Chinese Literature

B

Prose

The major work of prose surviving from the Han dynasty is a general history, the Shi ji (Records of the Historian). This text was completed by historian Sima Qian and covers China’s history from legendary times to his own age, the 2nd century bc, in 130 chapters. The Shi ji established the general form used by all 24 official histories of the dynasties. It is largely a compilation of original source material, state papers, traditional narratives, and poems and prose compositions, and is organized in five parts: (1) annals of the emperors (12 chapters); (2) chronological tables (10 chapters); (3) monographs on such topics as the calendar, rivers and canals, and state sacrifices (8 chapters); (4) annals of the princely houses (30 chapters); and (5) narratives, mainly biographies of important men (70 chapters).

Other surviving prose from the Han empire consists of memorials and edicts, official and private letters, prefaces, narratives, descriptions, essays, epitaphs, addresses to the dead, and other short pieces. The heritage of Confucian moral teaching is exemplified in the essay “Guo Qin Lun” (“The Faults of Qin”). In this essay the 2nd-century-bc imperial tutor Jia Yi describes the sudden fall of China’s first true empire—the Qin dynasty, which preceded the Han—as a warning to his own ruler. However, even a court figure such as Jia Yi was drawn to ideas outside Confucianism; his contemplation of death, “Fu niao fu” (“The Owl”), incorporates Daoist ideas and takes the form of a fashionable fu prose-poem.

IV

Post-Confucian Literature

At the beginning of the 3rd century ad China’s Han dynasty collapsed into political disunity and civil war. This disintegration shook the status of Confucianism and its literary hierarchy. During the Han dynasty this hierarchy had expanded to incorporate new forms, including those cited above and several others. For example, early in the Han period an imperial music bureau (Yue Fu) was established to collect folk songs, in the tradition of the Book of Songs. These folk songs included verse with lines of five characters known as shi and later as gushi (ancient style shi). Despite its folk origin, the style was gradually adopted by the cultural elite. The status of this form was consolidated in the 3rd century ad by the gifted poet Cao Zhi, son of Cao Cao who was a dominant warlord in the devastating civil wars that followed the fall of the Han. Cao Zhi skillfully constructed an image of himself in his poetry as a melancholy man oppressed by the violent politics of his time and forced to take refuge in hedonism and imaginative journeys.

Other writers during this time of turmoil also developed the theme of withdrawal from involvement in the battles of rival kingdoms and their internal politics. Tao Qian, a 5th-century official, retired to what his verse describes as the life of a farmer in a gentle landscape, at ease with his family, friends, and wine. His verse and prose narrative, T’ao hua yuan (The Peach Blossom Spring), was a popular depiction of a hidden utopia peopled by refugees who did not even know of the Han dynasty’s existence. Tao Qian’s writing creates a Daoist ideal of community that counters the intellectual trend of the times.

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Prose narratives of the time also show a fascination with Daoist-inspired values, such as simplicity and spontaneity, and with events not yet incorporated into official histories or explained by official doctrines. One of these narratives, Shi shuo xin yu (A New Account of Tales of the World) by Liu Yiqing, is a 5th-century work that contains anecdotes about historical figures of the era. Another popular type of prose was zhi guai, or tales of the supernatural. Court writing gradually began to exhibit a complex style requiring paired phrases of four or six characters, a form known as pian wen (parallel prose). This style was heavily laced with allusions to the Confucian Classics.

A

Major Innovations

The new forms of literature, no longer shaped by the Confucian canon, prompted important critical reactions. One response was the first established text of Chinese literary criticism, the Wen xin diao long (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) by 6th-century writer Liu Xie. It upheld the value of literature according to its fidelity to Confucian precepts. Liu Xie nevertheless established the critique of literary form as a separate category of literature. By 531 scholar Xiao Tong had compiled the first major anthology of Chinese literature, the Wen xuan (Selections of Refined Literature), consisting of nearly 800 works organized into 37 literary categories. Despite their conservative emphasis on Confucianism, these anthologies and works of criticism sought to incorporate shifting cultural practices into an overarching tradition. The new literary trends were little altered by such critical responses, however.

