ANONYMOUS FOLK SONGS. Beginning with the Shi Ching, The Book of Odes, whose editing was attributed to Confucius, it has been the custom in China periodically to make extensive collections of folk song, “to ascertain what the people are thinking.” No other culture seems ever to have done this, although it is a most astute idea. Today it is obvious that popular folk and protest songs reflect the profound dissatisfaction with a murderous social system. Although the classical Chinese, following the Confucian commentaries on The Book of Odes, interpreted simple erotic lyrics and narrative ballads as allegorical statements of political criticism, this is not as outrageous as it seemed to earlier generations of Western translators. Of course there is nothing of the one-to-one correspondence of erotic metaphor to political fact the Confucianists persuaded themselves existed, but we are well aware that the love songs of a Donovan, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, or Leonard Cohen are quite as subversive of the society which produced them as any overt song of protest. The Han poems are usually serious and seem to have been literary reworkings of folk songs in the yueh fu meter. However, the Southern Six Dynasties collections are simple, erotic lyrics, probably sung by courtesans. Many are attributed to legendary girls—Tzu Yeh, T’ao Yeh, and the tragic Maid of Hua Mountain. Like the Shi Ching love songs, recent scholarship has arranged many of the Tzu Yeh songs in dialogue between a young man and a girl, and seen them as part of a harvest festival marriage or group marriage celebration. The Northern Six Dynasties yueh fu are harder, more literary, more masculine, and show the influence of the peoples beyond the northern frontiers.
CHANG CHI (author of “Night at Anchor by Maple Bridge”) lived in the eighth century under the Emperor Hsuan Tsung in the great age of the T’ang Dynasty.
CHANG CHI, a poet of the later Tang Dynasty, and author of “Faithful Wife,” lived in the ninth century. (There were two different poets with this name as spelled in English. The Chi’s are different in Chinese.)
CHIANG CHIEH lived at the end of the Sung Dynasty, in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. He became a hermit rather than take office under the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty.
CHIANG SHE CH’UAN lived from 1725 to 1784.
CHU CHEN PO was a ninth-century poet. A wonderful bestiary could be made up by selections from the whole body of classical Chinese poetry (including “Hedgehog”) and illustrated with classical Chinese or Japanese paintings. I recommend the idea to some children’s book publisher.
THE POETESS CHU SHU CHEN. Information about the Poetess Chu Shu Chen is all guesswork, based on her poems. She almost certainly lived late in the Sung Dynasty, after Su Tung P’o and Ju Shih; doubtful legends connect her with both. These great Chinese women poets, of which Chu Shu Chen and Li Ch’ing Chao are the two most famous of the Sung Dynasty, are sisters of Christine de Pisan, Gaspara Stampa, and Louise Labé. There has been no writer like them in English, although a similar sensibility is found, in a religious form, in Christina Rossetti.
CH’ANG CH’U LING (673-740) was a counselor of the Emperor Hsuan Tsung of the T’ang Dynasty called Ming Huang, “The Bright Emperor.”
CH’ANG KUO FAN lived in the nineteenth century. The stability of the Chinese tradition and way of life is shown by the echo of this poem across the centuries from the nineteenth-century poets to Hsieh Ling Yun (385-433) in the Time of Troubles in the Six Dynasties, and from him back to Ch’u Yuan (322 B. c.) of the Warring Kingdoms.
THE POETESS CH’EN T’AO, not to be confused with the ninth-century hermit poet Ch’en Sung Po (Ch’en T’ao), was the wife of a Sung Dynasty general.
CH’EN YU YI lived from 1090 to 1138.
CH’EN CH’I lived in the eighth century. “Visit to the Hermit Ts’ui” is a bread and butter note; the finest such poem is probably the Japanese waka echoing Wang Wei:
Although it was not my own home
The wild plum by the window
Smelled just the same.
