Facts and Details

Among the earliest and most influential poetic anthologies was the Chuci (Songs of Chu), made up primarily of poems ascribed to the semilegendary Qu Yuan (ca. 340-278 B.C.) and his follower Song Yu (fourth century B.C.). The songs in this collection are more lyrical and romantic and represent a different tradition from the earlier Shijing. During the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), this form evolved into the fu, a poem usually in rhymed verse except for introductory and concluding passages that are in prose, often in the form of questions and answers. The era of disunity that followed the Han period saw the rise of romantic nature poetry heavily influenced by Taoism. [Source: Library of Congress]

Classical poetry reached its zenith during the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907). The early Tang period was best known for its lushi (regulated verse), an eight-line poem with five or seven words in each line; zi (verse following strict rules of prosody); and jueju (truncated verse), a four-line poem with five or seven words in each line.

“Subsequent writers of classical poetry lived under the shadow of their great Tang predecessors, and although there were many fine poets in subsequent dynasties, none reached the level of this period. As the classical style of poetry became more stultified, a more flexible poetic medium, the ci, arrived on the scene. The ci, a poetic form based on the tunes of popular songs, some of Central Asian origin, was developed to its fullest by the poets of the Song dynasty (960-1279). As the ci gradually became more literary and artificial after Song times, the san qu, a freer form, based on new popular songs, developed. The use of san qu songs in drama marked an important step in the development of vernacular literature. [Ibid]

Classic Chinese Poets

Poetry by Wan Cheih Chinese poets have traditionally given themselves pen names like The Wanderer and participated in groups with names like the Crescent Moon Society.

Qu Yuan (340-277 B.C.) is regarded by some as the father of Chinese poetry, One of his most famous lines goes: “Long did I sigh to hold back tears, saddened I am by the grief of my people.” He is still admired today. See, Festivals, Dragon Boat Racing

The Tang dynasty was considered the golden age for Chinese poetry. Poets often sat beneath the moon and drank wine from cups floated on rivers and composed poems like: "The sun beyond the mountain glows/ The Yellow River seaward flows/ But if you desire a grander sight/ The you must scale a greater height." Poets sometimes played a game in which a cup was placed in a stream and a poet had to compose a poem before the cup floated by. If he failed he had to consume a glass of wine.

The two best-known poets of the period were Li Bai (701-762) and Du Fu (712-770). Li Bai was known for the romanticism of his poetry; Du Fu was seen as a Confucian moralist with a strict sense of duty toward society. His poems inspired many Chinese painters. Later Tang poets developed greater realism and social criticism and refined the art of narration. One of the best known of the later Tang poets was Bai Juyi (772-846), whose poems were an inspired and critical comment on the society of his time. Other famous Tang dynasty poets include Wang Wei, Li You and Huang Tingjian. Xue Tao was a famous female poet. Wang Wei (701-761) was a poet-painter who said "there are paintings in his poems and poems in his paintings." The Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) poets Su Xun and his sons Su Shi and Su Zhe are also highly regarded .

Chinese Painting, Calligraphy and Poetry

Poem by Wang To Qing Poetry is much more fully integrated into painting and calligraphy in Chinese art than it is into painting and writing in Western art. There are two words used to describe what a painter does: Hua hua means "to paint a picture" and xie hua means "to write a picture." Many artists prefer the latter.

Poetry, painting and calligraphy were known as the "Three Perfections." Poems are often the subjects of painting. Painters were often inspired by poetry and tried to create works with a poetic, lyrical quality.

Recalling a series of twelve poems by Su Shih (1036-1101) that inspired him, the great master painter Shih T'ao (1641-1717) wrote: "This album had been on my desk for a year and never once did I touch it. One day, when a snow storm was blowing outside, I thought of Tung-p'o's poems describing twelve scenes and became so inspired that I took up my brush and started painting each of the scenes in the poems. At the top of each picture I copied the original poem. When I chant them the spirit that gave them life emerges spontaneously from paintings." [Source: "The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin]

When a painting did not fully convey the artist feelings, the artist sometimes turned to calligraphy to convey his feelings more deeply. Describing the link between writing and painting, the artist-poet Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) wrote:

Do the rocks in flying-white, the trees in ancient seal script
And render bamboo as if writing in clerical characters:
Only if one is truly able to comprehend this, will he realize
That calligraphy and painting are essentially the same.

