Chinese literature, the body of works written in Chinese,
including lyric poetry, historical and didactic writing, drama,
and various forms of fiction.
Chinese literature is one of
the major literary heritages of the world, with an uninterrupted
history of more than 3,000 years, dating back at least to the
14th century bc. Its medium, the Chinese language, has retained
its unmistakable identity in both its spoken and written aspects
in spite of generally gradual changes in pronunciation, the
existence of regional and local dialects, and several stages in
the structural representation of the written graphs, or
“characters.” Even the partial or total conquests of China for
considerable periods by non-Chinese ethnic groups from outside
the Great Wall failed to disrupt this continuity, for the
conquerors were forced to adopt the written Chinese language as
their official medium of communication because they had none of
their own. Since the Chinese graphs were inherently nonphonetic,
they were at best unsatisfactory tools for the transcription of
a non-Chinese language; and attempts at creating a new
alphabetic–phonetic written language for empire building proved
unsuccessful on three separate occasions. The result was that
after a period of alien domination, the conquerors were
culturally assimilated (except the Mongols, who retreated en
masse to their original homeland after the collapse of the Yüan
[or Mongol] dynasty in 1368). Thus, there was no disruption in
China’s literary development.
General characteristics
Through cultural contacts, Chinese literature has profoundly
influenced the literary traditions of other Asian countries,
particularly Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Not only was the Chinese
script adopted for the written language in these countries but
some writers adopted the Chinese language as their chief
literary medium.
The graphic nature of the
written aspect of the Chinese language has produced a number of
noteworthy effects upon Chinese literature and its diffusion:
(1) Chinese literature, especially poetry, is recorded in
handwriting or in print and purports to make an aesthetic appeal
to the reader that is visual as well as aural. (2) This visual
appeal of the graphs has in fact given rise to the elevated
status of calligraphy in China, where it has been regarded for
at least the last 16 centuries as a fine art comparable to
painting. Scrolls of calligraphic renderings of poems and prose
selections have continued to be hung alongside paintings in the
homes of the common people as well as the elite, converting
these literary gems into something to be enjoyed in everyday
living. (3) On the negative side, such a writing system has been
an impediment to education and the spread of literacy, thus
reducing the number of readers of literature; for even a
rudimentary level of reading and writing requires knowledge of
more than 1,000 graphs, together with their pronunciation. (4)
On the other hand, the Chinese written language, even with its
obvious disadvantages, has been a potent factor in perpetuating
the cultural unity of the growing millions of the Chinese
people, including assimilated groups in far-flung peripheral
areas. Different in function from recording words in an
alphabetic–phonetic language, the graphs are not primarily
indicators of sounds and can therefore be pronounced in variant
ways to accommodate geographical diversities in speech and
historical phonological changes without damage to the meaning of
the written page. As a result, the major dialects in China never
developed into separate written languages as did the Romance
languages, and, although the reader of a Confucian Classic in
southern China might not understand the everyday speech of
someone from the far north, Chinese literature has continued to
be the common asset of the whole Chinese people. By the same
token, the graphs of China could be utilized by speakers of
other languages as their literary mediums.
The pronunciation of the
Chinese graphs has also influenced the development of Chinese
literature. The fact that each graph had a monophonic
pronunciation in a given context created a large number of
homonyms, which led to misunderstanding and confusion when
spoken or read aloud without the aid of the graphs. One
corrective was the introduction of tones or pitches in
pronunciation. As a result, metre in Chinese prosody is not
concerned with the combination of syllabic stresses, as in
English, but with those of syllabic tones, which produce a
different but equally pleasing cadence. This tonal feature of
the Chinese language has brought about an intimate relationship
between poetry and music in China. All major types of Chinese
poetry were originally sung to the accompaniment of music. Even
after the musical scores were lost, the poems were, as they
still are, more often chanted—in order to approximate
singing—than merely read.
Chinese poetry, besides
depending on end rhyme and tonal metre for its cadence, is
characterized by its compactness and brevity. There are no epics
of either folk or literary variety and hardly any narrative or
descriptive poems that are long by the standards of world
literature. Stressing the lyrical, as has often been pointed
out, the Chinese poet refrains from being exhaustive, marking
instead the heights of his ecstasies and inspiration or the
depths of sorrow and sympathy. A short poem in Chinese sometimes
resembles a cablegram, wherein verbal economy is highly
desirable. Generally, pronouns and conjunctions are omitted, and
one or two words often allude to highly complex thoughts or
situations. This explains why many poems have been differently
interpreted by learned commentators and competent translators.
The line of demarcation between
prose and poetry is much less distinctly drawn in Chinese
literature than in other national literatures. This is clearly
reflected in three genres. The fu, for example, is on the
borderline between poetry and prose, containing elements of
both. It uses rhyme and metre and not infrequently also
antithetic structure, but, despite occasional flights into the
realm of the poetic, it retains the features of prose without
being necessarily prosaic. This accounts for the variety of
labels given to the fu in English by writers on Chinese
literature—poetic prose, rhyme prose, prose poem, rhapsody, and
prose poetry.
Another genre belonging to this
category is p’ien-wen (“parallel prose”), characterized by
antithetic construction and balanced tonal patterns without the
use of rhyme; the term is suggestive of “a team of paired
horses,” as is implied in the Chinese word p’ien. Despite the
polyphonic effect thus produced, which approximates that of
poetry, it has often been made the vehicle of proselike
exposition and argumentation. Another genre, a peculiar mutation
in this borderland, is the pa-ku wen-chang (“eight-legged
essay”). Now generally regarded as unworthy of classification as
literature, for centuries (from 1487 to 1901) it dominated the
field of Chinese writing as the principal yardstick in grading
candidates in the official civil-service examinations. It
exploited antithetical construction and contrasting tonal
patterns to the limit by requiring pairs of columns consisting
of long paragraphs, one responding to the other, word for word,
phrase for phrase, sentence for sentence.
Chinese prose writing has been
diverted into two streams, separated at least for the last 1,000
years by a gap much wider than the one between folk songs and
so-called literary poems. Classical, or literary, prose (ku-wen,
or wen-yen) aims at the standards and styles set by ancient
writers and their distinguished followers of subsequent ages,
with the Confucian Classics and the early philosophers as
supreme models. While the styles may vary with individual
writers, the language is always far removed from their spoken
tongues. Sanctioned by official requirement for the competitive
examinations and dignified by traditional respect for the
cultural accomplishments of past ages, this medium became the
linguistic tool of practically all Chinese prose writers.
Vernacular prose (pai-hua), in contrast, consists of writings in
the living tongue, the everyday language of the authors.
Traditionally considered inferior, the medium was piously
avoided for creative writing until it was adopted by novelists
and playwrights from the 13th century on.
History
Origins: c. 1400–221 bc
The oldest specimens of Chinese writing
extant are inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells dating back
to the last three centuries of the Shang dynasty (18th–12th
centuries bc) and recording divinations performed at the royal
capital. These inscriptions, like those engraved on ceremonial
bronze vessels toward the end of the Shang period, are usually
brief and factual and cannot be considered literature.
Nonetheless, they are significant in that their sizable
vocabulary (about 3,400 characters, of which nearly 2,000 have
been reliably deciphered) has proved to be the direct ancestor
of the modern Chinese script. Moreover, the syntactical
structure of the language bears a striking resemblance to later
usages. From the frequent occurrences in the bone inscriptions
of such characters as “dance” and “music,” “drum” and “chimes”
(of stone), “words” and “southern” (airs), it can safely be
inferred that, by the Shang dynasty, songs were sung to the
accompaniment of dance and music; but these songs are now lost.
Tien-yi Li
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
Literary use of myths
Nuwa, Chinese creator goddess
Chinese mythology
The Ten
Suns of Heaven
The Eight
Immortals
E. T. C.
Werner "Myths and Legends of China"
(PART
I,
PART II)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Is a collection of cultural history,
folktales, and religions that have been passed down in oral
or written tradition. These include creation myths and
legends and myths concerning the founding of Chinese culture
and the Chinese state. Like many mythologies, it has in the
past been believed to be, at least in part, a factual
recording of history.
Historians have conjectured that the Chinese mythology
began in 12th century B.C. The myths and the legends were
passed down in oral format for over a thousand years, before
being written down in early books such as Shan Hai Jing.
Other myths continued to be passed down through oral
traditions such as theatre and song, before being recorded
in the form of novels such * Hei'an Zhuan - Epic of Darkness
Literally Epic of the Darkness, this is the only collection
of legends in epic form preserved by a community of the Han
nationality of China, namely, inhabitants of the Shennongjia
mountain area in Hubei, containing accounts from the birth
of Pangu till the historical era.
Imperial historical documents and philosophical canons
such as Shangshu, Shiji, Liji, Lüshi Chunqiu, and others.
Some myths survive in theatrical or literary formats, as
plays or novels. Important mythological fiction which is
seen as definitive records of these myths include:
Verse poetry of ancient states such as Lisao by Qu Yuan
of the Chu state.
Fengshen Yanyi (封神演義), or Anointing of the Gods, which is
mythological fiction dealing with the founding of the Zhou
dynasty.
Journey to the West, by Wu Cheng'en and published in the
1590s, a fictionalised account of the pilgrimage of Xuanzang
to India in order to obtain Buddhist religious texts, in
which the pilgrims encounter a variety of ghosts, monsters,
and demons as well as the Flaming Mountains.
Baishe Zhuan, a romantic tale set in Hangzhou involving a
snake who attained human form and fell in love with a man.
Shangdi (上帝), appears in literature probably earlier
than 700 BC as Huangtian Dadi 皇天大帝 very occasionally as
皇天上帝, (the dating of these occurrences depends on the date
of Oracle Bones and the
Shujing, aka "Book of Documents"). When Huangtian Dadi was
used it refers to Jade Emperor or Yu Huang, and Tian 天 and
Jade Emperor were synonymous in Chinese prayers.
Yu Di (玉皇 or 玉帝 or Jade Emperor), appears in literature
after the establishment of Taoism in China, but the position
of Yu Huang dates back to beyond the times of Huangdi, Nuwa
or Fuxi.
Tian (天, or Heaven), appears in literature probably
about 700 BC, or earlier (the dating of these occurrences
depends on the date of the Shujing, aka "Book of
Documents"). There are no "creation" oriented narratives for
'Heaven', although the role of a creator is a possible
interperatation. The qualities of 'Heaven' and Shangdi
appear to merge in later literature (and are worshipped as
one entity ("皇天上帝") in, for example, the Temple of Heaven in
Beijing). The extent of the distinction (if any) between
them is debated. The sinologist Herrlee Creel proposes that
an analysis of the Shang oracle bones shows Shangdi preceded
'tian' as a deity, and that Zhou Dynasty authors replaced
the term Shangdi with tian to cement the claim of their
influence.
Nüwa (女媧), appears in literature no earlier than about
350 BC. Her companion was Fuxi (伏羲), the brother and husband
of Nuwa. These two beings are sometimes worshipped as the
ultimate ancestor of all humankind. They sometimes believe
that Nuwa molded humans from clay for companionship. They
are often represented as half-snake, half-human creatures.
Nüwa was also responsible for repairing the sky after Gong
Gong damaged the pillar supporting the heavens (see below).
Pangu (盤古), written about 200 AD by the Daoist author Xu
Zheng, was a later myth claiming to describe the first
sentient being & creator.
Three August Ones and Five Emperors
Following on from the age of Nuwa and Fuxi (or
cotemporaneous in some versions) was an age known as the
Three August Ones and Five Emperors (三皇五帝). This involves a
collection of legendary rulers who ruled between c. 2850 BC
to 2205 BC, the time preceding the Xia dynasty.
The list of names comprising the Three August Ones and
Five Emperors vary widely between sources (see Three August
Ones and Five Emperors for other versions of the list). The
version in the widest circulation (and most popularly known)
is:
The Three August Ones (Huang):
Fuxi (伏羲) - The companion of Nuwa.
Shennong (神農) - Shennong, literally meaning "Divine Farmer",
reputedly taught the ancients agriculture and medicine.
Huang Di (黃帝) - Huang Di, literally meaning, and commonly
known as, the "Huang Emperor"(normally "黄" means "yellow",
however it doesnt mean "yellow" here. See below for the full
explaination of "皇帝"), is often regarded as the first
sovereign of the Chinese nation.
(Source: Shangshu (尚書))
The Five Emperors (Di):
Shaohao (少昊) - Leader of the Dongyi or "Eastern
Barbarians"; his pyramidal tomb is in present-day Shandong
province. [clarification needed]
Zhuanxu (顓頊) - Grandson of the Huang Emperor
Emperor Ku (帝嚳) - Great grandson of the Huang Emperor;
nephew of Zhuanxu.
Yao (堯) - The son of Ku. His elder brother succeeded Ku, but
abdicated when he was found to be an ineffective ruler.
Shun (舜) - Yao, passing over his own son, made Shun his
successor because of Shun's ability and morality.
These rulers were generally regarded as extremely moral and
benevolent rulers, examples to be emulated by latter day
kings and emperors. When Qin Shi Huang united China in 221
BC, he felt that his achievements had surpassed those of all
the rulers who have gone before him. Hence, he combined the
ancient titles of Huang (皇) and Di (帝) to create a new
title, Huangdi (皇帝), usually translated as Emperor.
Great Flood
Shun passed his place as leader of the Huaxia
tribe to Yu the Great (禹). According to legend, the Yellow
River was prone to flooding, and erupted in a huge flood in
the time of Yao. Yu's father, Gun, was put in charge of
flood control by Yao, but failed to alleviate the problem
after 9 years. He was executed by Shun, and Yu took his
father's place, and led the people in building canals and
levees. After thirteen years of toil, flooding problems were
solved under Yu's command. Shun enfeoffed Yu in the place of
Xia, in present-day Wan County in Henan. On his death, Shun
passed the leadership to Yu. The main source for the story
of Yu and the Great Flood comes from The Counsels of Yu the
Great in the Classic of History (尚書·大禹謨). Because of his
achievement in resolving the Great Flood, Yu, alone among
the mythological rulers, is usually called "Yu the Great"
(大禹). Alternatively, he is called Emperor Yu (帝禹), like his
predecessors.
Xia Dynasty
from the shang dynasty
Upon Yu's death, his position as leader was passed not to
his deputy, but was inherited by his son Qi. Various sources
differ as to the process by which Qi rose to this position.
Most versions agree that during his lifetime, Yu had
designated his deputy, Gaotao (皋陶), to be his successor.
When Gaotao died before him, Yu then selected Gaotao's son,
Bo Yi (伯益) as successor. One version then says that all the
peoples who had submitted to Yu admired Qi more than Bo Yi,
and Yu passed power to Qi instead. Another version holds
that Bo Yi ceremoniously offered the position to Qi, who
accepted, against convention, because he had the support of
other leaders. A third version says that Qi killed Bo Yi and
usurped his position as leader.
A 4th version, the currently most accepted version in
China says, Yu named Bo Yi as successor, because Bo Yi had
achieved fame through teaching the People to use fire to
drive animals during hunts. Bo Yi had the popular support of
the People and Yu could not go against it easily. But Yu
gave Bo Yi the empty successor title, without giving Bo Yi
more responsibilities. Instead Yu gave his own son all the
responsibilities of managing the country. After a few years,
Bo Yi lost popularity without additional achievements, and
Yu's son Qi became more popular among the People. Then Yu
named Qi as the successor. Bo Yi, however, did not lose
willingly. Bo Yi challenged Qi for leadership, and a civil
war ensued. Qi with great support of the People, managed to
defeat Bo Yi's forces, and killed Bo Yi, and solidified his
rule.
In any case, Qi's succession broke the previous
convention of meritorious succession, and began what is
traditionally regarded as the first dynasty in Chinese
history. The dynasty is called "Xia" after Yu's centre of
power.
The Xia Dynasty is considered at least semi-mythological.
The Records of the Grand Historian and the Bamboo Annals
record the names of 17 kings of the Xia Dynasty. However,
there is no conclusive archaeological evidence of its
capital or its existence as a state of any significant size.
Archaeological evidence do not point towards a significant
urban civilisation until the Shang Dynasty.