THE EMPEROR CH’IEN WEN OF LIANG (503-551). An exceptionally large number of the emperors of the Six Dynasties and Three Kingdoms were poets, probably due, as in Japan’s Time of Troubles, to the fact that the emperors of the contending states were mostly rois fainéants. Power was in the hands of warlords of the type the Japanese stabilized in the Shogunate.
CH’IN CH’ANG SIU. “Spring Sorrow” is a T’ang Dynasty poem, possibly a folk song. She is dreaming of her husband.
CH’U CH’UANG I (early eighth century) was a close friend of the first major T’ang poet and landscapist Wang Wei.
FAN YUN (451-505) was a courtier of the Emperor Wu of Liang. This poem is answered by that of his friend Shen Yueh.
FU HSUAN (217-278) wrote this poem as a literary imitation of the folk songs of the Six Dynasties, the southern style yueh fu.
HAN YU (768-824) was the most famous of the prose writers of the T’ang Dynasty and one of the first thinkers to whom the term Neo-Confucian can be strictly applied. This is his most famous poem. On the whole Han Yu seems a rather formal writer, devoid of original ideas.
HO CH’E CH’ANG (659-744) was an official under the Bright Emperor and a drinking companion of LI PO.
HO HSUN (d. 527) was a contemporary and friend of LIU HSIAO
CH’AO, SHEN YUEH and FAN YUN.
HSIEH LING YUEN (385-433), Duke of K’ang Lo, was one of the most important poets of the Six Dynasties period. He grew up in the Chin Kingdom where his great grand-uncle Hsieh An had been prime minister and his grandfather a field marshal. At the fall of the Chin Dynasty he became an important official of the Liu Sung. Although his reputation is based upon his nature poetry, meditative elegiac verse describing mountain hermitages, monasteries, or lonely travel, of a type that would have a great influence on Tu Fu, he was actually the proprietor of an immense estate where his fantastic landscaping—at the expense of hundreds of forced laborers—made him enemies in all the surrounding country. He seems to have been restless there, unable to let politics alone, however much he objected to it. Eventually he was demoted from high office and sent to Canton where again he made enemies and finally was executed. He was apparently a rather manic individual and never at rest even at his elaborate retreat. He should have a minor place as a culture hero he invented mountaineering boots. His poetry is remarkable for its dramatic sonority, rather as if Wordsworth had been rewritten by Marlowe. In his youth Neo-Taoism, and in his maturity Buddhism of a kind related to Zen (Ch’an in Chinese, Dhyana in Sanskrit), the School of Instant Enlightenment, played an explicit role in his poetry. He himself not only wrote poems and essays on the Doctrine of Instant Enlightenment, but read Sanskrit and translated several sutras, accomplishments unheard of among important Chinese poets. I find his poetry rather stiff, not unlike that of Ch’u Yuan, the ancestor of all the unhappy courtier poets. Although Hsieh Ling Yuen’s verse for his day was extremely modern, even modernistic, there is also something archaizing about it.
HSIEH NGAO lived at the end of the thirteenth century, during the final days of the Southern Sung. When the Mongols sacked Hang-chow he fled to the mountains and spent the rest of his life as a wandering hermit.
HSIN CH’I CHI (1140-1207) was a general, courtier, and friend of Su Tung P’o and the philosopher Chu Shi. On the fall of the Northern Sung to the Mongols he fled to Hangchow to the Emperor Kao Tsung where he became a general, the governor of provinces and the leader of expeditions attempting the reconquest of the North.
HUANG T’ING CH’IEN (1045-1105) was a friend of Su Tung P’o. “Clear Bright” is the Spring Feast of the Dead.
KAO CHI (1336-1374) was the most popular poet of the early Ming Dynasty. He was eventually executed. He led the revival of the classic style of the great T’ang poets.
KUAN YUN SHE lived in the thirteenth century. Seven-Seven, according to myth is the time when for one night the cowboy, Altair, crosses the Milky Way on a bridge of magpies to sleep with Vega, the weaving girl.