Other times the message of the calligraphy was more mundane. An inscription on the side of Sheep and Goat by Zhao Mengfu read: "I have painted horses before, but have never painted sheep, so when Zhongxin requested a painting, I playfully drew these for him from life. Though I can not get close to the ancient masters, I have managed somewhat to capture their essential spirit”.

Li Bai

The famous Tang dynasty poet Li Bai (A.D. 701-762) is one of the most quoted Chinese poets in the West.In China Li is regarded as a "banished immortal"— “an immortal who misbehaved in heaven and was banished to earth"—and is considered wild, eccentric and possessing special powers.

Li Bai does not seem to have been very likable as a person. He has been described as "tiresome sort of bohemian, vain and untrustworthy, an irresponsible citizen, a careless friend, an indifferent husband and a terrible drunk." Other than a short stint "polishing" Imperial documents, Li never had a job and didn't seem to make much money from his poetry. He appeared to have survived by sponging off relatives.

Li once referred to himself as the “god of imbibing..” It was said he was capable of “producing 100 poems after drinking a whole dou of wine.” A dour is equal to about 10 liters.. One of Li’s most famous poems, Amidst Flowers with a Jug of Wine goes:

Amidst flowers with a jug of wine
I pour alone lacking companionship
With a raised cup I invite the Moon
To toast my shadow, the three of us.

Li Bai wrote the following poem about the famous Huangshan mountains:

Huangshan is hundreds of thousands of feet high
With numerous soaring peaks lotus-like
Rock pillars shooting up to kiss empyrean roses
Like so many lilies grown amid a sea of gold.

Near Jiuhuashan in the Huangshan mountains, Li Bai wrote:

Looking far ahead from Jiujang,
I saw the peaks of Mount Jiuhia
Emerging from the Heavenly River
Like nine beautiful lotus flowers.

Development of Prose in China

“The proponents of the Hundred Schools of Thought in the Warring States and Spring and Autumn periods made important contributions to Chinese prose style. The writings of Mo Zi (Mo Di, 470-391 B.C.?), Mencius (Meng Zi; 372-289 B.C.), and Zhuang Zi (369-286 B.C.) contain well-reasoned, carefully developed discourses and show a marked improvement in organization and style over what went before. Mo Zi is known for extensively and effectively using methodological reasoning in his polemic prose. Mencius contributed elegant diction and, along with Zhuang Zi, is known for his extensive use of comparisons, anecdotes, and allegories. By the third century B.C., these writers had developed a simple, concise prose noted for its economy of words, which served as a model of literary form for over 2,000 years. [Source: Library of Congress]

The Tang period also saw a rejection of the ornate, artificial style of prose developed in the previous period and the emergence of a simple, direct, and forceful prose based on Han and pre-Han writing. The primary proponent of this neoclassical style of prose, which heavily influenced prose writing for the next 800 years, was Han Yu (768-824), a master essayist and strong advocate of a return to Confucian orthodoxy. [Source: Library of Congress]

“Vernacular fiction became popular after the fourteenth century, although it was never esteemed in court circles. Covering a broader range of subject matter and longer and less highly structured than literary fiction, vernacular fiction includes a number of masterpieces. The greatest is the eighteenth-century domestic novel Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber). A semiautobiographical work by a scion of a declining gentry family, Hong Lou Meng has been acknowledged by students of Chinese fiction to be the masterwork of its type. [Ibid]

The Dream of the Red Chamber and Other Famous Chinese Novels

TV drama version of Dream of Red Chamber Classic novels include The Tales of the Marshes by Sze Nai-an (translated into English by Pearl S. Buck), Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Lo Kuan-chung (a collection of stories sometimes referred to as the Chinese equivalent of Arthurian legends); Historical Memoirs, Water Margins and the writings of Tu Fu and Li Po. Many classic stories are associated with Chinese Theaters. See Theater and Opera.

The Dream of the Red Chamber is a comedy of manners by Cao Xueqing, who is sometimes called the Chinese Tolstoy. Detailing a number of sexual trysts involving members of both the opposite sexes and the same sex, it was written in the 19th century and set in the 16th century and revolves around a young man named Jia Baoyu and his two girl cousins, Lin Daiyu and Xue Baochi, who are his lovers. Lin Daiyu is the tragic figure in Dream of Red Chamber. Orphaned at the age of five, she goes to live with her uncle and must compete with her cousins for lover and attention. The story is also known by title Dream of Red Mansions. David Hawkes’ fine translation of Dream of the Red Chamber is both a faithful translation and a masterpiece of English prose.)

