The Poetics of Sovereignty
Page 54
was at stake was the emperor’s consideration of his subjects. This can be
seen in the Mencius passage in which King Hui of Liang asks Mencius whether it is proper to enjoy his goose- and deer-filled park. Mencius responds to the king by telling him about King Wen of Zhou, whose people
happily labored over the construction of his pleasure park because the
king shared it with them.114 The lesson is clear for Taizong as well, who
has inherited not the palatial ideology of King Wen, but of the First Em-
peror.
—————
113. On the argument concerning technology and naturalness in early China, see Puett, Ambivalence of Creation, pp. 59–64.
114. See Mengzi 1A.2 / Mengzi zhengyi, 2.44–50. On this topic, Michael Nylan has written,
“The common people in perilous times could be controlled better and more easily if they perceived the ruler to be equitable in his dispersals and disbursements and judicious in expending his resources, including his bodily energies and the strength of his people.” See Nylan, “On the Politics of Pleasure,” p. 85.
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306
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
The argument shifts topics in the third section, as Taizong turns from
the problem of palace-building to another large-scale imperial construc-
tion project: the Great Wall. While recent scholarship has questioned the
reality of a single massive wall that had existed continuously since the Qin,
the myth of the First Emperor’s Great Wall was very much part of the
Chinese cultural imagination.115 What Taizong sees, however, is the unin-
tended consequences of the wall, which allowed the northern frontier na-
tions to safely amass their strength and ready themselves for incursions
against the Chinese heartland without being transformed by the civilizing
force of the Son of Heaven.
The threat of war, however, allows Taizong to reclaim the central role
in the poetic narrative; he depicts himself as the single figure who can pac-
ify the nomadic hordes. He claims to do this through a careful study of
“the measures taken by the hundred kings,” invoking the accumulated
wisdom of past rulers as his guide (l. 54), but also, in the same gesture, an-
nouncing his own inheritance of sovereignty: “It happened that this use-
less body followed in their footsteps, / Ascending to the imperial design
and governing the world” (ll. 55–56). Under his rule, the barbarian invad-
ers are repulsed and society is once again restored to a condition of uto-
pian trust, in which gates could be left open without inviting property
theft. Yet Taizong’s image of social stability is one connected not so much
with moral and ritual transformation, but with the state’s practical needs:
“The commoners were allowed to pursue farming, / Script and axles made
uniform for carts and writing” (ll. 67–68). Political standardization and
the necessity of agriculture were, after all, central tenets in the theories of
Shang Yang and Li Si, whose reconception of the state buttressed Qin
ideology, making possible the foundation of empire. The presence of both
Legalism and Confucianism in medieval political discourse could hardly
be considered exceptional, as the imperial state combined the needs of po-
litical centralization with the rhetoric of moral ideology.
This equivocation between the traditions of the sage-kings and the in-
novations of the imperial age does not seem to convince even Taizong
himself, and so he echoes the argument made by Xiao He to Han Gaozu,
that the construction of a palace would serve to establish the new dynasty:
“By making use of the two toilings of earth and wood, / There is no need
—————
115. See Waldron, Great Wall of China.
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
307
for the two tasks of shield and spear” (ll. 73–74). Yet even this is not suffi-
cient to quell Taizong’s worries. He recalls the example of the Han gen-
eral Zhou Yafu, who would not relax the military regulations at Xiliu En-
campment for the visiting Han Wendi, and realizes that Xiao He’s
symbolic argument cannot compare to Zhou Yafu’s unyielding character.
Taizong also sees through the justification of the massive imperial hunts,
which were supposed to demonstrate the military power of the emperor
and thereby awe border nations into peaceful submission. In both cases,
the signified of true sovereignty—what Mencius would term the Kingly
Way—cannot be truly communicated through the symbolic forms of the
palace and the hunt, but must rather be exemplified and cultivated in the
sovereign’s own person.
The abortive attempt to justify his building of Daming Palace now
leads Taizong to consider the frugality of Han Wendi, who famously de-
clined to build an exposed terrace despite the trivial cost, as well as the
greed of the Lord of Shu and Earl Zhi, who sought only to maximize their
own profits and so lost their lives. Taizong realizes that he is no Wendi,
but unlike the Lord of Shu and Earl Zhi, he acknowledges the populace’s
murmuring at the excessively grand scale of Taizong’s new palace, confess-
ing, “In seeking profit, I have embraced the trifling and neglected the im-
portant, / In causing harm, I abandoned what was crucial and thought
only of the trivial.”