THE POETESS LI CHI’NG CHAO (1084-1142) belongs in the great company of Gaspara Stampa and Louise Labé. Although the poems sound like conventional “abandoned love” verses because they take off from the standard set piece, “The Deserted Concubine” (as in Li Po’s “The Jeweled Stairs Grievance,” translated by Pound), they are actually truly personal, written after the death of her husband. Her father was a friend of Su Tung P’o. She is China’s greatest poetess, of any period. Wut’ung trees—Sterculia plantanifolia—look like planes or sycamores. Nine-Nine—a day of picnics on hills, chrysanthemum viewing, and outdoor love-making—was originally both a harvest festival and the Autumn Feast of the Dead. “Orchid Boat”—her sex, or specifically her vulva.
LI P’IN wrote in the latter half of the ninth century. One of the most perfect poems of the later T’ang, “Crossing Han River” sums up the troubled times of the dying dynasty.
LI SHANG YIN lived from 813 to 859. If Tu Fu is to be compared to Baudelaire, Li Shang Yin in his more complex poems might be compared with Mallarmé. Yet underlying their complexities are extremely simple poetic situations of the most classic Chinese type. Although their poetry was comparatively unappreciated in the West until recently, a deeper knowledge of T’ang Dynasty poetic language and greater sophistication of poetic taste have led to contemporary revaluation. Today Li Shang Yin is considered the greatest T’ang poet after Po Chu I.
LIU CH’ANG CH’ING lived in the eighth century.
LIU YU HSI lived from 772 to 842.
LU CHI (261-303). Author of a famous Ars Poetica, one of the first and best in the Orient. Lu Chi was a military adventurer and courtier who was executed in the Six Dynasty struggles for the throne of Chin.
LU KUIE MENG lived in the ninth century.
LU YU (1125-1209) is the least classical of the major Sung poets. Although a member of the scholar gentry, he never attained, or desired, high office, and seems to have been genuinely far from rich, especially toward the end of his life. (Understand that throughout China’s history a really “poor farmer” never got a chance to read or write anything.) His poetry is loose, casual. It had to be—he wrote about eleven thousand poems. His best poems have that easy directness that is supposed to come only with rare, concentrated effort. By his day Sung China had retreated to the South and the Golden Tatars in the North were already being threatened by the Mongols who were soon to overwhelm all. Lu Yu’s patriotism was not prepared to accept the modus vivendi less doctrinaire minds had worked out, and his stirring agitational poems against the invader have been very popular in twentieth-century China where everybody has been an invader to everybody else.
MENG HAO JAN (689-740) was a friend of Wang Wei and one of the leading poets of the early years of the T’ang Dynasty. His middle years were spent as a hermit in the mountains. He is famous for having hidden under Wang Wei’s bed when the Emperor Hsuan Tsung came to call. Having offended the Emperor, he was not given a post and went happily back to his hermitage.
NG SHAO lived in the sixth century.
LADY P’AN was a favorite concubine of the Emperor Ch’eng Ti of Han (32 B. C.). Discarded by him, she wrote one of the first and best “deserted courtesan” poems, which would be imitated innumerable times in the centuries to come.
P’AN YUEH (P’AN YENG JEN), of the fourth century, was considered the most handsome man of his time. He became an important official, but like so many others in the Six Dynasties, was eventually executed. Although women are said to have rioted in the streets whenever he went by, he is most famous for his poems to his dead wife.
PAO YU was a monk of the fifth century.
PO CHU I (772-846) is generally considered, with Li Po, Wang Wei, and Tu Fu, one of the four leading poets of the T’ang Dynasty. More varied in his subjects than the others, he was a master of poignant, unforgettable phrases, many of which could be excerpted and stand alone as separate poems. It is this latter characteristic as much as anything else which accounts for his tremendous popularity with the classical poets of Japan, where, as Arthur Waley points out, he is revered as a god of poetry. He was a great favorite of Waley’s, whose translations of Po Chu I are among the finest poems of the twentieth century, and who also wrote an excellent biography of Po which everyone interested in Chinese verse, culture, or history should read. It is un-equaled as an introduction to the life of the T’ang Dynasty.
