrapher, Tang Yin was grouped with three other poet-painters as one of the “Four Gentlemen of Wu.” In 1489 he passed the provincial exam and was listed as the top candidate. The next year he took the national exam and was involved in a case in which other candidates cheated. After a full investigation he was demoted to government clerk, ending his hopes for an official career. He worked as a painter and met with great success (along with Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, and Qiu Ying, he was considered one of the “Four Masters of the Ming”). He was called upon to work for a prince, Qu Chenhao (died 1521), but when he learned that the prince was planning a rebellion, Tang Yin pretended to be insane, drinking wildly, acting stupid, and stripping naked, which enabled him to resign his position. After that he was very much given to carnal pleasures and wine, and yet at the same time he tried to seek comfort in Buddhism. His amorous exploits were the source of countless anecdotes, short stories, and even a play. On his deathbed his final words were that the generations to come would misunderstand him just as his own had.