Journey to the West

Journey to the West is a 16th century novel by Wu Cheng En that has many similarities with The Wizard of Oz. It is based on the 7th century wanderings of real life Buddhist monk named Hsuan-tang Zang who went to India in search of sacred Buddhist texts. In the story the Great Monk Tang is accompanied on his journey by three animal spirits: the dim-witted and awkward Pigsy (a pig), the Monkey King (an immortal that possesses a monkey) and the water spirt monk Sha (a feminine spirit).

Hsuan-tsang (Xuan Zang), the Chinese monk who inspired the story, left China for India in A.D. 645 to obtain Buddhist texts from which the Chinese could learn more about Buddhism. He made it to Central Asia and India despite being held up by surly Chinese guards and guides who abandoned him in the middle of nowhere. In Central Asia he traveled to Turfan, Kucha, the Bedel pass, Lake Issyk-kul, the Chu Valley (near present-day Bishkek), Tashkent, Samarkand, Balk, Kashgar and Khoton before crossing the Himalayas into India. Hsuan-tsang spent 16 years in India collecting texts and returned with 700 Buddhist texts.

Film version of Journey to the West Journey to the West is widely regarded as the greatest story of Chinese literature and is well known in Japan and Korea and elsewhere in Asia. The monk Hsuan-tang Zang is kind of an anti-hero, pious but cowardly. He repeatedly has to be rescued by the monkey king and the water spirit. The greatest challenge for the four characters is crossing the 400-kilometer-wide river to Heaven, guarded by a monster that feeds on children. When they return to China with scrolls they went to India to collect the find the scrolls are blank and are told that is the true teaching of Buddha.

The monkey is fearless and likes to fight, defending his rights. At teh beginning of teh story he gate crashes into heaven hoping to become mortal but instead is deemed to self-centered and is imprisoned by Buddha in mountain for 500 years as punishment, and later offered a chance to redeem himself by protecting the monk Hsuan-tang Zang as travels from China to India. The journey takes over a hundred years.

Journey to the West has been staged as a play and a Japanese television series in the 1970s and made into Chinese and Japanese films. In 2007 Chinese director Chen Shizheng collaborated with Damon Albarn of the rock groups Blur and Gorillaz, and James Hewiit, the Gorillaz cartoonist, to do a stage and opera version of Journey to the West. It is a unique blend of animation, dance, acrobatics, martial arts and video game elements. The Times of London called it “an improbable combination of The Lion King, Cirque du Soleil and Crouching, Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

Chen is the one who brought the 20-hour, 55-act Ming dynasty opera Peony Pavilion to New York and directed the film Dark Matter with Merlyn Streep. Dalmon’s score by an electronically-enhanced pit orchestra is eclectic and minimalist but is perfect for the show. Fei Yang is delightful and acrobatic as the Monkey King.

Chinese Literature in the 20th Century

In the New Culture Movement (1917-23), literary writing style was largely replaced by the vernacular in all areas of literature. This was brought about mainly by Lu Xun (1881-1936), China's first major stylist in vernacular prose (other than the novel), and the literary reformers Hu Shi (1891-1962) and Chen Duxiu (1880-1942). [Source: Library of Congress]

“The late 1920s and 1930s were years of creativity in Chinese fiction, and literary journals and societies espousing various artistic theories proliferated. Among the major writers of the period were Guo Moruo (1892-1978), a poet, historian, essayist, and critic; Mao Dun (1896-1981), the first of the novelists to emerge from the League of Left-Wing Writers and one whose work reflected the revolutionary struggle and disillusionment of the late 1920s; and Ba Jin (b. 1904), a novelist whose work was influenced by Ivan Turgenev and other Russian writers. In the 1930s Ba Jin produced a trilogy that depicted the struggle of modern youth against the ageold dominance of the Confucian family system. Comparison often is made between Jia (Family), one of the novels in the trilogy, and Hong Lou Meng. Another writer of the period was the gifted satirist and novelist Lao She (1899-1966). Many of these writers became important as administrators of artistic and literary policy after 1949. Most of those still alive during the Cultural Revolution were either purged or forced to submit to public humiliation. [Ibid] The League of Left-Wing Writers was founded in 1930 and included Lu Xun in its leadership. By 1932 it had adopted the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism, that is, the insistence that art must concentrate on contemporary events in a realistic way, exposing the ills of nonsocialist society and promoting the glorious future under communism. [Ibid]

19th and 20th Century Chinese Writers

Rickshaw Boy by Lao She The May 4 movement of 1919 started out as student protests against a decision at the Paris Peace Conference, after the first world war, to award Japan control of German concessions in China's Shandong province. It soon encompassed a broader debate about how China should modernize. It spawned a host of writers famous throughout the Chinese world, including Lu Xun.