SHEN YUEH (441-513) was one of the circle of poets at the court of the Emperor Wu of Liang which included Fan Yun. Shen is extremely important in the evolution of Chinese verse. He popularized a factor in Chinese verse peculiar to the language, the conscious prosodic arrangement of the tones. He was also a severe critic of over-elaboration and references to the classics, older poems, and bits of legend and history. However, this poem refers to a story in the Han Fei book of how Chang Min sought his friend Kao Hui in a dream but got lost in the dream and had difficulty finding his way back.
SU TUNG P’O (1036-1101), named Su Shih, belonged to a powerful family of officials and scholars. Under the protection of his father’s patron, Ou Yang Hsiu, he rose to prominence when very young. At first he held various provincial posts. Shortly after he was called to office he came into conflict with the famous reformer, Wang An Shih. I should explain that the early years of Sung witnessed a tremendous increase in trade and rise in the general standard of living. Wang proposed to stem this rising tide of commercialism with a series of economic measures which returned all power to the central authority and curbed, in fact attempted to abolish, the mercantile classes and reform the agricultural system. It has been called, with little accuracy, a program of state socialism and autarchy. Actually it was the purest “Neo-Confucianism"; of a kind different from that which, as a philosophy, later acquired the name. But the scholar gentry—the Confucianists—were violently opposed. Wang An Shih was simply too unconventional for them. However, for a time, under a new emperor, his schemes were put into effect, with doubtful results. As one of Wang’s leading opponents Su Tung P’o then entered upon a period of remarkable vicissitudes. He first was moved out of the court to the governorship of Hangchow and then was exiled altogether, once as far away as Hainan. His life was a series of ups and downs — out to exile, back to court, out to exile again. He even spent three months in prison. He seems to have been a good, conventional administrator, loved by the people under him but arrogant and rash with equals or super-visors. He was also an excellent painter; his ink paintings of bamboos are superlative. They are imitated to this day and crude forgeries can be found in curio shops. As a painter and something of an esthetician he was one of the founders of the Southern Sung style, one of the glories of Far Eastern culture. He is certainly one of the ten greatest Chinese poets. His work may be full of quotations and allusions to T’ang poetry, T’ao Ch’ien and the classics, but it is still intensely personal and is the climax of early Sung subjectivity. His world is not Tu Fu’s: where the latter sees definite particulars, clear moral issues, and bright sharp images, Su Tung P’o’s vision is clouded with the all-dissolving systematic doubt of Buddhism and the nihilism of revived philosophical Taoism. Su’s is a less precise world, but a vaster one, more like our own.
SU WU (second century) was a general of the Emperor Wu Ti of Han.
TU FU (713-770) is translated at length in my One Hundred Poems from the Chinese. Tu Fu is, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a majority of those qualified to speak, the greatest non-epic, non-dramatic poet who has survived in any language. Sappho, for instance, can hardly be said to have survived. He shares with her, Catullus, and Baudelaire, his only possible competitors, a sensibility acute past belief. Like them, he is — possibly paying the price of such a sensibility—considerably neurasthenic and the creator of an elaborate poetic personality, a fictional character half mask, half revelation. Tu Fu came from a family of scholars, officials, and landowners, and rose early to a minor office in the court of Hsuan Tsung, called Ming Huang, the Bright Emperor. With the majority of the scholar class, he was violently opposed to the party of Yang Kuei Fei, the Emperor’s famous concubine. Following the legendary histories of the first dynasties, the disasters that smote the Chinese throne were traditionally attributed to the evils of women, eunuchs, wine, and magic, and Ming Huang was no exception.