China in the post-Han era also absorbed inspiration from Buddhism and writings from India that were translated from Sanskrit into Chinese. Buddhism gained strength in China as disorder increased and the domination of Confucian thought diminished. The first major sign of this influence on literature was the adoption of elements of Sanskrit poetic structure, which resulted in two new Chinese verse forms: jue ju (curtailed verse) and lü shi (regulated verse). Both of the verse forms have lines of five or seven characters, or syllables, and each line has a prescribed tonal pattern and alternating rhyme. Curtailed verse is organized in four lines, and regulated verse in eight lines. Too short to tell a story, curtailed verse seeks instead to create a mood in an economical manner. The longer regulated verse is based on coupled lines that are parallel in sound, thought, and tone.

The next great Chinese empire, the Tang dynasty (618-907), produced the most famous poets to write in the new verse forms. Among them is the writer many critics consider China’s greatest poet, Du Fu, who created in his poetry an image of himself as the sober statesman. After a rebellion in the Tang capital, Du Fu became a refugee and his poetry turned melancholy, as in these lines from “Spring Prospect”:

Others who helped perfect the new verse forms during the Tang dynasty include Li Bo, who wrote in the guise of the wine-inspired genius; the humorous and sentimental Bo Juyi, and the enigmatic Li Shangyin. Among the cultural elite, Buddhist ideas themselves found expression in the landscape painter and poet Wang Wei and the Zen poet Han Shan.

Modern discoveries of 10th-century manuscripts in the northwestern city of Dunhuang show that Buddhists promoted their beliefs and gained converts through marketplace storytellers. The most representative example of these stories, which are called bianwen, is about a young man who demonstrates such filial piety that the Buddha is moved to save his mother from punishment in hell and reincarnation as a dog. Dunhuang became a center for the translation and copying of Buddhist texts from India and Central Asia. Popular music along the Central Asian borders of the empire also increasingly found its way into the high culture of China. This music provided a new form of lyric, the ci, in which lines of uneven lengths are set in a prescribed pattern and matched to tunes. This music was lost several centuries ago, although the form was practiced well into the 20th century.

B

Conservative Reactions

Following a political crisis in the Tang empire, literati officials loyal to the central government began an attack on Buddhism, parallel prose, and other aspects of culture that they felt violated Confucian beliefs. Their most articulate spokesperson was the 9th-century poet and essayist Han Yu, who sought to reunify and consolidate the culturally and politically fragmenting empire under central authority. Han reasserted the value of writing styles found in the Classics and the histories prior to the advent of parallel prose and Buddhist texts, forcing students to study the ancient texts instead.

The conservative reaction did not preserve the Tang dynasty for long, but it did establish a direction for high culture that dominated the next great dynasty, the Song (960-1279). The most widely read and oft-cited of the poets and essayists of the Song dynasty were Ouyang Xiu and Su Dongpo (also known as Su Shi). As much as they championed Han Yu’s promotion of ancient-style prose (gu wen), both Ouyang and Su became better known for their devotion to the newer ci lyric form and their expansion of its content to include reflections on historical and philosophical issues. Su freed the ci from its rigid meter. This excerpt from Su’s poem “Written on a Painting Entitled ‘Misty Yangtze and Folded Hills’ in the Collection of Wang Dingguo” illustrates his powers of observation and description:

Confucianism itself was changing during the Song dynasty. The chief architect of what became known as Neo-Confucianism was 12th-century philosopher Zhu Xi, who incorporated aspects of Daoist and Buddhist thought into his commentaries on the Confucian Classics. He further abstracted passages from the Book of Ritual and combined these with Confucius’s Analects and the Book of Mencius to create a core curriculum for students entering civil service education. This collection was known as the Sishu (The Four Books), and these works are sometimes counted among the Confucian Classics.

V

Literature of the Late Imperial Period

The hold that government officials and the educational elite had over literature began to weaken as larger cultural shifts took place within Song society, although Confucianism in some form kept its position in the educational curriculum and as official belief. First, Song rulers carried through reforms to make education far more available to commoners, fostering more readers and writers. Second, printing developed as a commercial enterprise and made the written word much more widely available. Third, in the increasingly commercial economy during and after the Song, merchants and landowners outside the nobility gained power and supported new forms of entertainment. Fourth, the Mongols conquered China and replaced the Song with the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368), alienating a group of scholars who refused to participate in the new regime. This refusal established the literati as something other than government officials, and their other interests—including literature—became an important means to express their identity as a semi-autonomous social group. With that new identity went expressions of independence from conventional, state-supported interpretations of Confucianism—if not from Confucianism itself—as well as from state-sponsored literary values.

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