by Chen Jack W
When Ren’gao pulled back from the capital region to consolidate his
forces, Taizong led troops after him, but did not engage him immediately
in battle, saying, “My troops have been freshly defeated, and their fighting
spirits are still low. The bandit is full of himself because of his victory, and
must be desirous of battle, thinking little of his enemies” 我士卒新敗，
銳氣猶少。賊以勝自驕，必輕敵好斗.79 Taizong waited for over six-
ty days until Ren’gao had run out of supplies and many of his command-
ers had surrendered to the Tang. Then, Taizong sent a small detachment
to Shallow Waters Plain to lure the enemy army out, and with a larger
number of troops lying in wait, surprised and defeated Ren’gao’s best
troops. Unable to hold out, Ren’gao surrendered to the Tang and was
sent to Chang’an to be executed.
Twelve years later, in the winter of 630, Taizong embarked on his first
xunshou 巡狩, or “ritual tour of inspection,” visiting Longzhou 隴州
(near the borders of modern-day Gansu and Shaanxi) and passing by the
site of his victory over Xue Ju’s forces.80 The six poems included in the
Hanlin xueshi ji most likely date from this time.81 First, I will examine
Taizong’s poem, which reads:
—————
79. Jiu Tang shu, 55.2248. For a slightly different version of the speech, see Xin Tang shu, 86.3707.
80. Jiu Tang shu, 3.40; Xin Tang shu, 2.31–32. On the xunshou as a ritual form and its role in the Tang, see Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk, pp. 161–69. This will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 7.
81. Hu Kexian dates Taizong’s poem to 642, in “Tang Taizong shige kaobian,” p. 66. He quotes the Jiu Tang shu mention of Taizong hunting at Qiyang 岐陽 (actually, the Jiu Tang shu reads “Qishan” 岐山), which would have been in the vicinity of the battlefield.
See Jiu Tang shu, 3.54.
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The Significance of Court Poetry
243
In Five Syllables: Traveling Past the Battlefield
Where I Crushed Xue Ju
五言行經破薛舉戰地82
In years gone by, I was filled with heroic spirits,
昔年懷壯氣，
Lifting my spear, I had just received the war tally.
提戈初仗節。
My heart followed the bright sun on high,
心隨朗日高，
And my aims were as pure as the autumnal frost.
志與秋霜潔。
I shifted the vanguard—sudden lightning flashed,
移鋒驚電起，
Battle was continuous—the Great River burst its banks. 轉戰長河決。83
Camps were crushed: meteors sank into darkness,
營碎落星沉，84
Formations rolled out: heavy clouds dispersed.
陣卷橫雲裂。85
With one gesture, the evil miasma was purified,
一撝氛沴靜，
And with another, the leviathan was destroyed.
再舉鯨鯢滅。
[rhyme:
屑 sat / 薛 sat]
At this site, I look down upon the plains of old,
於玆俯舊原，
Fixing my eyes and halting the ornate carriage.
屬目駐華軒。
Of what is buried by sand, there are no old traces,
沉沙無故跡，86
But of the “few cooking fires,” there are still marks.
減灶有殘痕。87
Froth of the waves speckles the waters with white,
浪霞穿水淨，
—————
82. Taizong’s poem is preserved in Wenyuan yinghua, 170.822a; Quan Tang shi, 1.4; and Tang Taizong quanji jiaozhu, pp. 25–27.
83. “Great River” is used to refer both to the Yellow River and to the Milky Way.
84. The image of the meteors refers to the death of valiant warriors. This association has its locus classicus in the red meteor (or comet) that flew around the encampment of
Zhuge Liang 諸葛亮 (181–234) on the night that he died. See the commentary by Pei
Songzhi in Sanguo zhi, 35.926.
85. Juan 卷 is used here in the sense of a fierce wind rolling all beneath it, dispersing the clouds, which serve as a figure for the masses of enemy troops. Another sense of juan relevant to this line is the related phrase, xijuan tianxia 席卷天下, “rolling up the empire like a mat.”
86. By this, Taizong means the bodies and weapons of the war-dead.
87. This refers to a stratagem of Sun Bin 孫臏 (ca. 380–316 bc), as recounted in his biography in the Shi ji. When the states of Wei and Zhao attacked Han, Han appealed to Qi for aid. Because Qi soldiers were thought cowardly, Sun Bin took advantage of the poor reputation to trick the Wei army. He had the Qi troops build increasingly fewer cooking fires on successive nights, as if the troops were steadily deserting the army. The Wei commander fell for Sun Bin’s trick and led a smaller force to rout the Qi army, but instead was ambushed and killed. See Shi ji, 65.2164–65.
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244
The Significance of Court Poetry
The mists on the peaks envelop lotuses in gloom.
