Chapter Six

Early and High Tang Poetry before Du Fu

When Li Shimin 李世民 (600–649, r. 626–49) urged his father to seize the throne from the Sui emperor and proclaim the founding of the Tang, they did not know that they were at the beginning of a three- hundred-year-long dynasty. Later, before the ignominious collapse of Emperor Tang Xuanzong’s 唐玄宗 (685–762, r. 712–56) reign into catastrophic rebellion, the officials of his court did not know that they would become part of the legend of the glorious height of Tang rule. And when Du Fu 杜甫 and Li Bai 李白 died, they had every reason to believe that they were failures: they did not know that within a generation they would be hailed as the greatest poets of their age and that history would view them as the greatest poets in the Chinese tradition. We later readers, in contrast, know all of this, and we tend to allow our knowledge to shape our reading of the poetry. Our backward glance imparts a sense of necessity to Tang poetry that is not part of the poetry itself. e Tang dynasty was the great age of Chinese poetry, but this claim is a cliché and of little value. e challenge is to allow the poetry—with its astonishing variety of voices, moods, styles, and topics—to speak for itself. e Tang rulers, like those of the brief Sui dynasty, were northerners. ey were suspicious of the allure of the Southern courts and at the same time intrigued by it. Moreover, as the new masters of a reunited China, the early Tang emperors felt the need to bring together the divergent cultures of the North and South that had grown apart during the years of disunion. Southern scholars, for example, were central to the grand textual compilation projects for the Confucian canon at the beginning of the dynasty that were to demonstrate that the Tang was the worthy inheritor of the Han universal empire. In literature, the Tang court sought to demonstrate that it could master the full legacy of the South yet improve upon it with the strength and seriousness of Northern values. e Tang emperor and princes invited the best of the remaining Southern poets to serve as advisors and to join them in versifying at imperial banquets and all the many occasions that called for poetry. e Tang court largely continued the elegant styles of the Southern salons, stripped perhaps of their most frivolous topics and hyper-refined mannerisms. Fortunately for poetry—though not for the poets—the Tang court was as dangerous a place as were the princely courts of the Southern dynasties. As before, courtiers were banished or prudently withdrew from the centers of power, and they took their mastery of poetic technique with them. ey wrote of serious personal concerns through the courtly style and, in demanding more from it, changed it. Another set of historical circumstances also intervened to shape poetry during the first century of the Tang. Empress Wu Zetian 武則天 (623–705, r. 690–705), the wife of Emperor Gaozong 唐高宗 (628–83, r. 649–83), was a formidable power even during her husband’s lifetime. After his death, she dominated her sons. Two were declared emperors in succession—while she still remained regent—and she removed both. In the end she declared her own dynasty. Eventually Tang loyalists within the court organized resistance and restored the deposed emperors to the throne. During the period of Wu Zetian’s ascendancy, however, she sought to marshal support among “new men”—talented commoners and the lesser branches of the great clans—who were less committed to the Tang imperial clan and who would Ea rly and High Tang Poetry before Du Fu 179 owe their rising status to her support. One mechanism by which she sought to recruit the new elite was through greater use of the “presented scholar” (jinshi 進士) examination system, which underwent major reform in 681. e jinshi examination after 681 demanded policy essays but also required candidates to compose poems in the “regulated verse” form that had evolved out of palace poetry. us one important result of Empress Wu’s political maneuverings was that ambitious young men from good families throughout the empire sought to master the regulated verse form. e center of poetic composition began to shift from the court itself to the elite society of the capital, Chang’an 長安. e short reigns of the two Tang emperors, the sons of Wu Zetian who were restored to the throne in succession after the empress’s death, were extremely unstable, filled with brutal palace intrigue and marked by institutional drift. When Xuanzong came to the throne, however, he restored morale and efficiency to the civil bureaucracy, and his military campaigns expanded the empire to its greatest reach. Chang’an became the glittering, cosmopolitan capital of a vast realm that stretched from northern Vietnam in the south to outposts in Central Asia in the west. Later critics deemed the bold, expansive poetry of his reign, with its grand vision, to be “High Tang” 盛唐 poetry. Some of the major poets of the period like Wang Wei came from long established lineages, while others like Zhang Jiuling 張九齡 (678– 740)—who came from Guangzhou—were “new men” recruited through the examination system. Du Fu, the greatest Tang poet, to be discussed in the next chapter, was from a minor branch of a declining aristocratic lineage, while Li Bai was of very uncertain ancestry and was an outsider who briefly attracted interest in the capital for his outlandish ways. Indeed, the capital’s brilliance, wealth, and hunger for the new during the height of Xuanzong’s power attracted talented writers and encouraged poetic innovation. is chapter looks at writers from the beginning of the Tang through Xuanzong’s reign and tries to suggest the richness and variety of the poetry of the period.