Having realized his folly, Taizong sets the stage for the scene of moral
enlightenment that, by generic convention, provides the closure for many
rhapsodies. Taizong raises his eyes from the palatial scene to consider the
rains and clouds that selflessly nourish the entire world, realizing that he
should analogously benefit all things without thought of requital or rec-
ognition. This is the model of the gift, which, as Jacques Derrida has writ-
ten, is dispensed freely and can have “no reciprocity, return, exchange,
countergift, or debt” as the result of the giving.116 To give without desire
for return would perhaps prove an impossible ideal, but it was the under-
lying logic in Yu’s tireless labors to deliver his people from destructive
floods. What Taizong hopes to institute (at least in the space of the poem)
is a government based upon grace rather than desire.
—————
116. Derrida, Given Time, p. 12.
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308
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
It is at this point that Taizong withdraws from the palatial scene—and,
from another perspective, withdraws the scene of the palace—to enter in-
to a contemplative space. This erasure of rhapsodic representation recalls
a similar gesture performed at the end of Sima Xiangru’s “Rhapsody on
the Imperial Park.” One might recall how, in that poem, once the em-
peror had reached the height of pleasure during the grand banquet, he
suddenly
realizes that he should end the celebration and return the Impe-
rial Park to farmland. Similarly, Taizong shuts out the lofty view of the
terrace, saying, “I dispel and purge my cares / And naturally is my heart
made cheerful” (ll. 101–102). This is also an act of askēsis in an almost mo-nastic sense: Taizong has rejected the extravagance of palatial representa-
tion to embrace inward contemplation. To be sure, he does not imagine
tearing down the palace—a promise that he would probably not want to
make good on—but the palace nevertheless is removed from the scene of
the poem.
Taizong realizes that the palace cannot be justified by appeals to the
necessity of sovereign power or state prosperity, and that the “single act of
virtue” transcends the scale of value for material wealth (ll. 103–104). Un-
derlying the argument in this last section is an inversion of the exploita-
tive economy of the tyrant, in which the entire populace served to gratify
the One Man’s desires. Here, it is the sovereign who exists to serve the
empire, disseminating grace without desire and prizing virtue above all
gain. However, such a sovereign ideal cannot exist in the world created by
the Qin foundation of empire. Taizong must therefore look to a founding
moment that preceded the Qin, which he finds in the final couplet: “Both
those of ‘same virtue’ and ‘same mind’ / Together flow in fragrance from
the Kingly Way” (ll. 107–108). The allusion is to King Wu’s “Great Vow,”
a speech in which the Zhou co-founder laid out the charge against the
Shang tyrant Zhou:
Shou [another name for the Shang tyrant Zhou] has thousands and millions of
ordinary men, but they are divided in mind and in virtue. I have ten men, minis-
ters capable of government, who are united in mind and in virtue. Though one’s
men may all be close relatives, they would not be the equal of benevolent men.
Heaven sees as my people see; Heaven hears as my people hear. If the common
people have faults, they all belong to me, the One Man. Now I must go forth.
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Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
309
受有億兆夷人，離心離德。予有亂臣十人，同心同德。雖有周親，不
如仁人。天視自我民視，天聽自我民聽，百姓有過，在予一人。今朕
必往。117
King Wu uses the language of unity throughout this passage: that is, his
ministers are united in their hearts; Heaven sees and hears through the eyes
and ears of Wu’s people; and Wu himself takes the responsibility of his
people’s faults all upon himself. By appropriating the language of King Wu
on the eve of the Zhou dynastic founding, Taizong sets up a counter-
genealogy to the tyrants who had haunted the rhapsodic meditation on the
past and whose desires for self-aggrandizement led to the construction of
massive palace complexes. Like King Wu, Taizong was a dynastic co-
founder and led the military conquest of the previous dynasty, which had
lost Heaven’s favor. The closing image of the “Kingly Way,” then, refers
not only to the normative tradition of moral sovereignty, but also to the so-
vereign lineage that connects Taizong to the exemplary kings of former
times.