Shang Dynasty
Jie, the last king of the Xia Dynasty, is said to be a
bloodthirsty despot. Tang of Shang, a tribal leader,
revolted against Xia rule and eventually overthrew Jie and
established the Shang Dynasty, based in Anyang. In Book 5 of
Mozi, Mozi described the end of Xia dynasty and the new
Shang dynasty. During the reign of King Jie of Xia, there
was a great climactic change. The paths of the sun and moon
were different, the seasons were confused and the five
grains were dried up. Ghouls were crying in the country and
cranes shrieked for ten nights. Heaven ordered Shang Tang to
receive the heavenly commission from Xia dynasty. The Xia
dynasty have failed morally and Heaven has determined her
end. Therefore, Shang Tang was commanded to destroy Xia with
the promise of Heaven's help. In the dark, Heaven destroyed
the fortress' pool. Shang Tang then gained victory easily.
The Shang Dynasty ruled from ca. 1766 BC to ca. 1050 BC.
It came to an end when the last despotic ruler, Zhou of
Shang, was overthrown by the new Zhou Dynasty. The end of
the Shang Dynasty and the establishment of the Zhou is the
subject of the influential mythological fiction, Investitute
of the Gods (封神演義). Book 5 of Mozi also described the shift.
During the reign of Shang Zhou, Heaven could not endure his
morality and his neglect of timely sacrifices. It rained mud
for ten days and nights, the nine cauldrons (presumably used
in either astronomy or to measure earth movements) shifted
positions, pontianaks appeared and ghosts cried at night.
There were women who became men, the heaven rained flesh and
thorny brambles covered the national highways. A red bird
brought a message "Heaven decrees King Wen of Zhou to punish
Yin and possess its empire". The Yellow River formed charts
and the earth brought forth mythical horses. When King Wu
became king, three gods appeared to him in a dream, telling
him that they have drowned Shang Zhou in wine and that King
Wu was to attack him. On the way back from victory, the
heavens gave him the emblem of a yellow bird.
Unlike the preceding Xia Dynasty, there is clear
archaeological evidence of a government centre at Yinxu in
Anyang, and of an urban civilization in the Shang Dynasty.
However, the chronology of the first three dynasties remains
an area of active research and controversy.
Creation and the Pantheon
The Jade Emperor is charged with running of the three
realms: heaven, hell and that of the living. The Jade
Emperor adjudicates and metes out rewards and remedies to
actions of saints, the living and the deceased according to
a merit system loosely called the Jade Principles Golden
Script (玉律金篇, see external links). When judgments proposed
were objected to, usually by other saints, the
administration would occasionally resort to the counsels of
the advisory elders.
Dragon
The Chinese dragon is one of the most important mythical
creatures in Chinese mythology. The Chinese dragon is
considered to be the most powerful and divine creature and
is believed to be the controller of all waters. The dragon
symbolised great power and was very supportive of heroes and
gods. One of the most famous dragons in Chinese mythology is
Yinglong "Responding Dragon", said to be the god of rain.
Many people in different places pray to Yinglong in order to
receive rain. In Chinese mythology, dragons are believed to
be able to create clouds with their breath. Chinese people
sometimes use the term "Descendants of the Dragon" as a sign
of their ethnic identity.
For the most part, Chinese myths involve moral issues
which inform people of their culture and values.
Religion and mythology
There has been extensive interaction between Chinese
mythology and the major belief systems of Confucianism,
Taoism, and Buddhism.
On the one hand, elements of pre-Han dynasty mythologies
such as those in Shan Hai Jing were adapted into these
belief systems as they developed (in the case of Taoism), or
were assimilated into Chinese culture (in the case of
Buddhism). On the other hand, elements from the teachings
and beliefs of these systems became incorporated into
Chinese mythology. For example, the Taoist belief of a
spiritual paradise became incorporated into mythology, as
the place where immortals and deities dwell.
|
Early Chinese literature does not present, as the literatures of
certain other world cultures do, great epics embodying
mythological lore. What information exists is sketchy and
fragmentary and provides no clear evidence that an organic
mythology ever existed; if it did, all traces have been lost.
Attempts by scholars, Eastern and Western alike, to reconstruct
the mythology of antiquity have consequently not advanced beyond
probable theses. Shang dynasty material is limited. Chou dynasty
(c. 1111–255 bc) sources are more plentiful, but even these must
at times be supplemented by writings of the Han period (206
bc–ad 220), which, however, must be read with great caution.
This is the case because Han scholars reworked the ancient texts
to such an extent that no one is quite sure, aside from evident
forgeries, how much was deliberately reinterpreted and how much
was changed in good faith in an attempt to clarify ambiguities
or reconcile contradictions.
The early state of Chinese
mythology was also molded by the religious situation that
prevailed in China at least since the Chou conquest (12th
century bc), when religious observance connected with the cult
of the dominant deities was proclaimed a royal prerogative.
Because of his temporal position, the king alone was considered
qualified to offer sacrifice and to pray to these deities.
Shang-ti (“Supreme Ruler”), for example, one of the prime
dispensers of change and fate, was inaccessible to persons of
lower rank. The princes, the aristocracy, and the commoners were
thus compelled, in descending order, to worship lesser gods and
ancestors. Though this situation was greatly modified about the
time of Confucius in the early part of the 5th century bc,
institutional inertia and a trend toward rationalism precluded
the revival of a mythological world. Confucius prayed to Heaven
(T’ien) and was concerned about the great sacrifices, but he and
his school had little use for genuine myths.
Nevertheless, during the latter
centuries of the Chou, Chinese mythology began to undergo a
profound transformation. The old gods, to a great extent already
forgotten, were gradually supplanted by a multitude of new ones,
some of whom were imported from India with Buddhism or gained
popular acceptance as Taoism spread throughout the empire. In
the process, many early myths were totally reinterpreted to the
extent that some deities and mythological figures were
rationalized into abstract concepts and others were euhemerized
into historical figures. Above all, a hierarchical order,
resembling in many ways the institutional order of the empire,
was imposed upon the world of the supernatural. Many of the
archaic myths were lost; others survived only as fragments, and,
in effect, an entirely new mythological world was created.
These new gods generally had
clearly defined functions and definite personal characteristics
and became prominent in literature and the other arts. The myth
of the battles between Huang-ti (“The Yellow Emperor”) and Ch’ih
Yu (“The Wormy Transgressor”), for example, became a part of
Taoist lore and eventually provided models for chapters of two
works of vernacular fiction, Shui-hu chuan (The Water Margin,
also translated as All Men Are Brothers) and Hsi-yu chi (1592;
Journey to the West, also partially translated as Monkey). Other
mythological figures such as K’ua-fu and the Hsi-wang-mu
subsequently provided motifs for numerous poems and stories.
Historical personages were also
commonly taken into the pantheon, for Chinese popular
imagination has been quick to endow the biography of a beloved
hero with legendary and eventually mythological traits. Ch’ü
Yüan, the ill-fated minister of the state of Ch’u (771–221 bc),
is the most notable example. Mythmaking consequently became a
constant, living process in China. It was also true that
historical heroes and would-be heroes arranged their biographies
in a way that lent themselves to mythologizing.
Hellmut Wilhelm
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
Confucius
Chinese philosopher
Pinyin romanization Kongfuzi, or Kongzi, Wade-Giles K’ung-fu-tzu, or
K’ung-tzu, original name Kongqiu, literary name Zhongni
born 551, Qufu, state of Lu [now in Shandong province, China]
died 479 bce, Lu
Main
China’s most famous teacher, philosopher, and political theorist, whose
ideas have influenced the civilization of East Asia.
Confucius’s life, in contrast to his tremendous importance, seems
starkly undramatic, or, as a Chinese expression has it, it seems “plain
and real.” The plainness and reality of Confucius’s life, however,
underlines that his humanity was not revealed truth but an expression of
self-cultivation, of the ability of human effort to shape its own
destiny. The faith in the possibility of ordinary human beings to become
awe-inspiring sages and worthies is deeply rooted in the Confucian
heritage, and the insistence that human beings are teachable,
improvable, and perfectible through personal and communal endeavour is
typically Confucian.
Although the facts about Confucius’s life are scanty, they do
establish a precise time frame and historical context. Confucius was
born in the 22nd year of the reign of Duke Xiang of Lu (551 bce). The
traditional claim that he was born on the 27th day of the eighth lunar
month has been questioned by historians, but September 28 is still
widely observed in East Asia as Confucius’s birthday. It is an official
holiday, “Teachers’ Day,” in Taiwan.
Confucius was born in Qufu in the small feudal state of Lu in what is
now Shandong province, which was noted for its preservation of the
traditions of ritual and music of the Zhou civilization. His family name
was Kong and his personal name Qiu, but he is referred to as either
Kongzi or Kongfuzi (Master Kong) throughout Chinese history. The
adjectival “Confucian,” derived from the Latinized Confucius, is not a
meaningful term in Chinese, nor is the term Confucianism, which was
coined in Europe as recently as the 18th century.
Confucius’s ancestors were probably members of the aristocracy who
had become virtual poverty-stricken commoners by the time of his birth.
His father died when Confucius was only three years old. Instructed
first by his mother, Confucius then distinguished himself as an
indefatigable learner in his teens. He recalled toward the end of his
life that at age 15 his heart was set upon learning. A historical
account notes that, even though he was already known as an informed
young scholar, he felt it appropriate to inquire about everything while
visiting the Grand Temple.
Confucius had served in minor government posts managing stables and
keeping books for granaries before he married a woman of similar
background when he was 19. It is not known who Confucius’s teachers
were, but he made a conscientious effort to find the right masters to
teach him, among other things, ritual and music. His mastery of the six
arts—ritual, music, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and
arithmetic—and his familiarity with the classical traditions, notably
poetry and history, enabled him to start a brilliant teaching career in
his 30s.
Confucius is known as the first teacher in China who wanted to make
education broadly available and who was instrumental in establishing the
art of teaching as a vocation, indeed as a way of life. Before
Confucius, aristocratic families had hired tutors to educate their sons
in specific arts, and government officials had instructed their
subordinates in the necessary techniques, but he was the first person to
devote his whole life to learning and teaching for the purpose of
transforming and improving society. He believed that all human beings
could benefit from self-cultivation. He inaugurated a humanities program
for potential leaders, opened the doors of education to all, and defined
learning not merely as the acquisition of knowledge but also as
character building.
For Confucius the primary function of education was to provide the
proper way of training exemplary persons (junzi), a process that
involved constant self-improvement and continuous social interaction.
Although he emphatically noted that learning was “for the sake of the
self” (the end of which was self-knowledge and self-realization), he
found public service integral to true education. Confucius confronted
learned hermits who challenged the validity of his desire to serve the
world; he resisted the temptation to “herd with birds and animals,” to
live apart from the human community, and opted to try to transform the
world from within. For decades Confucius tried to be actively involved
in politics, wishing to put his humanist ideas into practice through
governmental channels.
In his late 40s and early 50s Confucius served first as a magistrate,
then as an assistant minister of public works, and eventually as
minister of justice in the state of Lu. It is likely that he accompanied
King Lu as his chief minister on one of the diplomatic missions.
Confucius’s political career was, however, short-lived. His loyalty to
the king alienated him from the power holders of the time, the large Ji
families, and his moral rectitude did not sit well with the king’s inner
circle, who enraptured the king with sensuous delight. At 56, when he
realized that his superiors were uninterested in his policies, Confucius
left the country in an attempt to find another feudal state to which he
could render his service. Despite his political frustration he was
accompanied by an expanding circle of students during this self-imposed
exile of almost 12 years. His reputation as a man of vision and mission
spread. A guardian of a border post once characterized him as the
“wooden tongue for a bell” of the age, sounding heaven’s prophetic note
to awaken the people (Analects, 3:24). Indeed, Confucius was perceived
as the heroic conscience who knew realistically that he might not
succeed but, fired by a righteous passion, continuously did the best he
could. At the age of 67 he returned home to teach and to preserve his
cherished classical traditions by writing and editing. He died in 479
bce, at the age of 73. According to the Records of the Historian, 72 of
his students mastered the “six arts,” and those who claimed to be his
followers numbered 3,000.
Roger T. Ames
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Poetry
The first anthology of Chinese poetry, known as the Shih Ching
(“Classic of Poetry”) and consisting of temple, court, and folk
songs, was given definitive form somewhere around the time of
Confucius (551–479 bc). But its 305 songs are believed to range
in date from the beginning of the Chou dynasty to the time of
their compiling.
The Shih Ching is generally
accounted the third of the Five Classics (Wu Ching) of Confucian
literature, the other four of which are: the I Ching (“Classic
of Changes”), a book of divination and cosmology; the Shu Ching
(“Classic of History”), a collection of official documents; the
Li chi (“Record of Rites”), a book of rituals with accompanying
anecdotes; and the Ch’un-ch’iu (“Spring and Autumn”) annals, a
chronological history of the feudal state of Lu, where Confucius
was born, consisting of topical entries of major events from 722
to 481 bc. The Five Classics have been held in high esteem by
Chinese scholars since the 2nd century bc. (For a discussion of
the I Ching and Shu Ching).
The poems of the Shih Ching
were originally sung to the accompaniment of music; and some of
them, especially temple songs, were accompanied also by dancing.
(In all subsequent periods of Chinese literary history, new
trends in poetry were profoundly influenced by music.) Most of
the poems of the Shih Ching have a preponderantly lyrical strain
whether the subject is hardship in military service or seasonal
festivities, agricultural chores or rural scenes, love or
sports, aspirations or disappointments of the common folk and of
the declining aristocracy. Apparently, the language of the poems
was relatively close to the daily speech of the common people,
and even repeated attempts at refinement during the long process
of transmission have not spoiled their freshness and
spontaneity. In spite of this, however, when the songs are read
aloud and not sung to music their prevailing four-syllable lines
conduce to monotony, hardly redeemed by the occasional
interspersion of shorter or longer lines.
If there ever was an epic
tradition in ancient China comparable to that of early India or
the West, only dim traces of it persist in the written records.
The Shih Ching has a few narrative poems celebrating heroic
deeds of the royal ancestors, but these are rearranged in cycles
and only faintly approximate the national epics of other
peoples. One cycle, for example, records the major stages in the
rise of the Chou kingdom, from the supernatural birth of its
remote founder to its conquest of the Shang kingdom. These
episodes, which, according to traditional history, cover a
period of more than 1,000 years, are dealt with in only about
400 lines. Other cycles, which celebrate later military exploits
of the royal Chou armies, are even briefer.
The Shih Ching exerted a
profound influence on Chinese poetry that, generally speaking,
has stressed the lyrical rather than the narrative element; a
dependence more on end rhymes for musical effect than on other
rhetorical devices; regular lines, consisting of a standard
number of syllables; and the utilization of intonation that is
inherent in the language for rhythm, instead of the alternation
of stressed and unstressed syllables as is the norm in Western
poetry. The high regard in which this anthology has been held in
China results both from its antiquity and from the legend that
Confucius himself edited it. It was elevated in 136 bc to the
position of a major classic in the Confucian canon.
Meanwhile, another type of
poetry, also originating in music and dance, had developed in
the south, in the basin of the Yangtze River, an area dominated
by the principality of Ch’u—hence the generic appellation Ch’u
tz’u, or “songs of Ch’u.” These southern songs, though adorned
with end rhymes like the songs of the Shih Ching, follow a
different metrical pattern: the lines are usually longer and
more irregular and are commonly (though not always) marked by a
strong caesura in the middle. Their effect is thus rather
plaintive, and they lend themselves to chanting instead of
singing. The beginning of this tradition is obscure because most
of the early samples were eclipsed by the brilliant
4th/3rd-century-bc compositions of the towering genius Ch’ü
Yüan, China’s first known poet.
Among some 25 elegies that are
attributed to Ch’ü Yüan, the most important and longest is Li
sao (“On Encountering Sorrow”), which has been described as a
politico-erotic ode, relating by means of a love allegory the
poet’s disappointment with his royal master and describing his
imaginary travels in distant regions and the realms of heaven,
in an attempt to rid himself of his sorrow. Ch’ü Yüan committed
suicide by drowning in the Mi-lo River; and his tragic death, no
less than his beautiful elegies, helped to perpetuate the new
literary genre. In contrast to the poems of the Shih Ching,
which had few successful imitators, the genre created by Ch’ü
Yüan was cultivated for more than five centuries, and it also
experienced later revivals.
Ch’ü
Yüan
Qu Yuan, Wade-Giles
romanization Ch’ü Yüan (b. c. 339, Quyi [now Zigui,
Hubei province], China—d. 278 bc, Hunan), one of the
greatest poets of ancient China and the earliest
known by name. His highly original and imaginative
verse had an enormous influence over early Chinese
poetry.