峰霧抱蓮昏。88
[rhyme: 元 ngwan / 痕 ghen / 魂 ghwen]
The world undergoes change in quick succession,
世途亟流易，
And human affairs differ from past to present.
人事殊今昔。
Long do I think and gaze upon former traces,
長想眺前蹤，
Examining my self, for the moment I feel content.
撫躬聊自適。89
[rhyme: 昔 seik]
The poem belongs to the subgenre of huaigu shi or “poetic meditations on
the past,” which were usually prompted by a particular historical site. Un-
like most poems in this subgenre, Taizong’s piece takes an act of the
speaker’s own past as its topic. This conjunction of historical reflection
and lyric self-narration is possible only when the poet is also the author of
the historical event in question. That is, ordinary poets may write on his-
tory, drawing moral conclusions from meditations on the past, but the
imperial poet may write of a history that he himself has created. Even so,
Taizong may well have been the first poet to have treated the poetic medi-
tation on history in the subjective-lyric mode; other imperial poems of
historical meditation tend, by contrast, to follow the mode of Liu Song
Xiaowudi, whose “On History” 詠史 is a meditation on ancient, rather
than personal, history.90
The poem is structured as three stanzas, marked by rhyme changes af-
ter the fifth and sixteenth couplets. In the first stanza of ten lines, the
poem portrays the tumult at the end of the Sui and the beginning of the
Tang. As he had done in “Watering Horses by the Great Wall,” Taizong
employs the entering-tone rhyme for the battle scenes (using the same ad-
jacent-rhyme categories of 屑 and 薛, in fact). Here, Taizong recalls being
dispatched by his father to end the insurrection of Xue Ju, and in the
third, fourth, and fifth couplets, he describes his battle with Xue Ju’s army.
Though Xue had proved a dangerous foe to the Tang commander Liu
—————
88. Wenyuan yinghua reads tuo 拖 (“to hang down”)
, instead of bao 抱. Taizong is comparing the peaks wrapped in mist to lotuses.
89. The phrase zishi 自適 is also used in the “Webbed Toes” 駢拇 chapter of the Zhuangzi. See Zhuangzi jishi, 8.327.
90. See Xian Qin Han Wei Nanbeichao shi, p. 1222.
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The Significance of Court Poetry
245
Wenjing, even forcing Taizong to delay his own attack on the rebel forces,
in the poem Taizong represents the engagement as decidedly one-sided.
Taizong compares his military forces to the sudden flashing of lightning
and to the image of the Yellow River (or perhaps the Milky Way) burst-
ing through its dikes. As he moves across the enemy fortifications, warri-
ors fall like bright meteors; the cloud-like masses of the opposing army are
swept away, unable to withstand the force of the Tang battle arrays. With
one wave of his spear, Taizong purifies the miasma that had been suffocat-
ing the land; and with another, he sends the evil leviathan to its doom. It
should be noted that where Taizong claims affinity to the sun and the
white frost, Xue Ju is likened to a killing stench and a monstrous sea
beast—that is, to unnatural phenomena that threaten grave injury to the
natural order of things.
With the sixth couplet, Taizong turns away from thoughts of the past
and enters into the poetic present. Here, he shifts to level-tone rhymes
that echo the new theme of the Tang peace. He looks to where his car-
riage has stopped, on the old battlefield where the sand buries the traces
of war, and claims still to be able to see the blackened sites of old camp-
fires. This allusion to Sun Bin’s cooking fire strategy is Taizong’s self-
congratulatory nod to his own handling of Xue Ren’gao, which, despite
the thunderous martial imagery of the preceding lines, was more a matter
of tactical intelligence than brute force. For the early militarist writers,
success for the military commander was less a matter of overwhelming
might than of correctly judging circumstances ( shi 勢), critical factors ( ji 機), and variability ( bian 變), and thus not rashly entering into battle.91
Yet Taizong’s invocation of Sun Bin is not simply a display of his military
acumen. By demonstrating his capacity for seeing beyond particular cir-
cumstances to the underlying broader principles, Taizong is laying claim
to qualities one also finds within the figure of the sage. It is the sage, after
all, who understands and acts in accord with the mind of Heaven, bring-
ing to fruition what Heaven had intended.92
—————
91. See the discussion of central militarist terms in Lau and Ames, trans., Sun Bin: The Art of Warfare, pp. 8, 22–28, 46–85 passim.
92. See Han thinker Lu Jia’s discussion of sagehood, as discussed in Puett, Ambivalence of Creation, p. 154–55.
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246
The Significance of Court Poetry
In the third and last stanza, Taizong shifts back to the entering tone.