If the palace drops out of the rhapsody’s final accounting, it is because
Taizong can find no justification for palaces that do not participate in the
troubling rhetoric of empire. In this context, the allusion to King Wu
serves a different purpose, one that contrasts with Han Gaozu rather than
the First Emperor. Gaozu, in accepting Xiao He’s argument for the Wei-
yang Palace, mistakes the representational form of the palace—its gran-
deur and ornamentation—for its significance. What Taizong offers, by
way of redress, is a dialectical account of the palace that considers the ear-
lier palatial ideologies of the Qin and Han, but concludes with the nega-
tion of all palatial representation. Taizong invokes King Wu’s unity of
hearts and minds, which speaks to the intention of Xiao He’s argument
but without recourse to the expense of representation—which is to say,
without the palace itself. It is only when Taizong has voided the form of
the palace that he can reveals the palace’s originary content, its signifi-
cance as the unifying center of empire. This is what the palace was sup-
posed to signify in its role as the axis mundi of the world, as the cosmo-
logical and political center that defines and organizes all space around it.
—————
117. Shang shu zhengyi, 11.69c, in Shisanjing zhushu, p. 181.
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310
Palatial Form and the Rhapsodic Imagination
And this is also what had been forgotten in the creation of empire, when
the needs of the ruler and state took precedence over the needs of the
ruler’s subjects.
•
Taizong’s pairing of rhapsodic form with the subject of the imperial pal-
ace was a natural development from earlier rhapsodic treatments of capi-
tal cities and hunting parks. The poetic representation of space was some-
thing that the genre of rhapsody did well, conjuring a sense of panorama
through its long rhetorical catalogues and lexical prolixity. This same set
of formal characteristics underlay the architectonics of the rhapsody,
which organized and divided couplets into the building blocks of poetic
representation.
However, Taizong’s interest in the palace lay in the palace’s negation, a
tropological strategy that he has employed elsewhere as a means of repre-
senting the elusive ideal of sovereign virtue. The negation of the palace
occurs twice: once in the rhapsody as Taizong realizes the cost of con-
structing a detached palace, and once in history when Taizong calls for an
end to the actual construction of the Daming Palace. What the relation-
ship between these two negations actually was is a question that cannot be
resolved, since it is only the poem that survives to document Taizong’s
decision to halt work on the palace. That is, one cannot know if the rhap-
sody was composed in response to (that is, as a defense of ) the decision to
stop construction, or if the rhapsody was itself the crystallization of Tai-
zong’s meditation on sovereign wastefulness and the spur to his historical
decision. This question of causality and poetic representation is also pre-
sent in Taizong’s most famous poetic composition, “The Imperial Capital
Poems,” which is the topic of the next, and final, chapter.
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S E V E N
On “The Imperial Capital Poems”:
Ritual Sovereignty and Imperial Askēsis
If palaces are the material symbols of sovereignty, locating the sovereign in
space, then rituals are their temporal counterparts, marking both the suc-
cessful completion of cycles and the beginnings of epochs. The hallowed
Feng and Shan sacrifices, mentioned in passing in previous chapters, be-
longed to the latter kind of ritual, as their performance was intended to
announce the achievement of lasting peace throughout the empire. The
founders of a new dynasty often employed such rhetoric, claiming to have
swept away the chaos of the previous age. Nevertheless, Sima Qian begins
his “Treatise on the Feng and Shan” 封禪書 by asking, “Since antiquity,
why have there been sovereigns who have received the mandate but not
performed the Feng and Shan sacrifices?” 自古受命帝王，曷嘗不封
禪.1 This question might be asked of Tang Taizong, who would consis-
tently represent himself as bringing about an age of peace, and yet decide,
at three separate points in his reign, that it would not be right to perform
the Feng and Shan sacrifices at Mount Tai.
Taizong’s decisions concerning the Feng and Shan are preserved in a
set of edicts and speeches that span the length of his reign and take up a
broad set of issues concerning the idea of sovereignty. In these texts, Tai-
zong not only examines his own record, but also looks backwards to the
—————
1. Shi ji, 28.1355.
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312
On “The Imperial Capital Poems”
examples of earlier rulers and dynasties—most significantly to the failure
of the Sui to hold the mandate. Edicts and imperial speeches are, of course,
public documents, and though they are composed as if addressing the em-
pire in general, they are also intended for particular audiences. Similarly,
poetry may speak as if in the mode of universal address, even while there is
a particular audience in mind. The complement to Taizong’s public dis-
cussions of the Feng and Shan rites may be found in the ten-poem se-
quence, “The Imperial Capital Poems: Ten Pieces, with Preface.”2 In
these poems, we find Taizong ostensibly describing the activities of a day
of imperial leisure, beginning at dawn and ending late at night. However,
what emerges from this poem-cycle is a poetic discourse on the role of the