Actually, Yang Kuei Fei, her family and lovers were the inner core of an imperialist party in the Chinese court. Outlanders and upstarts of various sorts, themselves products of a kind of internationalism, they realized that T’ang China could survive at its then great extent only by admitting the associated peoples of the inner Asian frontiers to a share of power and a measure of federated autonomy. This of course was rank atheist nihilism to the Confucian literati. The court struggle led eventually to the overthrow of Yang Kuo Chung, Yang Kuei Fei’s brother; the revolt of An Lu Shan, her Turkish lover; the flight of the court; the execution, during the flight, at the insistence of the orthodox party, of Yang Kuei Fei; the abdication of the Emperor; the recapture of the capital by the troops of his son; and finally the fall of the capital again to the Nan Chao federation of Yunnanese and Tibetans. For a generation the most stable area in China was the isolated Southwest province of Szechuan—a situation not unlike the recent period of Japanese invasion and civil wars. The T’ang Dynasty was crippled permanently. The greatest period of Chinese civilization in the Christian era entered a slow decline from which it never recovered and the seeds were sown of a parochial chauvinism which kept the so-called geo-political problems of China unsolved until now.
Although Tu Fu’s young days were spent at Ming Huang’s spectacularly brilliant court, familiar to most Western readers from the work of Li Po, his maturity was passed in a time of trouble, wandering, exile, and chronic insecurity. He became a Court Censor, a kind of Tribune of the Patricians, under Su Tsung, Ming Huang’s son. This job was in reality an empty sinecure. Tu Fu, an unregenerate believer in the classics, proceeded to admonish the Emperor on his morals and foreign policy and was summarily dismissed. The longest settled period in his life followed, in a “thatched hut“ in the suburbs of Ch’eng-tu in Szechuan. It may have had a grass roof but it was doubtless quite palatial by any standards other than those of the imperial palace. He was happy, as men usually are, in quiet revery over vanished glories and a ruined career. Political changes started him wandering again slowly down the river, always hoping to return to the capital. His last years were spent largely in a houseboat. At 57 he died, apparently still in his boat. Various legends grew up about his death. Possibly he died of exposure due to the vicissitudes of storm and flood on the river.
All through his life Tu Fu wrote full-dress poems of advice to the throne. Most of these are the expected thing, as full of wisdom as a Papal Christmas message, but in time he seems to have learned. Almost alone of his class, at the end of his days, he came to hope for a united Chinese commonwealth, under a somewhat less pretentious, or, like the British, more etherealized, cult of the throne. I have not translated any of these poems. Others have done them well. They would require too much explanation. However well intentioned, they savor of the social lie, at least to my taste, and do not interest me. I have chosen only those poems whose appeal is simple and direct, with a minimum of allusion to past literature or contemporary politics—in other words, poems that speak to me of situations in life like my own. I have thought of my translations as, finally, expressions of myself.
I do not wish to give the impression that Tu Fu is faultless. He was a member of the scholar gentry and suffered from their ethnocentrism and caste consciousness, however transfigured. He was a valetudinarian. By the time he was thirty he was referring to himself as an aged white-haired man. He constantly speaks of his home as a hut and complains of his poverty, while in other poems, written at the same time, he reveals that he was moderately rich. He seems never to have relinquished ownership of his various farms (“grass huts“) and probably always drew revenue or at least credit from them. It is greatly to be doubted if either he or any of his family ever suffered from hunger, let alone starvation. True, he says his son starved to death, but this may be only a literary expression. With the collapse of central authority and the resultant famine, many people died of starvation. His son died at the same time, more likely from pestilence. He seems to have had only a mild literary affection for his wife. He wrote no love poems to women. Like most of his caste then and now his passionate relationships were with men. But these are not even minor faults, they are conventions, literary, caste, or Chinese. They are certainly microscopic spots compared with the blemishes that envelop Baudelaire like blankets. In Tu Fu, behind the conventions is a humanity as deep and wise as Homer’s.
