ONE Textual Variation in Poetic Manuscripts from

“Now, medieval writing does not produce variants; it is variance.” —Bernard Cerquiglini

Chronological, technical, and cultural differences make it impossible for us to truly experience a Tang poem as its original audience would have. There are, however, ways we can approach texts that allow us to reconstruct cer- tain aspects of those earlier readers’ experiences. With its numerous manuscript versions surviving in the Dunhuang caves from during or just after the Tang, Wei Zhuang’s “Qinfu yin” provides a unique opportunity to engage a Tang poem in something like its original states of existence, with all the disorder and irregularity they entail.1 When we consider these manuscripts not merely as flawed embodiments of an imagined original, but as examples of the kinds of texts Tang copyists and readers would ac- tually create and encounter, we gain important insights into the literary world in which Tang poetry was first composed and circulated. ————— epigraph: Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, 77–78. 1. In addition to the “Qinfu yin” manuscripts, I will briefly discuss a small set of shorter poems by the High Tang poet Gao Shi. 28 Chapter One

The story of the finds at the oasis city of Dunhuang, fascinating in its own right, has been told in many places and need not be repeated in great detail here.2 Briefly, somewhere near the turn of the twentieth century and no later than 1900, either a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu 王圓 籙 (1849–1931) or his assistant noticed a crack in the wall of one of the temple caves in the Mogao 莫高 complex at Dunhuang.3 Behind the wall he discovered a massive cache of stacked manuscripts. The bulk of these eventually found their way into the hands of the British archaeologist Mark (1862–1943) and the French scholar (1878– 1945) in 1907 and 1908 respectively, and later to the collections of the British Museum and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.4 Examination of the manuscripts eventually revealed a date range of 406 to 995 CE,5 along with evidence that the caves were sealed in the year 1035 or 1036.6 The total number of , including numerous fragments, is now thought to be near 50,000. Whereas most of the manu- scripts consist of copies of known Buddhist scriptures, there are also sig- nificant numbers of works such as popular narratives and vernacular ————— 2. The fullest discussion of the discovery and early history of the Dunhuang finds in English is Su Ying-hui’s “On the Tunhuang Studies,” 64–88. For a general introduction to the Dunhuang manuscripts see Ji Xianlin, Dunhuangxue da cidian. For a description of the physical and formal characteristics of the manuscripts, see Fujieda, “Dunhuang Manu- scripts.” Although Fujieda discusses in some detail the characteristics of the paper, hand- writing, and writing instruments of the manuscripts, his focus is primarily on Buddhist texts. However, his observation that the “informal” scrolls (i.e., other than the canonical Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian texts) from the ninth and tenth centuries were often written with a wooden pen introduced by the Tibetans is worth noting. Such a writing implement appears to have been used for sections of some of the “Qinfu yin” and Gao Shi manuscripts that I will discuss below. For a general study of the Dunhuang documents that were written in Chinese, see Ikeda, Tonkô kanbun bunken 敦煌漢文 文獻. 3. This possibility is noted in Wilkinson, Chinese History, 826. 4. Other groups of manuscripts were acquired by assistants of Ôtani Kôzui, Sergei Oldenburg, and Petr Kuz’mich Kozlov and taken to Japan and Russia. A number were also eventually obtained by the Beijing Capital Library and various collectors. See Wilkin- son, Chinese History, 828. 5. See Twitchett, “Chinese Social History,” 35. 6. This was the time of the Tangut or Xixia invasion of the area. Victor Mair notes that there are no documents in the Xixia language among the manuscripts despite their subsequent occupation of the area. See Mair, T’ang Transformation Texts, 5.