Qu Yuan was born a
member of the ruling house of Chu, a large state in
the central valley of the Yangtze River. While still
in his 20s he was appointed a trusted, favoured
counselor of his kinsman Huaiwang, the ruler of Chu.
Qu Yuan advocated the unpopular policy of resistance
to Qin, the most powerful of the Warring States,
causing his rival courtiers to intrigue successfully
against him. Estranged from the throne through the
malice of his rivals, Qu Yuan was banished to the
south of the Yangtze River by Huaiwang’s successor,
Qingxiangwang.
In despair over his
banishment, Qu Yuan wandered about southern Chu,
writing poetry and observing the shamanistic folk
rites and legends that greatly influenced his works.
He eventually drowned himself in despair in the
Miluo River, a tributary of the Yangtze. The famous
Dragon Boat Festival, held on the fifth day of the
fifth month of the Chinese lunar year, originated as
a search for the poet’s body.
The works of Qu
Yuan have survived in an early anthology, the Chuci
(“Elegies of Chu”; Eng. trans. The Songs of the
South, 1959), much of which must be attributed to
later poets writing about the legendary life of Qu
Yuan. The anthology begins with the long melancholic
poem Lisao (“On Encountering Sorrow”), Qu Yuan’s
most famous work, which initiated a tradition of
romanticism in Chinese literature.
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Prose
Prior to the rise of the philosophers in the 6th century bc,
brief prose writings were reported to be numerous; but of these
only two collections have been transmitted: the Shu, or Shu
Ching (“Classic of History”), consisting of diverse kinds of
primitive state papers, such as declarations, portions of
charges to feudal lords, and orations; and the I, or I Ching
(“Classic of Changes”), a fortune-telling manual. Both grew by
accretion and, according to a very doubtful tradition, were
edited by Confucius himself. Neither can be considered
literature, but both have exerted influence on Chinese writers
for more than 2,000 years as a result of their inclusion in the
Confucian canon.
The earliest writings that can
be assigned to individual “authorship,” in the loose sense of
the term, are the Lao-tzu, or Tao-te Ching (“Classic of the Way
of Power”), which is attributed to Lao-tzu, who is credited with
being the founder of Taoism and who might have been an older
contemporary of Confucius; and the Lun yü (“Conversations”), or
Analects (selected miscellaneous passages), of Confucius.
Neither of the philosophers wrote extensively, and their
teachings were recorded by their followers. Thus, the Lao-tzu
consists of brief summaries of Lao-tzu’s sayings, many of which
are in rhyme and others in polished prose to facilitate
memorization. Likewise, the Analects is composed of collections
of the sage’s sayings, mostly as answers to questions or as a
result of discussions because writing implements and materials
were expensive and scarce. The circumstances of the
conversations, however, were usually omitted; and as a
consequence the master’s words often sound cryptic and
disjointed, despite the profundity of the wisdom.
By about 400 bc, writing
materials had improved, and a change in prose style resulted.
The records of the discourses became longer, the narrative
portions more detailed; jokes, stories, anecdotes, and parables,
interspersed in the conversations, were included. Thus, the
Mencius, or Meng-tzu, the teachings of Mencius, not only is
three times longer than the Analects of Confucius but also is
topically and more coherently arranged. The same characteristic
may be noticed in the authentic chapters of the Chuang-tzu,
attributed to the Taoist sage Chuang-tzu, who “in paradoxical
language, in bold words, and with subtle profundity, gave free
play to his imagination and thought. . . . Although his writings
are inimitable and unique, they seem circuitous and innocuous.
Although his utterances are irregular and formless, they are
unconventional and readable . . .” (from the epilogue of the
Chuang-tzu).
The first example of the
well-developed essay, however, is found neither in the Mencius
nor in the Chuang-tzu but in the Mo-tzu, attributed to Mo Ti, or
Mo-tzu, a predecessor of Mencius and Chuang-tzu, whose singular
attainments in logic made him a forceful preacher. His recorded
sermons are characterized by simplicity of style, clarity of
exposition, depth of conviction, and directness of appeal.
The prose style continued to be
developed by such outstanding philosopher-essayists as Hsün-tzu
and his pupil, the Legalist Han-fei-tzu. The peak of this
development, however, was not reached until the appearance of
the first expertly arranged full-length book, Lü-shih
Ch’un-ch’iu (“The Spring and Autumn [Annals] of Mr. Lü”),
completed in 240 bc under the general direction of Lü Pu-wei.
The work, 60 essays in 26 sections, summarizes the teachings of
the several schools of philosophy as well as the folklore of the
various regions of China.
Lao-tzu
Laozi, (Chinese: “Master Lao,” or “Old Master”),
original name (Wade-Giles) Li Er, deified as Lao
Jun, Tai Shang Lao-Jun, or Tai Shang Xuanyuan
Huangdi, also called Lao Dun, or Lao Dan (flourished
6th century bce, China), the first philosopher of
Chinese Daoism and alleged author of the Daodejing,
a primary Daoist writing. Modern scholars discount
the possibility that the Daodejing was written by
only one person but readily acknowledge the
influence of Daoism on the development of Buddhism.
Laozi is venerated as a philosopher by Confucians
and as a saint or god in popular religion and was
worshipped as an imperial ancestor during the Tang
dynasty (618–907). (See also Daoism.)
The life of Laozi
Despite his historical importance, Laozi remains an
obscure figure. The principal source of information
about his life is a biography in the Shiji (“Records
of the Historian”) by Sima Qian. This historian, who
wrote in about 100 bce, had little solid information
concerning the philosopher. He says that Laozi was a
native of Quren, a village in the district of Hu in
the state of Chu, which corresponds to the modern
Luyi in the eastern part of Henan province. His
family name was Li, his proper name Er, his
appellation Dan. He was appointed to the office of
shi at the royal court of the Zhou dynasty (c.
1046–256 bce). Shi today means “historian,” but in
ancient China the shi were scholars specializing in
matters such as astrology and divination and were in
charge of sacred books.
After noting the civil status of Laozi, the
historian proceeds to relate a celebrated but
questionable meeting of the old Daoist with the
younger Confucius (551–479 bce). The story has been
much discussed by the scholars; it is mentioned
elsewhere, but the sources are so inconsistent and
contradictory that the meeting seems a mere legend.
During the supposed interview, Laozi blamed
Confucius for his pride and ambition, and Confucius
was so impressed with Laozi that he compared him to
a dragon that rises to the sky, riding on the winds
and clouds.
No less legendary is a voyage of Laozi to the
west. Realizing that the Zhou dynasty was on the
decline, the philosopher departed and came to the
Xiangu pass, which was the entrance to the state of
Qin. Yinxi, the legendary guardian of the pass
(guanling), begged him to write a book for him.
Thereupon, Laozi wrote a book in two sections of
5,000 characters, in which he set down his ideas
about the Dao (literally “Way”) and the de (its
“virtue”): the Daodejing. Then he left, and “nobody
knows what has become of him,” says Sima Qian.
After the account of the journey of Laozi and of
the redaction of the book, Sima Qian alludes to
other persons with whom Laozi was sometimes
identified. One was Lao Laizi, a Daoist contemporary
of Confucius; another was a great astrologer named
Dan. Sima Qian adds, “Maybe Laozi has lived one
hundred and fifty years, some say more than two
hundred years.” Since the ancient Chinese believed
that superior men could live very long, it is
natural that the Daoists credited their master with
an uncommon longevity, but this is perhaps a rather
late tradition because Zhuangzi, the Daoist sage of
the 4th century bce, still speaks of the death of
Laozi without emphasizing an unusual longevity.
To explain why the life of Laozi is so shrouded
in obscurity, Sima Qian says that he was a gentleman
recluse whose doctrine consisted in nonaction, the
cultivation of a state of inner calm, and purity of
mind. Indeed, throughout the whole history of China,
there have always been recluses who shunned worldly
life. The author (or authors) of the Daodejing was
probably a person of this kind who left no trace of
his life.
The question of whether there was a historical
Laozi has been raised by many scholars, but it is
rather an idle one. The Daodejing, as we have it,
cannot be the work of a single author; some of its
sayings may date from the time of Confucius; others
are certainly later; and a version of the text has
been recovered in an archaeological find at Guodian
that dates to before 300 bce. Owing to these facts,
some scholars have assigned the authorship of the
Daodejing to the astrologer Dan; while others,
giving credit to a genealogy of the descendants of
the philosopher, which is related in the biography
by Sima Qian, try to place the life of Lao Dan at
the end of the 4th century bce. But this genealogy
can hardly be considered as historical. It proves
only that at the time of Sima Qian a certain Li
family (see above) pretended to be descended from
the Daoist sage; it does not give a basis for
ascertaining the existence of the latter. The name
Laozi seems to represent a certain type of sage
rather than an individual.
Hagiographical legends
Beyond the biography in the Shiji and sporadic
mentions in other old books, several hagiographies
were written from the 2nd century ce onward. These
are interesting for the history of the formation of
religious Daoism. During the Eastern, or Later, Han
dynasty (25–220 ce), Laozi had already become a
mythical figure who was worshipped by the people and
occasionally by an emperor. Later, in religious
circles, he became the Lord Lao (Lao Jun), revealer
of sacred texts and saviour of mankind. There were
several stories about his birth, one of which was
influenced by the legend of the miraculous birth of
Buddha. Laozi’s mother is said to have borne him 72
years in her womb and he to have entered the world
through her left flank. One legend gives an
explanation of his family name, Li: the baby came to
light at the foot of a plum tree (li) and decided
that li (“plum”) should be his surname. Two legends
were particularly important in the creed of the
Daoists. According to the first, the Lao Jun was
believed to have adopted different personalities
throughout history and to have come down to the
earth several times to instruct the rulers in the
Daoist doctrine. The second legend developed from
the story of Laozi’s journey to the west. In this
account the Buddha was thought to be none other than
Laozi himself. During the 3rd century ce an
apocryphal book was fabricated on this theme with a
view to combating Buddhist propaganda. This book,
the Laozi huhuajing (“Laozi’s Conversion of the
Barbarians”), in which Buddhism was presented as an
inferior kind of Daoism, was often condemned by the
Chinese imperial authorities.
Laozi has never ceased to be generally respected
in all circles in China. To the Confucians he was a
venerated philosopher; to the people he was a saint
or a god; and to the Daoists he was an emanation of
the Dao and one of their greatest divinities.
Max Kaltenmark
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Chuang-tzu
Zhuangzi, (Chinese: “Master Zhuang”)Wade-Giles
romanization Chuang-tzu, original name Zhuang Zhou
(b. c. 369, Meng [now Shangqiu, Henan province],
China—d. 286 bce), the most significant of China’s
early interpreters of Daoism, whose work (Zhuangzi)
is considered one of the definitive texts of Daoism
and is thought to be more comprehensive than the
Daodejing, which is attributed to Laozi, the first
philosopher of Daoism. Zhuangzi’s teachings also
exerted a great influence on the development of
Chinese Buddhism and had considerable effect on
Chinese landscape painting and poetry.
Life
In spite of his importance, details of Zhuangzi’s
life, apart from the many anecdotes about him in the
Zhuangzi itself, are unknown. The “Grand Historian”
of the Han dynasty, Sima Qian (died c. 87 bce),
incorporated in his biographical sketch of Zhuangzi
only the most meagre information. It indicates that
Zhuangzi was a native of the state of Meng, that his
personal name was Zhou, and that he was a minor
official at Qiyuan in his home state. He lived
during the reign of Prince Wei of Chu (died 327 bce)
and was therefore a contemporary of Mencius, an
eminent Confucian scholar known as China’s “Second
Sage.” According to Sima Qian, Zhuangzi’s teachings
were drawn primarily from the sayings of Laozi, but
his perspective was much broader. He used his
literary and philosophical skills to refute the
Confucians and Mohists (followers of Mozi, who
advocated “concern for everyone”).
Zhuangzi is best known through the book that
bears his name, the Zhuangzi, also known as Nanhua
zhenjing (“The Pure Classic of Nanhua”). At about
the turn of the 4th century ce, Guo Xiang, the first
and perhaps the best commentator on the Zhuangzi,
established the work as a primary source for Daoist
thought. It is composed of 33 chapters, and evidence
suggests that there may have been as many as 53
chapters in copies of the book circulated in the 4th
century. It is generally agreed that the first seven
chapters, the “inner books,” are for the most part
from the hand of Zhuangzi himself, whereas the
“outer books” (chapters 8–22) and the miscellany
(chapters 23–33) are largely the product of his
later followers. A vivid description of Zhuangzi’s
character comes from the anecdotes about him in the
book’s later chapters.
Character
Zhuangzi appears in these passages as an
unpredictable and eccentric sage who seems careless
about personal comforts or public esteem. His
clothing is shoddy and patched, and his shoes have
to be tied to his feet with string in order to keep
them from falling apart. Nevertheless, he does not
consider himself to be miserable, only poor. When
his good friend Hui Shi comes to console him upon
the death of his wife, he finds the sage sitting on
a mat, singing and beating on a basin. Hui Shi
reprimands him, pointing out that such behaviour is
improper at the death of someone who has lived and
grown old with him and has borne him children.
When she died, how could I help being affected?
But as I think the matter over, I realize that
originally she had no life; and not only no life,
she had no form; not only no form, she had no vital
energy (qi). In the limbo of existence and
non-existence, there was transformation and the
vital energy emerged. The vital energy was
transformed to be form, form was transformed to
become life, and now birth has transformed to become
death. This is like the rotation of the four
seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter. Now she
lies asleep in the great house (the cosmos). For me
to go about weeping and wailing would be to show my
ignorance of destiny. Therefore I desist.
When Zhuangzi himself was at the point of death,
his disciples began to talk about an elaborate
burial for him. Zhuangzi immediately stopped the
discussion by declaring that he did not need the
paraphernalia of a great funeral, that nature would
be his inner and outer coffin, the sun and the moon
his jade rings, and the stars and the planets his
jewelry. All creation would make offerings and
escort him. He needed no more. Somewhat taken aback,
his disciples declared that they were afraid that
the crows and the buzzards might eat him. To this
Zhuangzi replied,
Above the ground it’s the crows and the kites who
will eat me; below the ground it’s the worms and the
ants. What prejudice is this, that you wish to take
from the one to give to the other?
Zhuangzi’s eccentricities stem directly from his
understanding of the processional nature of human
experience. Insight for Zhuangzi comes with the
realization that everything in life is both dynamic
and continuous—what he calls dao.
Philosophy
Zhuangzi taught that what can be known or said of
the Dao is not the Dao. It has neither initial
beginning nor final end, nor limitations or
demarcations. Life is the ongoing transformation of
the Dao, in which there is no better or worse, no
good or evil. Things should be allowed to follow
their own course, and men should not value one
situation over another. A truly virtuous man is free
from the bondage of circumstance, personal
attachments, tradition, and the need to reform his
world. Zhuangzi declined an offer to be prime
minister of the state of Chu because he did not want
the entanglements of a court career.
The complete relativity of his perspective is
forcefully expressed in one of the better-known
passages of the Zhuangzi:
Once I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamed that I was a
butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was
conscious that I was quite pleased with myself, but
I did not know that I was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke,
and there I was, visibly Zhou. I do not know whether
it was Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly or the
butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. Between Zhou
and the butterfly there must be some distinction.
This is called the transformation of things.
The relativity of all experience is in constant
tension in the Zhuangzi with the unity of all
things. When asked where the Dao was, Zhuangzi
replied that it was everywhere. When pushed to be
more specific, he declared that it was in ants and,
still lower, in weeds and potsherds; furthermore, it
was also in excrement and urine. This forceful
statement of the omnipresence of the Dao had its
parallels in later Chinese Buddhism, in which a
similar figure of speech was used to describe the
ever-present Buddha (Buddhist scholars, especially
those of the Chan [Zen] school, also drew heavily on
Zhuangzi’s works). Zhuangzi was par excellence the
philosopher of the unattached man who is at one with
the Dao.
James Hamilton Ware, Jr.
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Mo-tzu
Mozi, Wade-Giles romanization Mo-tzu, also spelled
Motze, Motse, or Micius, original name Mo Di (b.