Tu Fu comes from a saner, older, more secular culture than Homer and it is not a new discovery with him that the gods, the abstractions and forces of nature, are frivolous, lewd, vicious, quarrelsome, and cruel, and only men’s steadfastness, love, magnanimity, calm, and compassion redeem the nightbound world. It is not a discovery, culturally or historically, but it is the essence of his being as a poet. If Isaiah is the greatest religious poet, Tu Fu is not religious at all. But for me his response to the human situation is the only kind of religion likely to outlast this century. “Reverence for life,“ it has been called. I have saturated myself with his poetry for forty-five years. I am sure he has made me a better man, as a moral agent and as a perceiving organism. I say this because I feel that, above a certain level of attainment, the greatest poetry answers out of hand the problems of the critic and the esthetician. Poetry like Tu Fu’s is the answer to the question, “What is the purpose of Art?“
TU MU (803-852) was, with Po Chu I and Li Shang Yin, one of the leading poets of the latter part of the T’ang Dynasty. His poems blend the influences of Tu Fu, T’ao Yuan Ming and Wang Wei into an amalgam considerably softer than their originals. The second poem is capable of a sexual interpretation.
T’AO HUNG CHING (T’AO T’UNG MING) (452-536) began his career as a tutor to the Emperor’s children but soon resigned and spent his life as a Taoist hermit devoted to alchemy, yogic exercises and deep contemplation. He was universally venerated and consulted by statesmen and visited by the Emperor Wu of Liang himself. Verses such as these erotic poems by monks and hermits (especially the Neo-Taoist ones) are susceptible of a mystical interpretation, like the poems of Hafiz or St. Mechtild. Conversely, to this day there are Chinese scholars, not cranks, who interpret the Li Sao, the Tao Te Ching and the famous “mystical“ passage of Mencius in what we would call a tantric sense. The pivotal passage in all Chinese literature is the sixth chapter, the most cryptic, of the Tao Te Ching:
The valley’s soul is deathless.
It is called the Dark Woman.
The Dark Woman is the gate
To the root of heaven and earth.
If you draw her out like floss
She is inexhaustible.
She is only to be possessed without effort.
T’AO YUAN MING (TAO CHIN) (365-427) was the greatest poet of the Six Dynasties. As Hsieh Lung Yuen is called the inventor of mountain and waterfall poetry, so T’ao Yuan Ming is called the father of fields and gardens poetry. He spent eighty days in a minor government post, then fled to the country and never returned. His poems established a style and a poetic situation which was to last until the Communist regime. Wang Wei and Lu Yu are only two out of thousands of his descendants. His poetry is quiet and unpretentious, limpid in sound and forthright in meaning. He is one of the very greatest Chinese poets of all time. He has been translated several times, notably by Arthur Waley.
T’IEN HUNG was one of the warlords in the struggles out of which the Han Dynasty came in the third century B. C. This poem is a yueh fu, an imitation folk song, and is of disputed authorship.
TS’UI HAO (eighth century) was a friend of Li Po.
WANG CHANG LING died about 756 in the revolt of An Lu Shan against the T’ang Emperor Hsuan Tsung.
WANG HUNG KUNG is a contemporary poet.
WANG SHI CH’ENG (WANG I SHANG) (1634-1711) was a typical intellectual functionary of the Ming Dynasty; his poetry refined the forms of the past and considerably reduced their profundity. There was another poet of the same name, WANG YUAN MEI, 1526-1590, who wrote “A Note of Thanks“:
I thank you for your gift
Of a thousand silver pieces
But I beg you to take them back.
All the riches in the world
Will soon wear out, but my heart
Is more lasting and without price.
