Poetry and Empire Building

In 141 BCE, the year Emperor Wu of the Han ascended the throne, bamboo strips and silk, inscribed with knives and fur-tipped brushes, still served as the primary tools for storing and communicating information. However, despite the limitations of their writing technologies, the Western Han court produced “great rhapsodies” (da fu) of several thousand characters. This invites us to imagine how the authors of these great rhapsodies composed and edited in their minds—reflecting, remembering, mulling over words—prior to the act of writing. The audience must also have first acquired a certain degree of shared knowledge, for otherwise they would have had great difficulty understanding the words in the instant before they vanished.

Besides its extraordinary length, what most strikes today’s readers about the famous “Sir Vacuous/Imperial Park Rhapsody” (Zixu/Shanglin fu) by the important Western Han author Sima Xiangru (179-127 BCE) are its abundance of allusions, florid language, and many sonorous phrases involving verbal repetition and rhyme—all of which requires significant effort to decipher. How did the rulers and ministers understand and appreciate such works? Was it necessary to understand each and every word, phrase, and passage? If not everyone had a written copy at hand, would this not have required formidable powers of recitation and listening? What do these works tell us about collective memory, the erudition of the courtly milieu, and the Western Han ideal of “broad learning” (boxue)? And, as this ornate and learned form flourished during the great Han Empire, we may ask what sort of relation it had with contemporary notions of tianxia (天下)?

Professor Yu-yu Cheng 鄭毓瑜, distinguished professor of Chinese literature and former chair of Department of Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University (NTU), is well-known internationally for her studies of space, body, and the lyrical tradition in Chinese literature. She is currently Visiting Professor at Princeton University. Prof. Cheng is the author of numerous articles and books, which include, among other titles, “Literary Ch’i” in Six Dynasties Literary Theory 六朝文氣論探究, The Situation Aesthetics in Six Dynasties 六朝情境美學, Gender and Nation: Discourses of Encountering Sorrow in Han and Jin Rhapsodies 性別與家國: 漢晉辭賦的楚騷論述, The Poet in Text and Landscape: Mutual Definition of Self and Landscape 文本風景: 自我與空間的相互定義, and Metaphor: Crossing Categorical Boundaries in Ancient Chinese Literature 引 譬連類: 文學研究的關鍵詞. She is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the ROC Ministry of Education’s Academic Award in Humanities and Arts; the National Science Council’s (NSC) Outstanding Research Award; the Hu Shih Chair Award; and the NTU Outstanding Book Award. She has served as the convener of the NSC Department of Chinese Literature, the executive member of the NSC Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, the Director of the Language Center of College of Liberal Arts at NTU, and is currently the advisory committee member of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences on the National Science Council.