470?, China—d. 391? bce, China), Chinese philosopher
whose fundamental doctrine of undifferentiated love
(jianai) challenged Confucianism for several
centuries and became the basis of a socioreligious
movement known as Mohism.
Life
Born a few years after Confucius’s death, Mozi was
raised in a period when the feudal hierarchy
instituted at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty
(12th or 11th century bce to 256 bce) was swiftly
disintegrating and China was divided into small,
constantly warring feudal states. He thus confronted
the problem that faced all thinkers in
5th-century-bce China: how to bring political and
social order out of chaos.
According to
tradition, Mozi was originally a follower of the
teachings of Confucius, until he became convinced
that Confucianism laid too much emphasis on a
burdensome code of rituals and too little on
religious teaching, at which time Mozi decided to go
his own way. Confucius, from all accounts, was
aristocratic by temperament and orientation and
dreamed of a return of the calm and peaceful days of
pomp and splendour at the beginning of the Zhou
dynasty. Mozi, on the other hand, was drawn to the
common people and looked much farther back to a life
of primitive simplicity and straightforwardness in
human relations.
Mozi’s life,
however, resembled that of Confucius in many
important respects. He was widely read and well
versed in the tradition of the Chinese Classics.
Except for a brief period when he held public
office, Mozi spent most of his life traveling from
one feudal state to another in the hope of meeting a
prince who would allow him to put his teachings into
practice. In the absence of such a prince, he had to
be content with maintaining a school and
recommending his disciples for administrative
positions. He commanded respect partly because he
lived a very simple life and was a teacher who took
his own teachings seriously. He not only condemned
offensive war but also led his followers to distant
states to prevent the outbreak of wars by
reinforcing the defending state.
The Mozi, the
principal work left by Mozi and his followers,
contains the essence of his political, ethical, and
religious teachings. The gist of it is found in the
three sets of chapters of its second section, which
give an overview of the 10 major tenets: “exaltation
of the virtuous,” “identification with the
superior,” “undifferentiated love,” “condemnation of
offensive war,” “economy of expenditures,”
“simplicity in funerals,” “will of heaven,” “on
ghosts,” “denunciation of music as a wasteful
activity,” and “antifatalism.” Since Mohism split
into three schools after Mozi’s death, the three
sets of chapters may well represent the three sets
of texts preserved by the three schools. The other
sections of the Mozi might be listed as follows: (1)
summaries and abstracts of Mozi’s teachings, (2)
discussions on logic and physical sciences, (3)
records of Mozi’s doings and sayings, and (4) a
manual of military defense.
Teachings
As a thinker, Mozi was distinctive in his insistence
on methodology. He insisted that standards of
judgment be established, and his criteria may be
summarized as the threefold test and the fourfold
standard. The threefold test reminded thinkers that
the basis, verifiability, and applicability of any
proposition must be analyzed; the fourfold standard
reminded thinkers that one should always assess the
benefits any proposition could bring to the country
and the people. Benefits were defined as enrichment
of the poor, increase of the population, removal of
danger, and regulation of disorder. To Mozi the
tests and standards were indispensable. Generalizing
further, Mozi declared that, before anything could
be said to be good, it was necessary first to
demonstrate what it was good for.
The cornerstone of
Mozi’s system was undifferentiated love. If the
world is in chaos, he said, it is owing to human
selfishness and partiality, and the prescribed
cure—in striking parallel with Christianity—is that
“partiality should be replaced by universality,”
for, “when everyone regards the states and cities of
others as he regards his own, no one will attack the
others’ state or seize the others’ cities.” The same
principle was to be applied to the welfare of the
family and of the individual. The peace of the world
and the happiness of humanity lie in the practice of
undifferentiated love. Many objections—its
impracticability, its neglect of the special claims
of one’s parents—were raised against this new
doctrine, but Mozi demonstrated that the principle
of undifferentiated love had in it both utilitarian
justification and divine sanction. He spoke of
“undifferentiated love and mutual profit” in one
breath, and he was convinced that this principle was
both the way of man and the way of heaven (tian).
Mozi’s stand on
religion makes him exceptional among Chinese
philosophers. His call to the people was for them to
return to the faith of their fathers. He might be
said to be a revivalist, a champion of religious
orthodoxy with a personal god. To Mozi, there is
heaven, heaven has a will, and this will of heaven
is to be obeyed by human beings and accepted as the
unifying standard of human thought and action: “What
is the will of heaven that is to be obeyed? It is to
love all the people in the world without
distinction.” Heaven not only “desires righteousness
and abominates unrighteousness” but also metes out
reward and punishment accordingly. The system of
Mozi, with its gospel of undifferentiated love and
the ascetic discipline as exemplified by his own
life, soon after the master’s death, was embodied in
an organized church with a succession of Elder
Masters and a considerable body of devotees. The
religion prospered for several generations before
completely disappearing.
The teachings of
Mozi, however, continued to be held in high respect
for several centuries. Down to the beginning of the
2nd century bce, writers referred to Confucianism
and Mohism in one breath as the two leading schools
of thought. But from that time, Mohism suddenly
disappeared from the intellectual scene. Critics
have generally agreed in admiring the high-minded
character of Mozi himself but considered his
teachings overdemanding and contrary to human
nature. It was not until the encounter with Western
learning in the 19th century that Mozi was
rediscovered and his teachings reappraised.
Yi Pao Mei
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Ch’in and Han dynasties: 221
bc–ad 220
Poetry
Following the unification of the empire by the Ch’in dynasty
(221–206 bc) and the continuation of the unified empire under
the Han, literary activities took new directions. At the
Imperial and feudal courts, the fu genre, a combination of rhyme
and prose, began to flourish. Long and elaborate descriptive
poetic compositions, the fu were in form a continuation of the
Ch’u elegies, now made to serve a different purpose—the
amusement of the new aristocracy and the glorification of the
empire—by dwelling on such topics as the low table and the
folding screen or on descriptions of the capital cities. But
even the best fu writing, by such masters of the art as Mei
Sheng and Ssu-ma Hsiang-ju, bordered on the frivolous and
bombastic. Another major fu writer, Yang Hsiung, in the prime of
his career remorsefully realized that the genre was a minor
craft not worthy of a true poet. Nonetheless, the fu was almost
universally accepted as the norm of creative writing, and nearly
1,000 pieces were produced.
A more important contribution
to literature by the Han government was the reactivation in 125
bc of the Yüeh Fu, or Music Bureau, which had been established
at least a century earlier to collect songs and their musical
scores. Besides temple and court compositions of ceremonial
verse, this office succeeded in preserving a number of songs
sung or chanted by the ordinary people, including songs from the
border areas, which reveal alien influences. This
category—called yüeh-fu, for the Music Bureau—includes not only
touching lyrics but also charming ballads.
One such ballad, “The Orphan,”
tells of an orphan’s hardships and disappointments; the form of
the poem—lines of irregular length, varying from three to six
syllables (or graphs)—represents the singer’s attempt to
simulate the choking voice of the sufferers. Lo-fu hsing (“The
Song of Lo-fu”; also called Mo-shang sang, “Roadside Mulberry
Tree”), recounts how a pretty young lady declined a carriage
ride offered her by a government commissioner. The most
outstanding folk ballad of this period is K’ung-ch’üeh tung-nan
fei (“Southeast the Peacock Flies”). The longest poem of early
Chinese literature (353 lines), it relates the tragedy of a
young married couple who had committed suicide as the result of
the cruelty of the husband’s mother. The ballad was probably
first sung shortly after ad 200 and grew by accretion and
refinement in oral transmission until it was recorded in final
form for the first time in about 550. Yüeh-fu songs, most of
which are made up mainly of five-syllable lines, became the
fountainhead of a new type of poetry, ku-shih (“ancient-style
poems”); contemporary Han dynasty poets at first merely refined
the originals of the folk songs without claiming credit and
later imitated their fresh and lively metre.
Prose
Prose literature was further developed during the Ch’in and Han
dynasties. In addition to a prolific output of philosophers and
political thinkers—a brilliant representative of whom is Liu An,
prince of Huai-nan, whose work is called Huai-nan-tzu (c. 140
bc; “The Master of Huai-nan”)—an important and monumental
category of Han dynasty literature consists of historical works.
Outstanding among these is the Shih-chi (c. 85 bc; “Historical
Records,” Eng. trans., The Records of the Grand Historian of
China, 2 vol.) by Ssu-ma Ch’ien. A masterpiece that took 18
years to produce, it deals with major events and personalities
of about 2,000 years (down to the author’s time), comprising 130
chapters and totaling more than 520,000 words. The Shih-chi was
not only the first general history of its kind attempted in
China, it also set a pattern in organization for dynastic
histories of subsequent ages. An artist as well as a historian,
Ssu-ma Ch’ien succeeded in making events and personalities of
the past into living realities for his readers; his biographies
subsequently became models for authors of both fiction and
history. Ssu-ma’s great successor, the poet-historian-soldier
Pan Ku, author of the Han shu (“Han Documents”), a history of
the Former Han dynasty containing more than 800,000 words,
performed a similar tour de force but did not equal Ssu-ma
Ch’ien in either scope or style.
Pan Ku’s prose style, though
not necessarily archaic, was more consciously literary—a result
of the ever-widening gap between the spoken and written aspects
of the language. This anomaly was more evident in China than
elsewhere, and it was to have far-reaching effects on the
evolution of Chinese literary tradition. In an attempt to
resolve the difficulties of communication among speakers of many
dialects in the empire, a standard literary language, wen-yen,
was promoted from the Han dynasty on. Perpetuated for more than
2,000 years, the literary language failed to keep pace with
changes in the spoken tongue, and eventually it became almost
unintelligible to the illiterate masses.
The Six Dynasties and Sui
dynasty: ad 220–618
After the fall of the Han dynasty, there was
a long period of political division (ad 220–589), with barely
four decades of precarious unification (ad 280–316/17). Despite
the social and political confusion and military losses, however,
the cultural scene was by no means dismal. Several influences on
the development of literature are noteworthy. First, Buddhism,
introduced earlier, had brought with it religious chants and
Indian music, which helped to attune Chinese ears to the finer
distinctions of tonal qualities in their own language. Second,
aggressive northern tribes, who invaded and dominated the
northern half of the country from 316, were being culturally
absorbed and converted. Third, the political division of the
empire between the South and the North (as a result of the
domination of non-Chinese in the north) led to an increase in
cultural differences and to a subsequent rivalry to uphold what
was regarded as cultural orthodoxy, frequently resulting in
literary antiquarianism.
Poetry
Folk songs flourished in both regions. In the South, popular
love songs, originating in the coastal areas, which now came
increasingly under Chinese political and cultural domination,
attracted the attention of poets and critics. The songs of the
North were more militant. Reflecting this spirit most fully is
the Mu-lan shih (“Ballad of Mu Lan”), which sings of a girl who
disguised herself as a warrior and won glory on the battlefield.
Soon the number of writers of
“literary” poetry greatly increased. Among them, two poets
deserve special mention. Ts’ao Chih (3rd century), noted for his
ethereal lyricism, gave definite artistic form to the poetry of
the five-syllable line, already popularized in folk song. T’ao
Ch’ien (4th–5th centuries), also known as T’ao Yüan-ming, is one
of China’s major poets and was the greatest of this period. A
recluse, he retired from a post in the bureaucracy of the Chin
dynasty at the age of 33 to farm, contemplate nature, and write
poetry. His verse, written in a plain style, was echoed by many
poets who came after him. Using several verse forms with
seemingly effortless ease—including the fu, for Kuei-ch’ü-lai
tz’u (“Homeward Bound”)—he was representative of the trend of
the age to explore various genres for lyrical expression. One of
his best loved poems is the following ku-shih, translated by
Arthur Waley; it is one of 12 he wrote at different times after
he had been drinking.
I built my hut in a zone of
human habitation,
Yet near me there sounds no noise of horse or coach.
Would you know how this is possible?
A heart that is distant creates a wilderness round it.
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,
Then gaze long at the distant hills.
The mountain air is fresh at the dusk of day;
The flying birds two by two return.
In these things there lies a deep meaning;
Yet when we would express it, words suddenly fail us.
T’ao
Ch’ien
Tao Qian,
Wade-Giles romanization T’ao Ch’ien, also called Tao
Yuanming, courtesy name (zi) Yuanliang (b. 365,
Xunyang [now Jiujiang, Jiangxi province], China—d.
427, Xunyang), one of China’s greatest poets and a
noted recluse.
Born into an
impoverished aristocratic family, Tao Qian took a
minor official post while in his 20s in order to
support his aged parents. After about 10 years at
that post and a brief term as county magistrate, he
resigned from official life, repelled by its
excessive formality and widespread corruption. With
his wife and children he retired to a farming
village south of the Yangtze River. Despite the
hardships of a farmer’s life and frequent food
shortages, Tao was contented, writing poetry,
cultivating the chrysanthemums that became
inseparably associated with his poetry, and drinking
wine, also a common subject of his verse.
Because the taste
of Tao’s contemporaries was for an elaborate and
artificial style, his simple and straightforward
poetry was not fully appreciated until the Tang
dynasty (618–907). A master of the five-word line,
Tao has been described as the first great poet of
tianyuan (“fields and gardens”), landscape poetry
inspired by pastoral scenes (as opposed to the
then-fashionable shanshui [“mountains and rivers”]
poetry). Essentially a Daoist in his philosophical
outlook on life and death, he also freely adopted
the elements of Confucianism and Buddhism that most
appealed to him.
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Prose
As orthodox Confucianism gradually yielded to Taoism and later
to Buddhism, nearly all of the major writers began to cultivate
an uninhibited individuality. Lu Chi, 3rd-century poet and
critic, in particular emphasized the importance of originality
in creative writing and discredited the long-established
practice of imitating the great masters of the past. Still, his
celebrated essay on literature (Wen fu), in which he enunciated
this principle, was written as a fu, showing after all that he
was a child of his own age. The 3rd/4th-century Taoist
philosopher Ko Hung insisted that technique is no less essential
to a writer than moral integrity. The revolt of the age against
conventionality was revealed in the new vogue of ch’ing-t’an
(“pure conversation”), intellectual discussions on lofty and
nonmundane matters, recorded in a 5th-century collection of
anecdotes entitled Shih-shuo hsin-yü (“A New Account of Tales of
the World”) by Liu Yi-ch’ing. Though prose writers as a whole
continued to be most concerned with lyrical expression and
rhetorical devices for artistic effect, there were notable
deviations from the prevailing usage in the polyphonic p’ien-wen
(“parallel prose”). In this form, parallel construction of pairs
of sentences and counterbalancing of tonal patterns were the
chief requirements. P’ien-wen was used especially in works
concerned with philosophical disputes and in religious
controversies; but it was also used in the first book-length
work of literary criticism, Wen-hsin tiao-lung (“The Literary
Mind and the Carving of the Dragon”), by the 6th-century writer
Liu Hsieh.
Among prose masters of the 6th
century, two northerners deserve special mention: Yang
Hsien-chih, author of Lo-yang Chia-lan chi (“Record of Buddhist
Temples in Lo-yang”), and Li Tao-yüan, author of Shui Ching chu
(“Commentary on the Water Classic”). Although both of these
works seem to have been planned to serve a practical,
utilitarian purpose, they are magnificent records of
contemporary developments and charming storehouses of
accumulated folklore, written with great spontaneity and
artistry. This age also witnessed the first impact of Buddhist
literature in Chinese translation, which had been growing in
size and variety since the 2nd century.
T’ang and Five Dynasties:
618–960
During the T’ang dynasty (618–907), Chinese literature
reached its golden age.
Poetry
In poetry, the greatest glory of the period, all the verse forms
of the past were freely adopted and refined, and new forms were
crystallized. One new form was perfected early in the dynasty
and given the definitive name lü-shih (“regulated verse”). A
poem of this kind consists of eight lines of five or seven
syllables—each line set down in accordance with strict tonal
patterns—calling for parallel structure in the middle, or second
and third, couplets.
Another verse form much in
vogue was the chüeh-chü (“truncated verse”). An outgrowth and a
shortened version of the lü-shih, it omitted either the first
four lines, the last four lines, the first two and the last two
lines, or the middle four lines. Thus, the tonal quality of the
lü-shih was retained, whereas antithetic structure was made
optional. These poems of four lines, each consisting of five or
seven words (syllables or characters), had to depend for their
artistry on suggestiveness and economy comparable to the
robāʾīyāt (“quatrains”) of
Omar Khayyam and the Japanese haiku.
