CHAPTER FOUR

THE RHAPSODY OF THE QIN AND HAN

After a lengthy process of cohesion and fusion, China entered the age of Qin and Han, a period of more than four hundred years character- ized by a unified nation and a centralized government, which has been called by some historians the “First Empire” in Chinese history. The downfall of the Qin and the subsequent rise of the Western Han, fol- lowed by the downfall of the Western Han and the subsequent rise of the Eastern Han, did take place in the period, but the years of upheaval were not so long, and the basic political system remained consistent. It was only after the middle years of the Eastern Han that the centraliza- tion of state power began to move gradually towards disintegration. A unified autocratic feudal monarchy needed correlative mea- sures of thought and culture to uphold and strengthen its rule: the First Emperor of Qin tried to keep an ideological control by burning books, but it was not really materialized until Emperor Wu of Han adopted Dong Zhongshu’s proposal, the policy of “banishing the hun- dred schools and honoring Confucianism alone.” The Confucianism that won the status of being “honored alone” had gone through some reform: it absorbed some useful parts of the thought of Confucius and Mencius, and mixed them up with the thought of the School of Yin and Yang and the Legalists. What took shape as a result was a prag- matic theory that regarded the upholding of the imperial power as the ultimate purpose and one that blended politics, religion, ethics and law into unity. It depended upon the explication of the primary Confucian classics, so it was also known as the “Study of Classics.” In political institution, the rulers placed the reading of classics in close connection with the official career of the educated; accordingly the thought and culture of the two Han dynasties were mostly under the influence of the Study of Classics. The establishment of feudal autocracy and ideological control, natu- rally, restricted the free development of academic learning and culture to an extremely severe extent. The liberal and lively atmosphere of the “Contention of the Hundred Schools” of the Warring States period quickly receded. Confucianism itself, however, contained the idea of 76 chapter four fine-tuning social relations and stabilizing social order through cul- tural means; and due to the continuous economic development, the ruling class also felt a need for the enjoyment of spiritual culture in addition to material comfort. Consequently, during the age of the Qin and Han, while the culture did suffer some setbacks and retreats in its development, it also made considerable achievements in spite of all the restrictions. Under the specific social circumstances, the rhapsody, due to some of its generic features, became the mainstream of literary composition during the age of the Qin and Han (primarily during the Han).

1. The Background of the Flourish of the Rhapsody and Its Characteristics

The term “rhapsody (rhyme-prose),” used in a general sense, refers to The Songs of the South, works of the Qin and Han times that modeled after The Songs of the South in style with some of the features of lyric poetry, as well as works somewhat in between poetry and prose in nature, focusing on the delineation of objects, which emerged during the Han dynasty. The flourish of the rhapsody was, in the first place, related to some of the inclinations that had already been found in pre-Qin literature. We know that in the last years of the Warring States period, works by Qu Yuan and others in The Songs of the South already reached a remarkably high standard, and also, as discussed previously, in the royal court of the state of Chu at the time and shortly afterwards, there had already emerged a group of rhyme-prose writers. In addition, from the lines in the “Great Summons”: “Two teams of eight join in a dance, to the chanting of poetry and rhapsodies,” as well as from the title of the “Chapter of the Rhapsodies” in the Xunzi, the term “rhapsody,” as the name for a literary genre with a broad range of meanings, should have been established before the Han dynasty. Another point worthy of note was that, judging from the Intrigues of the Warring States and similar prose works, those who belonged to the so-called “Wandering Elite” of the late Warring States period were mostly well educated in literary composition, and were fond of expressing themselves in elabo- rate and exquisite language. One may infer that at the time, in order to become a member of the “Elite” one had to go through some kind of philological training. Certainly, neither the works of Qu Yuan and