Other writers associated with a brief period of modernization around the time of Hundred Day Reform in 1898 include Kang Youwei, an iconoclastic interpreter of Confucian philosophy who influenced Emperor Guangxi; and Liang Qichao, a gifted writer who was smuggled into Japan after the Emperor's arrest. Both men mixed politics and literature but eventually turned their backs on radical politics. Kang became interested in cosmology; Liang in history.

In a review of Red-light Novels of the Late Qing by Chloe F. Starr, John Christopher Hamm of the University of Washington wrote: “As a mere reader of fiction, I always found the late Qing and early Republican novels set in the world of courtesans and their clients rather rough going. Anything but ‘sexy,’ they seemed to portray characters ranging from the pitiable to the contemptible, playing out programmatic fates in a world whose claustrophobia-inducing narrowness was intensified by the plots' indefatigable repetition of trivial detail and the narration's pose of somewhat precious self-awareness.”

Lao She has had several books translated into English, most notably Cat City and The Rickshaw Boy. The later is a delightful novel written in the 1930s about a Beijing rickshaw driver. Lao wrote about working class people and met with Mao on a few occasions. Even so he was attacked and humiliated by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution and was either murdered or committed suicide.

Zhang Xianliang, the author of the sexually-explicit Half of Man is Woman is writer many say is worth checking out. Luo Guanzhong wrote the great historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the Tang Dynasty.

Ba Jin (1905-2005) was a prolific writer whose books are required reading for most Chinese middle school students. He wrote throughout his century-long life and us best-known for his semi-autobiographical trilogy Family 1937); Spring (1938) and Autumn (1940), about the struggle of a large family to break away from the control of its elders.

Xu Zhimo (1897-1931) was one of China's most distinguished poets of the twentieth century. In November 1931 he died tragically in a plane crash on his way from Nanjing to Beijing for a literary event. He attended Columbia University in the United States.

Lu Xun

The essayist and short story writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) is considered by many to be China's greatest 20th century writer and the founder of modern Chinese literature. . Lu was trained as doctor and gave up his medical career he said to devote himself to curing social ills with his writing. He loved Jules Verne, and translated his stories into Chinese beginning in 1903 as part of an effort to help China develop an appreciation of Western sciences. Lu eventually gave up writing and took up politics. He allied himself with the Communists around the time of his death in 1936.

Lu Xun is regarded as the pioneer of modern leftist Chinese literature. He was born in Zhejiang province, which is considered a a breeding ground of many Chinese artists and intellectuals. Today there is a literary awards named after him: the Lu Xun Award for short stories.

Lu was "noted for his acerbic tongue and critical nature." He wrote in a simple, straight-forward style that contrasting sharply with the complex, classical language that was fashionable at the time he wrote. He resolved to diagnose Chinese society and culture through literature. Like George Orwell, wrote biting social satire and sought to change what they viewed as a corrupt, backward and foreign-dominated China. Among Lu Xun’s more memorable characters is Ah Q, an allegorical, starving man on the street meant to represent the conflicts raging in China at the time.

Lu Xun’s Works

Lu's novella, The Story of Ah Q (1921), was a brilliant and vicious satire on Chinese traditions. Set in 1911. at the of the beginning of the ill-fated Chinese republic, it was about a peasant who survives a number if disasters, viewing each one as a triumph. His dreams of revolution ends with his own execution.

In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen was written Lu Xun in 1926. For decades, it had been in high school textbooks, and there was quite a bit of controversy when education authorities decided to remove it in 2007. There was speculation that the article was junked in part because it might remind people of a similar incident that occurred in 1989]

In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen is about 22-year-old Liu Hezhen, a student activist campaigning for a boycott of Japanese goods . On March 18, 1926, she was a a member of a group of students in Beiping (Beijing) that staged a demonstration to protest the Japanese navy opening fire on Chinese troops in Tianjin. When protesters gathered outside the residence of Duan Qirui, a warlord who was chief executive of the Republic of China at the time, to submit their petition, a shooting was ordered and forty-seven people died.