The fine distinctions of tonal
variations in the spoken language had reached their height
during this period, with eight tones; and rules and regulations
concerning the sequence of lighter and heavier tones had been
formulated. But since the observance of strict rules of prosody
was not mandatory in the ku-shih (“ancient style”) form still in
use, it was possible for an individual poet to enjoy conformity
or freedom as he saw fit.
Of the more than 2,200 T’ang
poets whose works—totaling more than 48,900 pieces—have been
preserved, only a few can be mentioned. Wang Wei, a musician and
the traditional father of monochrome landscape painting, was
also a great poet. Influenced by Buddhism, he wrote exquisite
meditative verse of man’s relation to nature that exemplified
his own dictum that poetry should have the beauty of painting
and vice versa. Li Po, one of the two major poets of the T’ang
dynasty, a lover of detachment and freedom, deliberately avoided
the lü-shih and chose the less formal verse forms to sing of
friendship or wine. An example is the poem “To Tan-Ch’iu,”
translated by Arthur Waley.
My friend is lodging high in
the Eastern Range,
Dearly loving the beauty of valleys and hills.
At green Spring he lies in the empty woods,
And is still asleep when the sun shines on high.
A pine-tree wind dusts his sleeves and coat;
A pebbly stream cleans his heart and ears.
I envy you, who far from strife and talk
Are high-propped on a pillow of blue cloud.
Generally considered the
greatest poet of China was Tu Fu, a keen observer of the
political and social scene who criticized injustice wherever he
found it and who clearly understood the nature of the great
upheaval following the rebellion of dissatisfied generals in
755, which was a turning point in the fortunes of the T’ang. As
an artist, Tu Fu excelled in all verse forms, transcending all
rules and regulations in prosody while conforming to and
exploiting them. His power and passion can perhaps be suggested
by a single line (translated by Robert Payne): “Blue is the
smoke of war, white the bones of men.”
One of the admirers of Tu Fu as
a poet-historian was Po Chü-i who, like his great predecessor,
was deeply concerned with the social problems of his age. Po
Chü-i sought to learn from ordinary folk not only naturalness of
language but also their feelings and reactions, especially at
the height of his career when he wrote what he called the Hsin
yüeh-fu shih (“New Yüeh-fu Poems”).
At the end of the T’ang and
during the Five Dynasties, another new verse form developed.
Composed normally of lines of irregular length and written as
lyrics to musical tunes, this form came to be known as tz’u, in
contrast with shih, which includes all the verse forms mentioned
above. Since the lines in a tz’u might vary from one to nine or
even 11 syllables, they were comparable to the natural rhythm of
speech and therefore easily understood when sung.
First sung by ordinary folk,
they were popularized by professional women singers and, during
the T’ang, attracted the attention of poets. It was not,
however, until the transitional period of the Five Dynasties
(907–960), a time of division and strife, that tz’u became the
major vehicle of lyrical expression. Of tz’u poets in this
period, the greatest was Li Yü, last monarch of the Southern
T’ang, who was seized in 976 as the new Sung dynasty
consolidated its power. Li Yü’s tz’u poetry is saturated with a
tragic nostalgia for better days in the South; it is suffused
with sadness—a new depth of feeling notably absent from earlier
tz’u, which had been sung at parties and banquets. The following
is typical, translated by Jerome Ch’en and Michael Bullock:
Lin hua hsieh liao ch’un hung
T’ai ch’ung ch’ung
Wu nai chao lai han yü wan lai feng
Yen chih lei
Hsiang liu tsui
Chi shih ch’ung
Tzu shih jen sheng ch’ang hen shui ch’ang tung
The red of the spring orchard
has faded.
Far too soon!
The blame is often laid
on the chilling rain at dawn
and the wind at dusk.
The rouged tears
That intoxicate and hold in thrall—
When will they fall again?
As a river drifts toward the east
So painful life passes to its bitter end.
Li Po
Li Bai, also
spelled Li Bo, Wade-Giles romanization Li Pai or Li
Po, courtesy name (zi) Taibai, literary name (hao)
Qinglian Jushi (b. 701, Jiangyou, Sichuan province,
China—d. 762, Dangtu, Anhui province), Chinese poet
who rivaled Du Fu for the title of China’s greatest
poet.
Li Bai liked to
regard himself as belonging to the imperial family,
but he actually belonged to a less exalted family of
the same surname. At age 24 he left home for a
period of wandering, after which he married and
lived with his wife’s family in Anlu (now in Hubei
province). He had already begun to write poetry,
some of which he showed to various officials in the
vain hope of becoming employed as a secretary. After
another nomadic period, in 742 he arrived at
Chang’an, the Tang dynasty capital, no doubt hoping
to be given a post at court. No official post was
forthcoming, but he was accepted into a group of
distinguished court poets. In the autumn of 744 he
began his wanderings again.
In 756 Li Bai
became unofficial poet laureate to the military
expedition of Prince Lin, the emperor’s 16th son.
The prince was soon accused of intending to
establish an independent kingdom and was executed;
Li Bai was arrested and imprisoned at Jiujiang. In
the summer of 758 he was banished to Yelang; before
he arrived there, he benefited from a general
amnesty. He returned to eastern China, where he died
in a relative’s house, though popular legend says
that he drowned when, sitting drunk in a boat, he
tried to seize the moon’s reflection in the water.
Li Bai was a
romantic in his view of life and in his verse. One
of the most famous wine drinkers in China’s long
tradition of imbibers, Li Bai frequently celebrated
the joy of drinking. He also wrote of friendship,
solitude, the passage of time, and the joys of
nature with brilliance and great freshness of
imagination.
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Du Fu
Du Fu, Wade-Giles
romanization Tu Fu, also called Du Gongbu or Du
Shaoling, courtesy name (zi) Zimei (b. 712, Gongxian,
Henan province, China—d. 770, on a riverboat between
Danzhou [now Changsha] and Yueyang, Hunan province),
Chinese poet, considered by many literary critics to
be the greatest of all time.
Born into a
scholarly family, Du Fu received a traditional
Confucian education but failed in the imperial
examinations of 735. As a result, he spent much of
his youth traveling. During his travels he won
renown as a poet and met other poets of the period,
including the great Li Bai. After a brief flirtation
with Daoism while traveling with Li Bai, Du Fu
returned to the capital and to the conventional
Confucianism of his youth. He never again met Li Bai,
despite his strong admiration for his older,
freewheeling contemporary.
During the 740s Du
Fu was a well-regarded member of a group of high
officials, even though he was without money and
official position himself and failed a second time
in an imperial examination. He married, probably in
741. Between 751 and 755 he tried to attract
imperial attention by submitting a succession of
literary products that were couched in a language of
ornamental flattery, a device that eventually
resulted in a nominal position at court. In 755
during An Lushan’s rebellion, Du Fu experienced
extreme personal hardships. He escaped, however, and
in 757 joined the exiled court, being given the
position of censor. His memoranda to the emperor do
not appear to have been particularly welcome; he was
eventually relieved of his post and endured another
period of poverty and hunger. Wandering about until
the mid-760s, he briefly served a local warlord, a
position that enabled him to acquire some land and
to become a gentleman farmer, but in 768 he again
started traveling aimlessly toward the south.
Popular legend attributes his death (on a riverboat
on the Xiang River) to overindulgence in food and
wine after a 10-day fast.
Du Fu’s early
poetry celebrated the beauty of the natural world
and bemoaned the passage of time. He soon began to
write bitingly of war—as in “Bingqu xing” (“The
Ballad of the Army Carts” ), a poem about
conscription—and with hidden satire—as in “Liren
xing” (“The Beautiful Woman” ), which speaks of the
conspicuous luxury of the court. As he matured, and
especially during the tumultuous period of 755 to
759, his verse began to sound a note of profound
compassion for humanity caught in the grip of
senseless war.
Du Fu’s paramount
position in the history of Chinese literature rests
on his superb classicism. He was highly erudite, and
his intimate acquaintance with the literary
tradition of the past was equaled only by his
complete ease in handling the rules of prosody. His
dense, compressed language makes use of all the
connotative overtones of a phrase and of all the
intonational potentials of the individual word,
qualities that no translation can ever reveal. He
was an expert in all poetic genres current in his
day, but his mastery was at its height in the lüshi,
or “regulated verse,” which he refined to a point of
glowing intensity.
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Po Chü-i
Bai Juyi, also
spelled Bo Juyi, Wade-Giles romanization Pai Chü-i
or Po Chü-i, courtesy name (zi) Letian, literary
name (hao) Xiangshan Jushi (b. 772, Xinzheng, Henan
province, China—d. 846, Luoyang, Henan province),
Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty (618–907) who used
his elegantly simple verse to protest the social
evils of his day, including corruption and
militarism.
Bai Juyi began
composing poetry at age five. Because of his
father’s death in 794 and straitened family
circumstances, Bai did not take the official
examinations for the bureaucracy until the late age
of 28. He passed them and also did extremely well at
another examination he took two years later. As a
result, he was given a minor post at the palace
library, as was another successful examination
candidate and poet, Yuan Zhen. They shared views on
the need for both literary and political reform, and
their lifelong friendship became perhaps the most
famous in Chinese history. In 807 Bai became a
member of the prestigious Hanlin Academy in Chang’an,
the capital, and he rose steadily in official life,
except for his banishment in 814 to a minor post at
Jiujiang, which arose from the slander of rival
courtiers. He assumed the important posts of
governor of Zhongzhou (818), Hangzhou (822), and,
later, Suzhou. In 829 he became mayor of Luoyang,
the eastern capital, but he retired from that post
in 842 because of illness.
Bai was the
informal leader of a group of poets who rejected the
courtly style of the time and emphasized the
didactic function of literature, believing that
every literary work should contain a fitting moral
and a well-defined social purpose. He considered his
most important contributions to be his satirical and
allegorical ballads and his “new yuefu,” which
usually took the form of free verse based on old
folk ballads. The most prolific of the Tang poets,
Bai aimed for simplicity in his writing, and—like Du
Fu, a great Tang poet of the preceding generation
whom Bai greatly admired—he was deeply concerned
with the social problems of the time; he deplored
the dissolute and decadent lifestyles of corrupt
officials and sympathized with the sufferings of the
poor. Many of Bai’s poems are quoted in the Japanese
classic The Tale of Genji.
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Li Yü
Li Yu, Wade-Giles
romanization Li Yü, also known as Li Houzhu,
courtesy name (zi) Chongguang (b. 937, Jinling [now
Nanjing, Jiangsu province], China—d. August 15(?),
978, Bianjing [now Kaifeng], Henan province),
Chinese poet and the last ruler of the Southern Tang
dynasty (937–975).
Li Yu succeeded his
poet father, Li Jing, as ruler in 961. His country
was invaded in 974 by Taizu, founder of the Song
dynasty (960–1279). When Li Yu’s capital, Jinling,
fell the next year, he surrendered and was taken to
the Song capital, Bianjing. There he was given a
nominal title, but his life was one of misery. After
Taizu died in 976, his brother and successor,
Taizong, had Li Yu poisoned.
Li Yu was a master
of the ci song form. More than 30 of his lyrics have
survived. His earlier poems reflect the gay and
luxurious life at his court, though some are tinged
with romantic melancholy. His middle poems are those
written from the time of his wife’s death (964) to
his captivity (975). He achieved his greatness,
however, in his later poems in which he expressed
his grief and despair at the loss of his kingdom.
The direct and powerful emotional appeal of these
later works has won them lasting popularity. In
addition to being a poet, Li Yu was also a painter,
calligrapher, collector, and musician.
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Folk literature
Besides the early tz’u, the end of the T’ang saw the evolution
of another new folk form: pien-wen (“popularizations,” not to be
confused with p’ien-wen, or parallel prose), utilizing both
prose and verse to retell episodes from the Buddha’s life and,
later, non-Buddhist stories from Chinese history and folklore.
Prose
In prose writing a major reform was led by Han Yü against the
peculiarly artificial prose style of p’ien-wen, which,
cultivated for almost 1,000 years, had become so burdened with
restrictive rules as to make forthright expression virtually
impossible. Han Yü boldly advocated the use of Chou philosophers
and early Han writers as models for prose writing. This
seemingly conservative reform had, in fact, a liberalizing
effect; for the sentence unit in prose writing was now given
perfect freedom to seek its own length and structural pattern as
logic and content might dictate, instead of slavishly conforming
to the rules of p’ien-wen. This new freedom enabled Liu
Tsung-yüan, Han Yü’s chief associate in the literary reform, to
write charming travel and landscape pieces. It also accelerated
the development of a new genre in prose: well-made tales of love
and romance, of heroic feats and adventures, of the mysterious
and supernatural, and of imaginary incidents and fictionalized
history. Among the 9th-century writers of such prose romances
were Han Yü’s pupil Shen Ya-chih and Po Hsing-chien, younger
brother of the poet Po Chü-i. These prose romances, generally
short, were written in the classical prose style for the
amusement of the literati and did not reach the masses until
some of the popular ones were adapted by playwrights in later
ages.
Sung dynasty: 960–1279
The Sung
dynasty was marked by cultural advancement and military
weakness. During this period, literary output was spectacularly
increased, thanks mainly to the improvement of printing
(invented in the 8th century) and to the establishment of public
schools throughout the empire (from 1044). Nearly all the
literary genres in verse and prose were continued; and some
trends, begun in T’ang times, were accelerated.
Prose
In prose, the reform initiated by Han Yü in the name of ancient,
more straightforward style (ku-wen) was reemphasized by such
11th-century writers as Ou-yang Hsiu and Su Tung-p’o. Both men
held high rank in the civil service and were great painters as
well as leading poets. Nevertheless, their contribution to prose
writing in ku-wen style was as important as their poetry. The
ku-wen movement was further supported by men whose primary
interest was not belles lettres, such as Ssu-ma Kuang, the
statesman-historian, and Chu Hsi, the scholar-philosopher and
principal formulator of Neo-Confucianism.
In prose fiction there were two
distinct trends. Short tales in ku-wen were written in ever
greater bulk but failed to maintain the level achieved in the
T’ang dynasty. The subject matter became more fragmentary and
anecdotal and the style duller. In sharp contrast to the ku-wen
school, which was still a literary language despite the movement
toward naturalness of expression, there arose a school of
storytelling in the vernacular. Almost purely oral in origin,
these tales reflected the style of the storyteller who
entertained audiences gathered in marketplaces, fairgrounds, or
temple yards. In the 12th century they became fairly lengthy,
connected stories, especially those dealing with fictionalized
history. This elevation of the everyday speech of the common
people as a medium of story writing of the hua-pen (“vernacular
story”) type was to open up new vistas in prose fiction in later
periods.
Poetry
Poetry of the conventional type (shih) was cultivated by
numerous rival schools, each claiming many illustrious members.
On the whole, the rival literary movements were significant as
steps toward greater naturalness in syntax, and a few
outstanding writers approximated the spoken vernacular language.
Among the many shih poets of the Sung dynasty, Lu Yu, who
flourished in the 12th century, was a towering figure. A
traveler and patriot, he wrote throughout his long career no
fewer than 20,000 poems, of which more than 9,000 have been
preserved.
But it was in their utilization
of the newer verse form, tz’u, that Sung poets achieved their
greatest distinction, making tz’u the major genre of the
dynasty. As noted above, the tz’u form had been popularized at
first orally by women singers; and the first generation of tz’u
writers had been inspired and guided by them in sentiment,
theme, and diction; their lyrics were thus redolent with the
fragrance of these women. Later in the 12th century, as men (and
one great woman) of letters began to take over, the tz’u form
reached the heights of great art. Ou-yang Hsiu and Li
Ch’ing-chao, the latter generally considered the greatest woman
poet of China, may be considered representatives of this trend.
Li Ch’ing-chao’s poems, paralleling her life, are intensely
personal. They at first dealt with the joys of love, but
gradually their tone darkened to one of despair, caused first by
frequent and lengthy separations from her husband, who was in
government service, and then by his untimely death.
Other masters of the tz’u were
Su Tung-p’o and Hsin Ch’i-chi, the latter a soldier turned
recluse. It was Hsin Ch’i-chi who imbued the writing of tz’u
with new characteristics by rising above rules without breaking
them, surpassing in this respect his contemporaries as well as
those who came after him.
