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Ye in Jian’an Literature 45

Chapter 2 Ye in Jian’an Literature

As the preceding chapter demonstrates, Ye was an important city in the politi- cal and military history of early China, and it remains today a repository of material artifacts. It has exercised an influence on the development of city de- sign and planning, but as an actual site, it suffered the inevitable fate of many other ancient cities in premodern China and was destroyed by natural and - man disasters. Still, the archeological artifacts and material remains give us an outline of what the physical city might have been like. Beyond its actual pres- ence, though, Ye also lived on to the present as a theme in Chinese literature— for nearly two thousand years. I would like now to consider how Ye develops as a trope, a part of the imaginary world of literature, as a celebrated site of con- temporary political power and prestige and as a symbol of the transience of power and nostalgia for the past. In the present chapter, I choose the two most significant sites of Ye in literature—the terraces and gardens—as a case study of the city of Ye in literature of the Jian’an 建安 (196–220) period.1

1 The Three Terraces of Ye as an Enduring Motif

At the font of the legacy of Ye stand Cao and two of his sons, Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226), the later Emperor of Wei 魏文帝 (r. 220–226), and Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232), known for their passion for and talents in letters. For them, the bond between the political and literary was tight; as Cao Pi said in his famous “On Literature” in his Standard Treatises (Dianlun lunwen 典論·論文):

Writing is the grand enterprise that orders the state and the prosperous matter that does not decay. The years granted to one have a specified time

1 Many scholars have worked or are presently working on Jian’an literature and literati. I will not focus on the whole of that literature but will turn directly to the works related to the city of Ye itself. Jian’an literature is well covered, for example, in the works of (listed alphabetically by surname) Robert Joe Cutter, Jean-Pierre Diény, Hans H. Frankel, Kechang 龔克昌, Howard L. Goodman, Donald Holzman, Jie 黃節, Itō Masafumi 伊藤正文, David R. Knechtges, Paul W. Kroll, Baojun 李寶均, Li Wenlu 李文祿, Guodong 廖國棟, Mei Chia-ling 梅家玲, Ronald C. Miao, Xiaolong 潘嘯龍, Shih Hsiang-, Suzuki Shûji 鈴木 修次, Mei 王玫, Wang Pengting 王鵬廷, Wang Wei 王巍, Fusheng 吳伏生, Gongchi 徐公持, Guanying 余冠英, Yu Shaochu 俞紹初, Yu Xianhao 郁賢皓, Caimin 張采民, Zhang Keli 張可禮, Jianjun 趙建軍, Zhao Youwen 趙幼文, and others.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004420144_004 46 Chapter 2

they will end; glory and pleasure end with one’s physical body. Both are a constant appointment that must be kept, and neither can be compared to the infinity of writing.

文章經國之大業，不朽之盛事。年壽有時而盡，榮樂止乎其身。二者 必至之常期，未若文章之無窮.2

The most iconic image of Ye is that of the Three Terraces that Cao Cao con- structed and which “became a favorite poetic topic starting in the fifth century.”3 Particularly prominent is the Bronze Bird Terrace and the story about Cao’s concubines residing on the terrace after his death. After the con- struction of the Bronze Bird Terrace was completed, Cao Cao toured the ter- race in the company of his sons and commanded them to compose poems to commemorate the occasion.4 Cao Pi’s preface describes the event that led to the poem’s composition as follows:

In the spring of the seventeenth year of Jian’an [ca. May, 212], [we] visited West Garden and ascended Bronze Bird Terrace. [Father] ordered us, we brothers, all to compose. Its text reads:

建安十七年春，遊西園，登銅雀臺。命余兄弟竝作。其詞曰： 登高臺以騁望 We ascend the high terrace and release our gaze into the distance,

2 See the complete text in Tong 蕭統 (501–31), Wen xuan 文選, comm. Li Shan 李善 (d. 689) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), 52.6a–52.8a. For English translations, see for example, Tian Xiaofei, “Cao Pi, ‘A Discourse on Literature,’” in Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Victor H. Mair and others (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 231–233; David Pollard, “Ch’i in Chinese Literary Theory,” in Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Ch’i-ch’ao, ed. Adele Rickett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 43–66; Donald Holzman, “Literary Criticism in China in the Early Third Century ad,” Asiatische studien 28.2 (1974): 113–149; Ronald C. Miao, “Literary Criticism at the End of the Eastern ,” Literature East and West 16 (1972): 1016–1026; Stephen Owen, “A Discourse on Literature,” in Readings in Chinese Literary Thought (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies Harvard University, 1992), 57–72; and E. R. Hughes, The Art of Letters: Chi’s “Wen ” ad 302 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1951), 231–234. 3 Tian Xiaofei, “A Preliminary Comparison of the Two Recensions of ‘Jinpingmei,’” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 62, no. 2 (2002): 353. 4 In the Shuijing zhu水經注, a statement reads, “Therefore, the Martial Emperor’s [Cao Cao] ‘Fu on Ascending the Terrace’ says that ‘We led the Changming to irrigate streets and li-dis- tricts,’ it refers specifically to this canal” (故魏武登臺賦曰引長明灌街里，謂此渠也). Li Daoyuan 酈道元 (d. 527), Shuijing , ed. Qiaoyi 陳橋驛 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chuban she, 1990), 10.212. But no extant “Fu on Ascending the Terrace” that is attributed to Cao Cao can be found.