Watching Magic Shows by Lu Xun

In his short story Watching Magic Shows , Lu Xun wrote: “These shows roam all across the country, so the tricks are the same wherever they go. They need just two things to collect their money: a black bear and a child...The black bear is kept hungry to the point of emaciation, so that he seems almost to lack the energy to move. Naturally, he couldn’t be allowed to be strong; a strong bear cannot be tamed. Now, he’s half-dead and half-alive, but he’s still got an iron ring through his nose, and he’s made to do tricks tethered to a leash. Sometimes he’s given a little something to eat—a crust of wheat bun soaked in water—but the spoon is held above his head, so that he has to stand on his hind legs and stretch his neck and open his mouth wide, and only after all this work does he get a bite, for which the magic show collects a few more coins.” [Source: Developmental Fairy Tales By Andrew F. Jones, China Beat, May 4, 2011]

“No one in China talks about where these bears come from. According to a study done by some Westerners, they are captured in the mountains when they are still small. Grown bears are no good, because once they’re big, their nature can no longer be changed. But even the cubs need to be “trained,” and this “training” takes two forms: beatings and hunger. Later they die of mistreatment and abuse. I imagine that what the study says is perfectly true. We can see well enough that even though they’re still alive and performing tricks, they’re wretched to the point where they hardly even resemble bears anymore. In some places, they go so far as to call them “cur-bears” [gouxiong], so great is their contempt for them.” [Ibid]

“The child in these scenes also suffers, as grown-ups stand on his belly or twist his arms behind his back, until he pulls a face to show his pain and begs the spectators to save him. Six, five, four more, and three “ and the magician has once again collected a handful of coins....Naturally, the child has also been trained, and the pain is feigned, just a plot cooked up in collusion with the grown-ups, and anyway, it never hurts to earn some more money.” [Ibid]

“They bang a gong to get the show started in the afternoon, and continue until the evening. When it’s over, the spectators disperse, and while some of them have spent some money, others have not...At the end of each show, I think to myself as I walk away: there are two kinds of moneymakers. One kind is abused to death until another is found as a replacement. The other kind will grow up to acquire a little child and a bear cub, and go on performing the same old tricks. It’s really very simple, and even seems a bit tedious when you think about it. Yet I go on watching these shows. What else would you have me look at, dear readers? “ [Ibid]

In his analysis of the story Andrew F. Jones wrote in Developmental Fairy Tales wrote: “Lu Xun wrote this essay in October 1933 amidst a wave of intense anxiety and interest in the question of Chinese children. In academic journals and popular media alike, the figure of the child became a ubiquitous emblem of the nation and its developmental hopes. Nor was this equation lost on the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT), which had the previous year instituted for the first time a national “Children’s Day.” and had already begun to promote 1934 as “The Year of the Child.” Newspapers and illustrated magazines such as the best-selling weekly Young Companion (Liangyou huabao) had since the late 1920s regularly featured the activities of a nascent scouting movement, a “Children’s Army” (tongzi jun) typically pictured as projecting a military prowess in miniature that the KMT, having suffered the loss of Manchuria to Japanese military encroachment in 1931, sorely lacked. Parents were encouraged to send in photographs of their charges, to be judged competitively on the strength of their vigor and vitality. The slogan for one such competition, sponsored by an American baby formula brand, Momilk—”If you want to strengthen the nation, you must first strengthen the children”—quite neatly summed up the conflation of the child and the nation in the context of the emergence of a vibrant and aggressively commercialized urban media culture.” [Ibid]

Book: Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture by Andrew F. Jones (Harvard University Press, 2011]

Image Sources: 1) Storyteller, Bukliin archives http://www.bucklinchinaarchive.com/ ; 2) Book, Calligraphy, Palace Museum Taipei ; 3) Encyclopedia, Li Bao, wikipedia; 4) Handscroll, Columbia University; 5) Tang party, University of Washington ; 6) Red Chamber TV, Hongloumeng; 7) Bei Dao, Poets.org 8) Pearl Buck, Pearl Buck website

Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

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© 2008 Jeffrey Hays

Last updated January 2013