Yüan dynasty: 1206–1368
Fleeing
from the Chin (Juchen) Tatars, who captured their capital in
1127, the Sung officials and courtiers retreated southward. For
almost a century and a half, China was again divided. And in
spite of political reunification by Kublai Khan, founder of the
Yüan, or Mongol, dynasty (beginning in 1206 in the North and
comprising the whole of China by 1280), the cultural split
persisted. In the South, where China’s historic traditions found
asylum, racial and cultural homogeneity persisted. In fact, the
centre of Chinese philosophy and traditional literature never
again returned north of the Yangtze Delta. But in the North new
developments arose, which led to wholly new departures. First,
the migration and fusion of the various ethnic groups gave birth
to a common spoken language with fewer tones, which later was to
become the basis of a national language; second, with the
southward shift of the centre of traditional culture, the
prestige of the old literature began to decline in the North,
especially in the eyes of the conquerors. Thus, in contrast to
the South, North China under the Yüan dynasty provided a unique
milieu for unconventional literary activities.
Drama
In this period, dramatic literature came into a belated full
flowering. The skits and vaudeville acts, the puppet shows and
shadow plays of previous ages had laid the foundation for a
full-fledged drama; but the availability of Indian and Iranian
models during the Yüan dynasty may have been a more immediate
cause for its accelerated growth. Many Chinese men of letters
refused to cooperate with the alien government, seeking refuge
in painting and writing. As the new literary type developed—the
drama of four or five acts, complete with prologue and epilogue
and including songs and dialogue in language fairly close to the
daily speech of the people—many men of letters turned to
playwriting. Between 1234 and 1368, more than 1,700 musical
plays were written and staged, and 105 dramatists were recorded;
moreover, there is an undetermined number of anonymous
playwrights whose unsigned works have been preserved but
discovered only in the 20th century. This remarkable burst of
literary innovation, however, failed to win the respect of the
orthodox critics and official historians. No mention of it was
made in the copious dynastic history, Yüan shih; and casual
references in the collected works of contemporary writers were
few. Many plays were allowed to fall into oblivion. It was not
until 1615 that a bibliophile undertook to reprint, as a
collection, 100 of the 200 plays he had seen. Even after ardent
searches by 20th-century librarians and specialists, the number
of extant Yüan dramas has been increased to only 167, hardly 10
percent of the number produced. Moreover, since the musical
scores have been lost, the plays cannot be produced on the stage
in the original manner.
Among the Yüan dramatists, the
following deserve special mention. Kuan Han-ch’ing, the author
of some 60 plays, was the first to achieve distinction. His
Tou-o yüan (“Injustice Suffered by Tou-o”) deals with the
deprivations and injustices suffered by the heroine, Tou-o,
which begin when she is widowed shortly after her marriage to a
poor scholar and culminate in her execution for a crime she has
not committed. Wang Shih-fu, Kuan’s contemporary, wrote
Hsi-hsiang chi (Romance of the Western Chamber), based on a
popular T’ang prose romance about the amorous exploits of the
poet Yüan Chen, renamed Chang Chun-jui in the play. Besides its
literary merits and its influence on later drama, it is notable
for its length, two or three times that of the average Yüan
play. Ma Chih-yüan, another contemporary, wrote 14 plays, of
which the most celebrated is Han-kung ch’iu (“Sorrow of the Han
Court”). It deals with the tragedy of a Han dynasty court lady,
Wang Chao-chün, who, through the intrigue of a vicious portrait
painter, was picked by mistake to be sent away to Central Asia
as a chieftain’s consort. Like the Romance of the Western
Chamber, this play has been translated into western European
languages.
This new literary genre
acquired certain distinct characteristics: (1) All extant
compositions may be described as operas; (2) each play normally
consists of four acts following a prologue; (3) the language of
both the dialogue (for the most part in prose) and the
arias—which alternate throughout the play—are fairly close to
the daily speech of ordinary people; (4) all of the arias are in
rhymed verse, and only one end rhyme is used throughout an act;
(5) all of the arias in an act are sung by only one actor; (6)
nearly all of the plays have a happy ending; (7) the characters
in most of the plays are people of the middle and
underprivileged classes—poor scholars, bankrupt merchants,
Buddhist nuns, peasants, thieves, kidnappers, abductors, and
women entertainers—antedating a similar trend in European drama
by nearly four centuries.
At least 12 of the playwrights
thus far identified were Sinicized members of originally
non-Chinese ethnic groups—Mongols, Juchens, Uighurs, and other
Central Asians.
Poetry
Another literary innovation, preceding but later interacting
with the rise of the drama, was a new verse form known as
san-ch’ü (“nondramatic songs”), a liberalization of the tz’u,
which utilized the spoken language of the people as fully as
possible. Although line length and tonal pattern were still
governed by a given tune, extra words could be inserted to make
the lyrics livelier and to clarify the relationship between
phrases and clauses of the poem. The major dramatists were all
masters of this genre.
Vernacular fiction
Similarly, fiction writers who wrote in a semivernacular style
began to emerge, continuing the tradition of storytellers of the
past or composing lengthy works of fiction written almost
entirely in the vernacular. All of the early pieces of this type
of book-length fiction were poorly printed and anonymously or
pseudonymously published. Although many early works were
attributed to such authors as Lo Kuan-chung, there is little
reliable evidence of his authorship in any extant work. These
novels exist in numerous, vastly different versions that can
best be described as the products of long evolutionary cycles
involving several authors and editors. The best known of the
works attributed to Lo are San-kuo chih yen-i (Romance of the
Three Kingdoms), Shui-hu chuan (The Water Margin), and P’ing-yao
chuan (“The Subjugation of the Evil Phantoms”). The best of the
three from a literary standpoint is the Shui-hu chuan, which
gives full imaginative treatment to a long accretion of stories
and anecdotes woven around a number of enlightened bandits—armed
social and political dissenters.
Lo Kuan-chung
Luo Guanzhong,
Wade-Giles romanization Lo Kuan-chung, original name
Luo Ben, also called Luo Guan and Luo Daobun,
courtesy name (zi) Guanzhong (b. c. 1330, Taiyuan?,
Shanxi province, China—d. c. 1400, Hangzhou?,
Zhejiang province), Chinese writer who traditionally
has been credited as the author of the classic
Chinese novels Sanguozhi yanyi (Three Kingdoms) and
Shuihuzhuan (Water Margin, or All Men Are Brothers).
Almost nothing is
known about the life of Luo. His authorship of
Sanguozhi yanyi and Shuihuzhuan (the latter possibly
written jointly with Shi Naian), however, is now
largely disputed. The first work is a historical
narrative, while the second is a semi-historical
picaresque novel about a band of outlaws, written in
the colloquial style. Both works enjoy continued
popularity among Chinese readers.
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Ming dynasty: 1368–1644
The Yüan
dynasty was succeeded by the Ming dynasty, under which cultural
influences from the South—expressed in movements toward cultural
orthodoxy—again became important. Nearly all the major poets and
prose writers in traditional literature were southerners, who
enthusiastically launched and supported antiquarian movements
based on a return to models of various ages of the past. With
the restoration of competitive literary examinations, which had
been virtually discontinued under the Mongols, the highly
schematic pa-ku wen-chang (“eight-legged essay”) was adopted as
the chief yardstick in measuring a candidate’s literary
attainments. Despite occasional protests, it continued to engage
the attention of aspirants to official literary honours from
1487 to 1901.
Classical literature
Although Ming poets wrote both shih and tz’u and their output
was prodigious, poetry on the whole was imitative rather than
freshly creative. Tirelessly, the poets produced verses
imitating past masters, with few individually outstanding
attainments.
Prose writers in the classical
style were also advocates of antiquarianism and conscious
imitators of the great masters of past ages. Rival schools were
formed, but few writers were able to rise above the ruts of
conventionalism. The Ch’in-Han school tried to underrate the
achievements of Han Yü and Liu Tsung-yüan, along with the Sung
essayists, and proudly declared that post-Han prose was not
worth reading. The T’ang-Sung school, on the other hand, accused
its opponents of limited vision and reemphasized Han Yü’s dictum
that literature should be the vehicle of Tao, equated with the
way of life taught by orthodox Confucianism. These continuous
squabbles ultimately led nowhere, and the literary products were
only exquisite imitations of their respective models.
The first voice of protest
against antiquarianism was not heard until the end of the 16th
century; it came from the Kung-an school, named for the
birthplace of three brothers, of whom the middle one was the
best known. Yüan Hung-tao challenged all of the prevailing
literary trends, advocating that literature should change with
each age and that any attempt at erasing the special stamp of an
era could result only in slavish imitation. Declaring that he
could not smile and weep with the multitude, he singled out
“substantiality” and “honesty with oneself” as the chief
prerequisites of a good writer.
This same spirit of revolt was
shared by Chung Hsing and T’an Yüan-ch’un, of a later school,
who were so unconventional that they explored the possibilities
of writing intelligibly without observing Chinese grammatical
usages. Although their influence was not long lasting, these two
schools set the first examples of a new subgenre in prose—the
familiar essay.
Vernacular literature
It was in vernacular literature that the writers of this period
made a real contribution. In drama, a tradition started in the
Sung dynasty and maintained in southern China during the period
of Mongol domination was revitalized. This southern drama, also
musical and known as ch’uan-ch’i (“tales of marvels”), had
certain special traits: (1) a ch’uan-ch’i play contains from 30
to 40 changes of scene; (2) the change of end rhymes in the
arias is free and frequent; (3) the singing is done by many
actors instead of by the hero or heroine alone; (4) many plots,
instead of being extracted from history or folklore, are taken
from contemporary life.
Since there were no rules
regulating the structure of the ch’uan-ch’i, playlets
approaching the one-act variety were also written. This southern
theatre movement, at first largely carried on by anonymous
amateurs, won support gradually from the literati until finally,
in the 16th century, a new and influential school was formed
under the leadership of the poet-singer Liang Ch’en-yü and his
friend the great actor Wei Liang-fu. The K’un school, initiating
a style of soft singing and subtle music, was to dominate the
theatre to the end of the 18th century.
Aside from drama and ta-ch’ü (a
suite of melodies sung in narration of stories), which in the
South were noticeably modified in spirit and structure, becoming
more ornate and bookish—it was prose fiction that made the
greatest progress in the 16th century. Two important novels took
shape at that time. Wu Ch’eng-en’s Hsi-yu chi is a fictionalized
account of the pilgrimage of the Chinese monk Hsüan-tsang to
India in the 7th century. The subject matter was not new; it had
been used in early hua-pen, or “vernacular story,” books and
Yüan drama; but it had never been presented at length in such a
lively and rapid-moving narration. Of all of the 81 episodes of
trial and tribulation experienced by the pilgrim, no two are
alike. Among the large number of monsters introduced, each has
unique individuality. Like the Shui-hu chuan, it reveals the
influence of the style of the oral storytellers, for each
chapter ends with the sentence “in case you are interested in
what is to follow, please listen to the next installment, which
will reveal it.” Unlike the Shui-hu chuan, which was written in
a kind of semivernacular, the language used was the vernacular
of the living tongue. For the author the choice must have been a
deliberate but difficult one, for he had the novel first
published anonymously to avoid disapproval. Besides eliciting
numerous commentaries and “continuations” in China, it has two
English translations.
The title of the second novel
(the author of which is unknown), Chin P’ing Mei, is composed of
graphs from the names of three female characters. Written in an
extremely charming vernacular prose style, the novel is a
well-knit, long narrative of the awful debaucheries of the
villain Ch’ing Hsi-men. The details of the different facets of
life in 16th-century China are so faithfully portrayed that it
can be read almost as a documentary social history of that age.
The sexual perversions of the characters are so elaborately
depicted that several Western translators have rendered a number
of indelicate passages in Latin. The novel has been banned in
China more than once, and all copies of the first edition of
1610 were destroyed.
Jinpingmei, (Chinese: “Gold
Plum Vase”)Wade-Giles romanization Chin-p’ing-mei,
the first realistic social novel to appear in China. It is the
work of an unknown author of the Ming dynasty, and its earliest
extant version is dated 1617. Two English versions were
published in 1939 under the titles The Golden Lotus and Chin
P’ing Mei: The Adventurous History of Hsi Men and His Six Wives;
the first two volumes of a later translation, The Plum in the
Golden Vase, were published in 1993 and 2001.
Jinpingmei describes in
naturalistic detail the life of the family of a well-to-do
businessman, Ximen Qing, who has acquired his wealth largely
through dishonest means and who devotes himself to the pursuit
of carnal pleasure and heavy drinking. To these ends he acquires
six wives and numerous maidservants. Ximen and his fifth wife,
Pan Jinlian (Golden Lotus), whom he has acquired by poisoning
her first husband, nearly succeed in corrupting the entire
household. The first wife, however, remains virtuous and in the
end bears a son who becomes a Buddhist monk to atone for his
father’s sins. The debauchery of Ximen is related in vivid
detail, leading many readers to dismiss the novel as
pornography. Others, however, regard the erotic passages as
central to the author’s moral purpose of exposing the vanity of
pleasure. Despite unofficial censorship because of its
eroticism, Jinpingmei became one of China’s most popular novels.
Ch’ing dynasty: 1644–1911/12
The
conquest of China by the Manchus, a Mongol people from the
region north of China who set up the Ch’ing dynasty in 1644, did
not disrupt the continuation of major trends in traditional
literature. (During the literary inquisition of the 18th
century, however, many books suspected of anti-Manchu sentiments
were destroyed; and numerous literati were imprisoned, exiled,
or executed.) Antiquarianism dominated literature as before, and
excellent poetry and prose in imitation of ancient and medieval
masters continued to be written, many works rivaling the
originals in archaic beauty and cadence. Although the literary
craftsmanship was superb, genuine creativity was rare.
Poetry and prose nonfiction
In the field of tz’u writing, the 17th-century Manchu poet Nara
Singde (Sinicized name, Na-lan Hsing-te) was outstanding; but
even he lapsed into conscious imitation of Southern T’ang models
except when inspired by the vastness of open space and the
beauties of nature. In nonfictional prose, Chin Jen-jui
continued the familiar essay form.
Prose fiction
P’u Sung-ling continued the prose romance tradition by writing
in ku-wen (“classical language”) a series of 431 charming
stories of the uncanny and the supernatural entitled Liao-chai
chih-i (1766; “Strange Stories from the Liao-chai Studio”; Eng.
trans., Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio). This collection,
completed in 1679, was reminiscent of the early literary tale
tradition, for it contained several T’ang stories retold with
embellishments and minor changes to delineate the characters
more realistically and to make the plots more probable. Such
traditional supernatural beings as fox spirits, assuming in
these stories temporary human form in the guise of pretty women,
became for the first time in Chinese fiction humanized and
likable. Despite the seeming success of these tales, the author
soon became aware of the limitations of the ku-wen style for
fiction writing and proceeded to produce a vernacular novel of
some 1,000,000 words, the Hsing-shihyin-yüan chuan (“A Marriage
to Awaken the World”). This long story of a shrew and her
henpecked husband was told without any suggestion of a solution
to the problems of unhappy marriages. Unsure of the reaction of
his colleagues to his use of the vernacular as a literary
medium, P’u Sung-ling had this longest Chinese novel of the old
school published under a pseudonym.
Wu Ching-tzu satirized the
18th-century literati in a realistic masterpiece, Ju-lin
wai-shih (c. 1750; “Unofficial History of the Literati”; Eng.
trans., The Scholars), 55 chapters loosely strung together in
the manner of a picaresque romance. Unlike P’u Sung-ling, whom
he far surpassed in both narration and characterization, he
adopted the vernacular as his sole medium for fiction writing.
Better known and more widely
read was Ts’ao Chan’s Hung-lou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber),
a novel of a love triangle and the fall of a great family, also
written in the vernacular and the first outstanding piece of
Chinese fiction with a tragic ending. Because its lengthy
descriptions of poetry contests, which interrupt the narrative,
may seem tiresome, especially to non-Chinese readers, they have
been largely deleted in Western translations. Nevertheless, some
Western critics have considered it one of the world’s finest
novels.
P’u Sung-ling
Pu Songling,
Wade-Giles romanization P’u Sung-ling, courtesy name
(zi) Liuxian, or Jianchen (b. June 5, 1640, Zichuan
[now Zibo], Shandong province, China—d. February 25,
1715, Zichuan), Chinese fiction writer whose
Liaozhai zhiyi (1766; “Strange Stories from
Liaozhai’s Studio”; Eng. trans. Strange Stories from
a Chinese Studio) resuscitated the classical genre
of short stories.