However, here, the martial imagery of the poem has given way to imperial
self-satisfaction ( zishi 自適), as Taizong can now find enjoyment in the
memory of his victory. The weight of the last line must, however, fall on
the literary particle liao 聊, a character that complicates the seeming
smugness of the ruler. One finds this sense of momentary delight in other
of Taizong’s poems, and in each case, it points to the self-awareness that
the ruler must turn from fleeting moments of leisure to shoulder his many,
unending responsibilities. Hence, Taizong has his moment of exultation,
but nevertheless concedes that this moment is temporal, belonging to the
flickering Jetztzeit of lyric imagining. The acknowledgment of time’s
greater sovereignty, which underlies all poems on history, is here the final
realization of an emperor whose eyes can no longer find the traces of his
past achievements.
Taizong’s poem on his victory over Xue Ju may be read in isolation (as
it probably was for much of post-Tang history), but reading the imperial
poem in the context of the five matching poems by Zhangsun Wuji, Yang
Shidao, Chu Suiliang, Xu Jingzong, and Shangguan Yi allows us to see
how the imperial voice was understood within the contemporary com-
munity of the court. This is crucial for a better understanding of the na-
ture of imperial court poetry—how the sovereign’s poetic argument is
transformed by his courtiers’ responses—as well as for a better under-
standing of how the court understood the figure of the sovereign, whose
acts of poetic inscription were never simply acts of leisurely insignificance.
The five poems all treat the same topic, often using the same imagery and
allusions, but the tone of the individual works differs, as do the poets’
styles of self-presentation. The order given in the collection seems to be by
age or by rank, which is the usual practice in anthology compilation.93 It is
significant that each of the five courtiers’ poems adopts a single rhyme,
while Taizong’s poem employs three different rhymes. Imperial sover-
eignty is here inscribed in the use of language, as the monophonic poems
of the courtiers match the polyphony of the all-embracing emperor.
—————
93. See Pauline Yu, “Poems for the Emperor,” p. 75.
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The Significance of Court Poetry
247
Matching Poems by Zhangsun Wuji, Yang Shidao, Chu
Suiliang, and Xu Jingzong
Of this group, Zhangsun Wuji, whom we have already encountered in the
Introduction, was the most prominent, being the brother-in-law of the
emperor. His poem reads:
In Five Syllables: Harmonizing with “Traveling Past the Battlefield
Where I Smashed Xue Ju”: To Imperial Command
五言奉和行經破薛舉戰地應詔
Presented by His Subject, Zhangsun Wuji, Minister of Education and
Duke of Zhao 司徒趙國公臣長孫無忌上
The progress of Heaven, in the past, had not yet
天步昔未平，
come to rest,
Atop Longzhou were stationed the divine troops.
隴上駐神兵。
Spears whirled round as Xi’s chariot arced above,
戈迴曦御轉，94
Bows stretched full under the cinnamon wheel’s light.
弓滿桂輪明。95
Your sheltering dust pacified the earthly axle,
屏塵安地軸，
Your rolling fog brought peace to earth’s gates.
卷霧靜乾扃。96
Before, your mood cracked lightning and thunder,
往振雷霆氣，
And now, your feelings bestow rain and dew.
今垂雨露情。97
From the high plains arise new settlements,
高垣起新邑，
Tall poplars ring former encampments.
長楊 故營。98
Mountain streams drench the pure scenery,
> 山川澄素景，
Forest groves stir with the sounds of autumn.
林薄動秋聲。
Winds over the wilds quicken migrating wings,
風野征翼駃，99
Frost on the islets purifies the frigid currents.
霜渚寒流清。
At dawn, the mists hang still in the cloudy net,
朝煙澹雲罕，100
—————
94. “Xi’s chariot” is a reference to the sun. The “Li sao” names Xihe 羲和 as the divine charioteer who drives the sun. See Chu ci buzhu, 1.27.
95. The “cinnamon wheel” is a figure for the moon. This is one of the earliest examples of this phrase. On the moon and the cinnamon tree, see Schafer, “Moon Cinnamons.”
96. Both the dust and the fog are used here as figures for imperial grace.
97. The bestowing of “rain and dew” is a standard figure for imperial grace.
98. I follow Chen Shangjun in emending bu 布 in the original manuscript to za .
99. The character jue 駃 should be emended to kuai 快.
100. The “cloudy net” refers either to the poetic image of a net that sweeps the clouds (or catches birds), or to the metaphoric description of an army arrayed to flank or blockade an This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Sat, 20 Jul 2019 13:01:49 UTC
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The Significance of Court Poetry
At dusk, the gusts swirl round the rainbow pennants.
夕吹繞霓旌。101
The chiming bells ring out from the goose passes,
鳴鑾出雁塞，102
The layered sound of drums enters into the dragon city. 疊鼓入龍城。103
I have already had the honor of accompanying You