WANG WEI (701-761) was with Li Po and Tu Fu one of the great poets of the reign of the Emperor Hsuan Tsung. He was captured by An Lu Shan and after the rebellion was imprisoned for a short time. The rest of his life was spent in retreat in the mountains. Also a great painter, he is usually credited with the invention of the contemplative landscape which was to reach its greatest development in the Sung Dynasty and in Japan. Like Su Tung P’o he is considered one of the very greatest calligraphers of all time; his style is still carefully imitated. The only poet whose poems of hermitage, out of all the hundreds of thousands written in China, can be compared with his is T’ao Yuan Ming. Wang was also considered the leading musician of his time. He was given the cabinet office of Minister of Music, a position far more important in Chinese civilization than it would seem to us. His poems have a compactness and ordonnance which makes them seem much more architectural or classical than many others on the same subject. In this they resemble his paintings, which survive in copies, and which are as tightly organized as a Cubist’s. His poems are inexhaustible expressions of the Doctrines of Mind Only and The Void; yet they are as unpretentious (if not as casual) as those of Lu Yu who wrote is 11,000 poems. Wang Wei is one of those model poets, personally and artistically flawless, who occur very rarely in the history of literature.
WEN T’ING YEN (ninth century) was a friend of Li Shang Yin.
THE EMPEROR WU OF HAN (156-187), whose name was Liu Ch’u, was a patron of literature and the arts who traveled extensively about his kingdom and deeply mourned the loss of a favorite wife. For these reasons a number of poems on such subjects, some of them of great beauty, have been attributed to him, but the only one accepted by all modern scholars as being his was written on the rupture of a great dike and in the style of Chu Yuan’s Li Sao. The poems of sorrow for lost love are far more accessible to modern taste or to nearly any taste. They were to have a great influence on future Chinese verse and were specifically imitated by the Sung Dynasty poet Mei Yao Ch’en whose poems are given in my One Hundred Poems From the Chinese.
THE EMPEROR WU OF LIANG (464-549) was also named Hsiao Tsu Yun. The Hsiao royal family was very productive of poets, probably because they had become, like the Japanese emperors, purely ceremonial rulers confined to ritual appearances and to their harems. The Hsiaos founded a school of erotic verse, known appropriately in Chinese as “harem poetry,“ which would endure until the end of the Manchu Dynasty in the twentieth century. Such poetry may have been written in the palace, but its connections with the folk songs of professional courtesans and prostitutes, from which it derived and to which it returned as an influence, give it a languid, poignant reality very like those Japanese waka by emperors or Fujiwara princes which are still sung in a folk-song meter (dodoitsu) by geisha to this day.
Hsiao Tsu Yun was the founder of the dynasty. His brother Hsiao Tzu Hui, Hsiao Kang (the Emperor Chien Wen), and his brother Hsiao T’ung were all poets. Like almost everybody of importance in the Six Dynasties period, most of them came to an unfortunate end. The number of people who were murdered, were executed or committed suicide in China in the fifth and sixth centuries is hair-raising. It is hard to understand how the society functioned at all. Surprisingly, unlike the European Dark Ages, it was a period of great accomplishment in literature, learning and the arts, and cultural patterns were established then which came to flower and fruit in the T’ang and Sung Dynasties.
WU WEI YE (1609-1671) was a courtier of the last Ming Emperor. At the fall of the dynasty he went into retirement for ten years, but in his old age he was persuaded to return to the Manchu court. Although the poem “At Yuen Yang Lake" may well record an actual occurrence, and is also indebted to poems by Tu Fu and Su Tung P’o and Lu Yu, it is an excellent example of the possibilities for political interpretation usually missed by Western readers.
THE EMPEROR YANG OF SUI. The brief Sui Dynasty (581-617) suppressed the contending powers of the Six Dynasties and handed on a unified Chinese Empire to the T’ang. It was a period of the rapid spread of Buddhism and developed characteristically Chinese Buddha and Bodhisattva images.
YUAN CHI (210-263) was one of the famous Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove and as such one of the founders of literary-philosophical Neo-Taoism. This poem is one of eighty.
YUAN MEI (1716-1797) was one of the most intimate and natural of the poets of the Ch’ing or Manchu Dynasty, a time generally of considerable preciosity.