Pu’s impressive
collection of 431 tales of the unusual and
supernatural was largely completed by 1679, though
he added stories to the manuscript as late as 1707.
The work departed from the prevailing literary
fashion that was dominated by more realistic huaben
stories written in the colloquial language. Pu
instead wrote his stories in the classical idiom,
freely adopting forms and themes from the old
chuanqi (“marvel tales”) of the Tang and Song
dynasties.
Although Pu lived
and died as an obscure provincial schoolteacher, his
work gained fame when it was first printed some 50
years after his death, inspiring many imitations and
creating a new vogue for classical stories. He is
credited with having adapted several of his tales
into “drum songs,” a popular dramatic form of the
time. The colloquial novel Xingshi yinyuanzhuan (c.
1644–61; “A Marriage to Awaken the World”; Eng.
trans. The Bonds of Matrimony), which realistically
portrays an unhappy contemporary marriage, was
attributed to him by some scholars.
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Ts’ao Chan
Cao Zhan,
Wade-Giles romanization Ts’ao Chan, literary name (hao)
Xueqin, also called Cao Xueqin (b. 1715?, Jiangning
[now Nanjing], Jiangsu province, China—d. February
12, 1763, Beijing), author of Hongloumeng (Dream of
the Red Chamber), generally considered China’s
greatest novel. A partly autobiographical work, it
is written in the vernacular and describes in
lingering detail the decline of the powerful Jia
family and the ill-fated love between Baoyu and his
cousin Lin Daiyu.
Cao was the
grandson of Cao Yin, one of the most eminent and
wealthy men of his time. In 1727, however, his
family, which held the hereditary office of
commissioner of imperial textiles in Jiangning,
suffered the first of a series of setbacks and moved
to Beijing. By 1742 Cao’s contemporaries were
reporting him to be living in reduced circumstances
and engaged on a work that could hardly be anything
other than the Dream. The author finished at least
80 chapters of the novel before his death. The work
was said to be completed by Gao E (1738?–1815?).
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Dream of the Red
Chamber
Dream of the Red Chamber, Pinyin
romanization Hongloumeng, Wade-Giles romanization
Hung-lou-meng, novel written by Cao Zhan in the 18th
century; it is generally considered to be the
greatest of all Chinese novels.
The work, published
in English as Dream of the Red Chamber (1929), first
appeared in manuscript form in Beijing during Cao
Zhan’s lifetime. In 1791, almost 30 years after his
death, the novel was published in a complete version
of 120 chapters prepared by Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E.
Uncertainty remains about the final 40 chapters of
the book; they may have been forged by Gao,
substantially written by Cao Zhan and simply
discovered and put into final form by Cheng and Gao,
or perhaps composed by an unknown author. The Story
of the Stone (1973–86) is a complete five-volume
English translation.
The novel is a
blend of realism and romance, psychological
motivation and fate, daily life and supernatural
occurrences. A series of episodes rather than a
strongly plotted work, it details the decline of the
Jia family, composed of two main branches, with a
proliferation of kinsmen and servants. There are 30
main characters and more than 400 minor ones. The
major focus, however, is on young Baoyu, the gifted
but obstinate heir of the clan. Spoiled by his
mother and grandmother, he is continually
reprimanded by his strict Confucian father, who
especially abhors Baoyu’s intimacy with his numerous
female cousins and maidservants. Most notable among
these relations are the melancholy Daiyu (Black
Jade), Baoyu’s ill-fated love, and the vivacious
Baochai (Precious Clasp), his eventual wife. The
work and the character of Baoyu in particular are
generally thought to be semiautobiographical
creations of Cao Zhan. His portrait of the extended
family reflects a faithful image of upper-class life
in the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12), while the
variety of individual character portraits reveals a
psychological depth not previously approached in
Chinese literature.
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Dream
of the Red Chamber
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The
Four Great Classical Novels
The Four Great Classical Novels, or the Four Major
Classical Novels (Chinese: 四大名著; pinyin: sì dà míng
zhù) of Chinese literature, are the four novels
commonly counted by scholars to be the greatest and
most influential of classical Chinese fiction. Well
known to most Chinese readers of the 21st century,
they are not to be confused with the Four Books of
Confucianism.
The works are considered to be the pinnacle of
China's achievement in classical novels, influencing
the creation of many stories, theater, movies,
games, and other entertainment throughout East Asia,
including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
In chronological order, they are:
1. Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Chinese: 三國演義;
pinyin: sān guó yǎn yì) (14th century) (more
recently translated as, simply, Three Kingdoms)
2. Water Margin (Chinese: 水滸傳; pinyin: shuǐ hǔ zhuàn)
(also known as Outlaws of the Marsh) (14th century)
3. Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記; pinyin: xī yóu
jì) (16th century) (also known as Monkey)
4. Dream of the Red Chamber (Chinese: 紅樓夢; pinyin:
hóng lóu mèng) (also known as The Story of the
Stone, (Chinese: 石頭記; pinyin: shí tóu jì) (18th
century)
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Drama
In drama, the Ming tradition of ch’uan-ch’i was worthily
continued by several leading poets of the conventional school,
though as a whole their dramatic writings failed to appeal to
the masses. Toward the end of the 18th century, folk dramas of
numerous localities began to gain popularity, converging finally
at the theatres of Peking and giving rise to what came to be
designated as Peking drama—a composite product that has
continued to delight large audiences in China.
19th-century translations of Western literature
By the early 19th century, China could no longer ward off the
West and, after the first Opium War (1839–42), China’s port
cities were forcibly opened to increased foreign contacts. In
due course, many Western works on diverse subjects were
translated into Chinese. The quality of some of these was so
outstanding that they deserve a place in the history of Chinese
literature. One distinguished translator was Yen Fu, who had
studied in Great Britain and whose renderings of Western
philosophical works into classical Chinese were acclaimed as
worthy of comparison, in literary merit, with the Chou
philosophers. Another great translator was Lin Shu, who, knowing
no foreign language himself but depending on oral interpreters,
made available to Chinese readers more than 170 Western novels,
translated into the literary style of Ssu-ma Ch’ien.
19th-century native prose and poetry
Meanwhile, writers of native fiction, especially in central and
southern China, began to be seriously influenced by Western
models. Using the vernacular and mostly following the picaresque
romance structure of the Ju-lin wai-shih, they wrote fiction
usually intended for serial publication and satirizing Chinese
society and culture. One of these writers was Liu E, whose Lao
Ts’an yu-chi (1904–07; The Travels of Lao Ts’an), a fictional
account of contemporary life, pointed to the problems
confronting the tottering Ch’ing dynasty.
Poetry, long stagnant, at last
began to free itself from the shackles of traditionalism. The
most prominent poet, Huang Tsun-hsien, inspired by folk songs
and foreign travel, tried to write poetry in the spoken language
and experimented with new themes, new diction, and new rhythm.
His young friend Liang Ch’i-ch’ao not only fervently supported
Huang and his associates in what they called “the revolution in
Chinese poetry” but also ventured forth in new directions in
prose. Liang’s periodical publications, especially, exerted an
extensive influence on the Chinese people in the early years of
the 20th century. Fusing all the unique and attractive features
of the various schools of prose writing of the past into a new
compound, Liang achieved a vibrant and widely imitated style of
his own, distinguished by several characteristics: flexibility
in sentence structure so that new terms, transliterations of
foreign words and phrases, and even colloquial expressions could
be accommodated; a natural liveliness; a touch of infectious
emotionalism, which the majority of his readers enjoyed.
Although he was too cautious to use the vernacular, except in
fiction and plays, he did attempt to approximate the living
speech of the people, as Huang Tsun-hsien had done in poetry.
As part of a westernization
movement, the competitive literary examination system, which had
been directly responsible for excessive conservatism and
conventionality in thought as well as in literature, was
abolished in 1905.
Tien-yi Li
William H. Nienhauser, Jr.
Modern Chinese literature
May
Fourth period
Following the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and the
establishment of the Republic in 1912, many young intellectuals
turned their attention to the overhauling of literary
traditions, beginning with the language itself. In January 1917
an article by Hu Shih, a student of philosophy at Columbia
University, entitled “Wen-hsüeh kai-liang ch’u-i” (“Tentative
Proposal for Literary Reform”) was published in the Peking
magazine Hsin ch’ing-nien (New Youth). In it Hu called for a new
national literature written not in the classical language but in
the vernacular, the living “national language” (kuo-yü). Ch’en
Tu-hsiu, the editor of Hsin ch’ing-nien, supported Hu’s views in
his own article “Wen-hsüeh ko-ming lun” (“On Literary
Revolution”), which emboldened Hu to hone his arguments further
in a second article (1918), entitled “Chien-she te wen-hsüeh
ko-ming” (“Constructive Literary Revolution”), in which he
spelled out his formula for a “literary renaissance.” The
literary reform movement that began with these and other “calls
to arms” was a part of the larger May Fourth Movement for
cultural and sociopolitical reform, whose name commemorates a
1919 student protest against the intellectual performance of the
Chinese delegates to the Paris Peace Conference formally
terminating World War I. At the outset, the literary reformers
met with impassioned but mostly futile opposition from classical
literati such as the renowned translator Lin Shu, who would
largely give up the battle within a few years.
The first fruits of this
movement were seen in 1918 and 1919 with the appearance in Hsin
ch’ing-nien of such stories as “K’uang-jen jih-chi” (“The Diary
of a Madman”), a Gogol-inspired piece about a “madman” who
suspects that he alone is sane and the rest of the world is mad,
and “Yao” (“Medicine”), both by Chou Shu-jen. Known by the
pseudonym Lu Hsün, Chou had studied in Japan and, with his
younger brother, the noted essayist Chou Tso-jen, had become a
leader of the literary revolution soon after returning to China.
Lu Hsün’s acerbic, somewhat westernized, and often satirical
attacks on China’s feudalistic traditions established him as
China’s foremost critic and writer. His “Ah Q cheng-chuan”
(1921; “The True Story of Ah Q”), a damning critique of early
20th-century conservatism in China, is the representative work
of the May Fourth period and has become an international
classic.
These early writings provided
the impetus for a number of youthful intellectuals to pool their
resources and promote shared ideals by forming literary
associations. The Wen-hsüeh yen-chiu hui (“Literary Research
Association”), generally referred to as the “realist” or
“art-for-life’s-sake” school, assumed the editorship of the
established literary magazine Hsiao-shuo yüeh-pao (Short Story
Monthly), in which most major fiction writers published their
works throughout the 1920s, until the magazine’s headquarters
was destroyed by Japanese bombs in 1932. The socially
reflective, critical-realist writing that characterized this
group held sway in China well into the 1940s, when it was
gradually eclipsed by more didactic, propagandistic literature.
Members of the smaller Ch’uang-tsao she (“Creation Society”), on
the other hand, were followers of the “Romantic” tradition who
eschewed any expressions of social responsibility by writers,
referring to their work as “art for art’s sake.” In 1924,
however, the society’s leading figure, Kuo Mo-jo, converted to
Marxism, and the Creation Society evolved into China’s first
Marxist literary society. Much of the energy of members of both
associations was expended in translating literature of other
cultures, which largely replaced traditional Chinese literature
as the foundation upon which the new writing was built. This was
particularly true in drama and poetry, in which figures such as
Henrik Ibsen and
Rabindranath Tagore, respectively, were as well
known to Chinese readers as indigenous playwrights and poets. In
drama, the Nan-kuo she (“South China Society”), founded by the
former Creationist T’ien Han, produced and performed several
short plays that were a mixture of critical realism and
melodrama, while poets of the Hsin-yüeh she (“Crescent Moon
Society”) such as the British-educated Hsü Chih-mo and the
American-educated Wen I-to were creating new forms based on
Western models, introducing the beauty of music and colour into
their extremely popular lyrical verse.
1927–37
Political events of the mid-1920s, in which Nationalist,
Communist, and warlord forces clashed frequently, initiated a
shift to the left in Chinese letters, culminating in 1930 in the
founding of the Tso-i tso-chia lien-meng (“League of Leftist
Writers”), whose membership included most influential writers.
Lu Hsün, the prime organizer and titular head throughout the
league’s half-decade of activities, had stopped writing fiction
in late 1925 and, after moving from Peking to Shanghai in 1927,
directed most of his creative energies to translating Russian
literature and writing the bitingly satirical random essays
(tsa-wen) that became his trademark. Among the many active
prewar novelists, the most successful were Mao Tun, Lao She, and
Pa Chin.
Mao Tun, a founder of the
Literary Research Association, was the prototypical Realist. The
subjects of his socially mimetic tableaux included pre-May
Fourth urban intellectual circles, bankrupt rural villages, and,
in perhaps his best known work, Tzu-yeh (1933; Midnight),
metropolitan Shanghai in all its financial and social chaos
during the post-Depression era.
Lao She, modern China’s
foremost humorist, whose early novels were written while he was
teaching Chinese in London, was deeply influenced by traditional
Chinese storytellers and the novels of Charles Dickens. His
works are known for their episodic structure, racy northern
dialect, vivid characterizations, and abundant humour. Yet it
was left to him to write modern China’s classic novel, the
moving tale of the gradual degeneration of a seemingly
incorruptible denizen of China’s “lower depths”—Lo-t’o
hsiang-tzu (1936; “Camel Hsiang-tzu,” published in English in a
bowdlerized translation as Rickshaw Boy, 1945).
Pa Chin, a prominent Anarchist,
was the most popular novelist of the period. A prolific writer,
he is known primarily for his autobiographical novel Chia (1931;
The Family), which traces the lives and varied fortunes of the
three sons of a wealthy, powerful family. The book is a
revealing portrait of China’s oppressive patriarchal society, as
well as of the awakening of China’s youth to the urgent need for
social revolution.
The 1930s also witnessed the
meteoric rise of a group of novelists from Northeast China
(Manchuria) who were driven south by the Japanese annexation of
their homeland in 1932. The sometimes rousing, sometimes
nostalgic novels of Hsiao Chün and Hsiao Hung and the powerful
short stories of Tuan-mu Hung-liang became rallying cries for
anti-Japanese youth as signs of impending war mounted.
Poetry of the 1930s underwent a
similar politicization, as more and more students returned from
overseas to place their pens in the service of the “people’s
resistance against feudalism and imperialism.” The lyrical verse
of the early Crescent Moon poets was replaced by a more socially
conscious poetry by the likes of Ai Ch’ing, T’ien Chien, and
Tsang K’o-chia that appealed to the readers’ patriotic fervour.
Others, particularly those who had at first gravitated toward
the Crescent Moon Society, began striking out in various
directions: notable works of these authors include the
contemplative sonnets of Feng Chih, the urbane songs of Peking
by Pien Chih-lin, and the romantic verses of Ho Ch’i-fang. Less
popular, but more daring, were Tai Wang-shu and Li Chin-fa,
poets of the Hsien-tai (“Contemporary Age”) group, who wrote
very sophisticated, if frequently baffling, poetry in the manner
of the French Symbolists.
While fiction reigned supreme
in the 1930s, as the art of the short story was mastered by
growing numbers of May Fourth writers, and novels were coming
into their own, the most spectacular advances were made in
drama, owing largely to the efforts of a single playwright.
Although realistic social drama written in the vernacular had
made its appearance in China long before the 1930s, primarily as
translations or adaptations of Western works, it did not gain a
foothold on the popular stage until the arrival of Ts’ao Yü,
whose first play, Lei-yü (1934; Thunderstorm), a tale of
fatalism, retribution, and incestual relations among members of
a rich industrialist’s family, met with phenomenal success. It
was followed over the next several years by other critically and
popularly acclaimed plays, including Jih-ch’u (1936; Sunrise)
and Yüan-yeh (1937; Wilderness), all of which examined pressing
social issues and universal human frailties with gripping
tension and innovative dramaturgy. Political realities in future
decades would force a steady decline in dramatic art, so that
Ts’ao Yü’s half-dozen major productions still stand as the
high-water mark of modern Chinese theatre. Yet, even though
movies, television, and other popular entertainments would
weaken the resiliency of this literary form, it would still
serve the nation as an effective propaganda medium, particularly
during the war of resistance.
Lao She
Lao She, pseudonym
of Shu Sheyu, original name Shu Qingchun (b.
February 3, 1899, Beijing, China—d. August 24, 1966,
Beijing), Chinese author of humorous, satiric novels
and short stories and, after the onset of the
Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), of patriotic and
propagandistic plays and novels.
A member of the
Manchu ethnic minority, Shu Sheyu served as
principal of an elementary school at age 17 and soon
worked his way up to district supervisor. In 1924 he
went to England, teaching Mandarin Chinese to
support himself and collaborating for five years on
a translation of the great Ming-dynasty novel
Jinpingmei. Reading the novels of Charles Dickens to
improve his English, Shu Sheyu was inspired to write
his own first novel, Lao Zhang di zhexue
(“Philosophy of Lao Zhang”), which was serialized in
the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (“Short-Story Magazine”)
in 1926. He completed two more novels, in which he
developed the theme that the strong, hardworking
individual could reverse the tide of stagnation and
corruption plaguing China. When Lao She returned to
China in 1931, he found that he had achieved some
fame as a comic novelist, and so he continued to
create his humorous, action-packed works.
In Niu Tianci zhuan
(1934; “The Life of Niu Tianci”), Lao She changed
his individualist theme to one stressing the
importance of the total social environment and the
futility of the individual’s struggle against such
an environment. His new theme found its clearest
expression in his masterpiece, Luotuo Xiangzi (1936;
“Xiangzi the Camel”; Eng. trans. Rickshaw or Camel
Xiangzi), the tragic story of the trials of a
rickshaw puller in Beijing. An unauthorized and
bowdlerized English translation, titled Rickshaw Boy
(1945), with a happy ending quite foreign to the
original story, became a best seller in the United
States.
During the
Sino-Japanese War, Lao She headed the All-China
Anti-Japanese Writers Federation, encouraging
writers to produce patriotic and propagandistic
literature. His own works were inferior and
propagandistic. His best work of this period was his
novel Sishi tong tang (1944–50; “Four Generations
Under One Roof”).
In 1946–47 Lao She
traveled to the United States on a cultural grant,
lecturing and overseeing the translation of several
of his novels, including The Yellow Storm (1951),
which was never published in Chinese, and his last
novel, The Drum Singers (1952; its Chinese version,
Gu shu yi ren, was not published until 1980). Upon
his return to China he was active in various
cultural movements and literary committees and
continued to write his propagandistic plays, among
them the popular Longxugou (1951; Dragon Beard
Ditch) and Chaguan (1957; Teahouse), which displayed
his fine linguistic talents in its reproduction of
the Beijing dialect.
Lao She fell victim
to persecution at the outset of the Cultural
Revolution in 1966, and it is widely believed that
he died as a result of a beating by Red Guards.
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Ts’ao Yü
Cao Yu, Wade-Giles
romanization Ts’ao Yü, pseudonym of Wan Jiabao (b.
September 24, 1910, Tianjin, China—d. December 13,
1996, Beijing), Chinese playwright who was a pioneer
in huaju (“word drama”), a genre influenced by
Western theatre rather than traditional Chinese
drama (which is usually sung).
Wan Jiabao was
educated at Nankai University in Tianjin and Qinghua
University in Beijing, where he studied contemporary
Chinese literature and Western drama. He taught in
Baoding and Tianjin and at the National Institute of
Dramatic Art in Nanjing. In 1934 his first play, the
four-act tragedy Leiyu (Thunderstorm; later adapted
for film [1938] and as a dance-drama [1981]), was
published. When it was performed in 1935 it
instantly won Cao Yu fame as a huaju writer. His
next works were Richu (1936; Sunrise; adapted as an
opera [1982] and for film [1938 and 1985]) and
Yuanye (1937; rev. ed. 1982; “The Wilderness”;
adapted for film [1981]), a story of love and
revenge that clearly reflects the influence of
American playwright Eugene O’Neill. Most Chinese
critics declared Yuanye a failure on its first
appearance, but the revised play received critical
acclaim in the 1980s.
After the outbreak
of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Cao Yu moved with
the drama school to Chongqing and later to Jiang’an,
where he wrote Tuibian (1940; “Metamorphosis”), a
patriotic work in which he expressed the hope that
China would throw off the constraints of the old
ways and embrace the new. He followed it with
Beijingren (1940; rev. ed. 1947; “Beijing Man”; Eng.
trans. Peking Man), thought by many to be one of the
masterpieces of modern Chinese drama; it is powerful
in both characterization and its use of symbolism.
Cao Yu was appointed the director of the Beijing
People’s Art Theatre in the early 1950s and was
elected the chairman of the Chinese Dramatists’
Association in the early 1980s. He wrote some dramas
in support of the Chinese Communist Party, but most
were considered failures.
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The war years: 1937–45
During the Sino-Japanese War, most writers fled to the interior,
where they contributed to the war effort by writing patriotic
literature under the banner of the Chung-hua ch’üan-kuo wen-i
chieh k’ang-ti hsieh-hui (“All-China Anti-Japanese Federation of
Writers and Artists”), founded in 1938 and directed by Lao She.
All genres were represented, including reportage (pao-kao
wen-hsüeh), an enormously influential type of writing that was a
natural outgrowth of the federation’s call for writers to go to
the countryside and the front lines. Literary magazines were
filled with short, easily produced and adaptable plays, topical
patriotic verse, and war-zone dispatches. Among the major
writers who continued to produce work of high quality during
this period were Pa Chin, Ts’ao Yü, Mao Tun, and Ting Ling. The
latter’s fictional explorations of the female psyche and the
social condition of women had caught the public’s imagination in
the 1920s, and in the late 1930s she established herself as the
major literary figure in the Communist stronghold of Yen-an.
The growing dissatisfaction of
intellectuals with the Nationalist government in Chungking
surfaced dramatically during the civil war that raged throughout
China following Japan’s surrender, ending with the Nationalists’
retreat to Taiwan and the establishment, in October 1949, of the
People’s Republic of China. Most writers, feeling intense pride
and welcoming the challenge, chose to remain on the mainland and
serve the new government.
1949 to the present
Literature on the China mainland since 1949 has largely been a
reflection of political campaigns and ideological battles. This
state of affairs can be traced to Mao Tse-tung’s 1942 “Tsai
Yen-an wen-i tso-t’an-hui shang te chiang-hua” (“Talks at the
Yenan Forum on Literature and Art”), in which he articulated his
position that literature, which existed to serve politics, was
to be popularized while the people’s level of literary
appreciation was gradually being elevated. Mao’s call for a
truly proletarian literature—written by and for workers,
peasants, and soldiers—gave rise to a series of rectification
campaigns that further defined and consolidated party control
over literary activities. In 1949, the First National Congress
of Writers and Artists was convened, and the All-China
Federation of Literature and Art Circles was founded, with Kuo
Mo-jo elected as its first chairman.
Mao’s literary ideals had first
been realized in the 1940s by Chao Shu-li, whose early stories,
such as “Li Yu-ts’ai pan-hua” (“The Rhymes of Li Yu-ts’ai”),
were models of proletarian literature, both in form and in
content. As the civil war neared its conclusion, novels of land
reform, such as Ting Ling’s prizewinning T’ai-yang chao tsai
Sang-kan-ho shang (1949; The Sun Shines over the Sangkan River)
and Pao-feng tsou-yü (1949; The Hurricane) by Chou Li-po, became
quite popular. Few of the established May Fourth writers
continued to produce fiction after 1949, for their experience as
social critics did not prepare them for Socialist Realism, a
method of composition, borrowed from the Soviet Union, according
to which society is described as it should be, not necessarily
as it is. Many of the older poets, however, were successful
during the early postliberation years, writing poetry in praise
of land reform, modernization, and Chinese heroes of the Korean
War. Playwrights were also active, introducing more proletarian
themes into their works, some of which incorporated music. By
this time, Lao She had begun writing plays, such as Lung-hsü kou
(1951; Dragon Beard Ditch), which earned him the prestigious
title of People’s Artist. Another very popular play, Pai-mao nü
(1953; White-Haired Girl) by Ho Ching-chih, was taken from a
contemporary folk legend.
During the mid-1950s, an
experiment in liberalization—the Hundred Flowers Campaign—was
abruptly terminated as criticism of the party went beyond all
expectations; it was followed by an anti-rightist movement that
purged the cultural ranks of most preliberation writers and
artists. The literary nadir, however, was not reached until the
Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when the only literature
available were a few carefully screened works by Lu Hsün, a
handful of model revolutionary Peking operas, and the
revolutionary-romantic novels of Hao Jan. After the death of Mao
and the fall of the Gang of Four, literature made a comeback and
most surviving writers were rehabilitated, although the progress
was as rocky as the political scene Chinese literature continued
to reflect.
The accusatory “scar
literature,” a sort of national catharsis that immediately
followed the 10-year “holocaust,” gave way to more professional
and more daring writing, as exemplified in the stories of Wang
Meng, with their stylistic experiments in stream of
consciousness; the symbolic “obscure” poetry of Pei Tao and
others; the relatively bold dramas, both for the stage and for
the screen, of several playwrights; and the innovative
investigative reportage of Liu Pin-yen. In addition to
translated literature from the West, literature from Taiwan also
began to reach mainland writers and readers as literary
restrictions continued to fall gradually.
Lu Hsün
Lu Xun, Wade-Giles
romanization Lu Hsün, pen name (biming) of Zhou
Shuren (b. September 25, 1881, Shaoxing, Zhejiang
province, China—d. October 19, 1936, Shanghai),
Chinese writer, commonly considered the greatest in
20th-century Chinese literature, who was also an
important critic known for his sharp and unique
essays on the historical traditions and modern
conditions of China.
Youth
Born to a family that was traditional, wealthy, and
esteemed (his grandfather had been a government
official in Beijing), Zhou Shuren had a happy
childhood. In 1893, however, his grandfather was
sentenced to prison for examination fraud, and his
father became bedridden. The family’s reputation
declined, and they were treated with disdain by
their community and relatives. This experience is
thought to have had a great influence on his
writing, which was marked by sensitivity and
pessimism.
Zhou Shuren left
his hometown in 1899 and attended a mining school in
Nanjing; there he developed an interest in Darwin’s
theory of evolution, which became an important
influence in his work. Chinese intellectuals of the
time understood Darwin’s theory to encourage the
struggle for social reform, to privilege the new and
fresh over the old and traditional. In 1902 he
traveled to Japan to study Japanese and medical
science, and while there he became a supporter of
the Chinese revolutionaries who gathered there. In
1903 he began to write articles for radical
magazines edited by Chinese students in Japan. In
1905 he entered an arranged marriage against his
will. In 1909 he published, with his younger brother
Zhou Zuoren, a two-volume translation of
19th-century European stories, in the hope that it
would inspire readers to revolution, but the project
failed to attract interest. Disillusioned, Lu Xun
returned to China later that year.
Literary career
After working for several years as a teacher in his
hometown and then as a low-level government official
in Beijing, Lu Xun returned to writing and became
associated with the nascent Chinese literary
movement in 1918. That year, at the urging of
friends, he published his now-famous short story
“Kuangren riji” (“Diary of a Madman”). Modeled on
the Russian realist Nikolay Gogol’s tale of the same
title, the story is a condemnation of traditional
Confucian culture, which the madman narrator sees as
a “man-eating” society. The first published
Western-style story written wholly in vernacular
Chinese, it was a tour de force that attracted
immediate attention and helped gain acceptance for
the short-story form as an effective literary
vehicle. Another representative work is the
novelette A-Q zhengzhuan (1921; The True Story of Ah
Q). A mixture of humour and pathos, it is a
repudiation of the old order; it added “Ah Q-ism” to
the modern Chinese language as a term characterizing
the Chinese penchant for rationalizing defeat as a
“spiritual victory.” These stories, which were
collected in Nahan (1923; Call to Arms), established
Lu Xun’s reputation as the leading Chinese writer.
Three years later the collection Panghuang (1926;
Wandering) was published. His various symbolic prose
poems, which were published in the collection Yecao
(1927; Wild Grass), as well as his reminiscences and
retold classical tales, all reveal a modern
sensibility informed by sardonic humour and biting
satire.
In the 1920s Lu Xun
worked at various universities in Beijing as a
part-time professor of Chinese script and
literature. His academic study Zhongguo xiaoshuo
shilue (1923–24; A Brief History of Chinese Fiction)
and companion compilations of classical fiction
remain standard works. His translations, especially
those of Russian works, are also considered
significant.
Despite his
success, Lu Xun continued to struggle with his
increasingly pessimistic view of Chinese society,
which was aggravated by conflicts in his personal
and professional life. In addition to marital
troubles and mounting pressures from the government,
his disagreements with Zhou Zuoren (who had also
become one of the leading intellectuals in Beijing)
led to a rift between the two brothers in 1926. Such
depressing conditions led Lu Xun to formulate the
idea that one could resist social darkness only when
he was pessimistic about the society. His famous
phrase “resistance of despair” is commonly
considered a core concept of his thought.
Shanghai years
Forced by these political and personal circumstances
to flee Beijing in 1926, Lu Xun traveled to Xiamen
and Guangzhou, finally settling in Shanghai in 1927.
There he began to live with Xu Guangping, his former
student; they had a son in 1929. Lu Xun stopped
writing fiction and devoted himself to writing
satiric critical essays (zawen), which he used as a
form of political protest. In 1930 he became the
nominal leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers.
During the following decade he began to see the
Chinese communists as the only salvation for his
country. Although he himself refused to join the
Chinese Communist Party, he considered himself a
tongluren (fellow traveler), recruiting many writers
and countrymen to the communist cause through his
Chinese translations of Marxist literary theories,
as well as through his own political writing.
During the last
several years of Lu Xun’s life, the government
prohibited the publication of most of his work, so
he published the majority of his new articles under
various pseudonyms. He criticized the Shanghai
communist literary circles for their embrace of
propaganda, and he was politically attacked by many
of their members. In 1934 he described his political
position as hengzhan (“horizontal stand”), meaning
he was struggling simultaneously against both the
right and the left, against both cultural
conservatism and mechanical evolution. Hengzhan, the
most important idea in Lu Xun’s later thought,
indicates the complex and tragic predicament of an
intellectual in modern society.
The Chinese
communist movement adopted Lu Xun posthumously as
the exemplar of Socialist Realism. Many of his
fiction and prose works have been incorporated into
school textbooks. In 1951 the Lu Xun Museum opened
in Shanghai; it contains letters, manuscripts,
photographs, and other memorabilia. English
translations of Lu Xun’s works include Silent China:
Selected Writings of Lu Xun (1973), Lu Hsun:
Complete Poems (1988), and Diary of a Madman and
Other Stories (1990).
Wang Xiaoming
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Taiwanese literature after 1949
The first decade of literary activities in Taiwan after 1949 was
characterized by stereotypical anti-Communist fiction and
drippingly sentimental essays and poetry, producing little
memorable literature other than novels such as Yang-ko (1954;
The Rice-Sprout Song) by Chang Ai-ling, a story of peasant life
under Communist rule, and Hsüan-feng (1959; The Whirlwind),
Chiang Kuei’s novel of power struggles in Shantung. In the
1960s, however, a group of Taiwan University students ushered in
the modernist era by publishing their own craftsmanlike stories,
which were heavily indebted to such Western masters as Franz
Kafka, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Many of these writers,
such as Pai Hsien-yung, author of Yu-yüan ching-meng (1982;
Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream), remained active
and influential in the mid-1980s. Vernacular poetry in Taiwan
developed around several societies in which modernist, even
surrealist, verse was in vogue. These poets, while not widely
accepted by the reading public, strongly influenced the more
accessible poets who followed. The late 1960s witnessed the rise
of regional (hsiang-t’u) writing, in which the Taiwanese
countryside served as the setting for fiction and poetry that
effectively captured the dramatic social and psychological
effects of transition from a rural to an urban-based society.
Huang Ch’un-ming’s Ni-szu i-chih lao-mao (1980; The Drowning of
an Old Cat) is representative of this nativist school, which in
later years gave way to a more nationalistic literature that
reflected Taiwan’s current political situation. Mainland
literature occasionally appears in Taiwanese periodicals, while
firsthand experiences and observations by mainland émigrés and
overseas Chinese, such as the collection of stories Yin
hsien-chang (1976; The Execution of Mayor Yin) by Ch’en Jo-hsi,
are given broad exposure.
Howard C. Goldblatt
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