Stephen Owen

Early Chinese literature, beginnings through Western Han

The Chinese language and writing system The earliest evidence for the Chinese language, and for the Chinese script as its writing system, is found in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions from the site of the Late Shang (ca 1250–ca 1046 bc ) royal capital near modern Anyang, located in the northernmost part of modern Henan Province. From there to the present day, a continuous line of development can be drawn for both language and script that has served the expression of Chinese literature over the last three millennia. The Chinese script is one of only a handful of instances in human history where writing was invented independently, and it is the only originally invented writing system still in use today. Over time, it was adopted to write not just Chinese but also other East and Southeast Asian languages such as Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese, thereby extending the reach of the Chinese literary tradition significantly beyond the boundaries of its spoken language. The Late Shang oracle inscriptions ( jiaguwen ) scratched into bovine shoulder bones and turtle plastrons were records of communications with the royal ancestral spirits. Since their initial discovery in 1899, more than 150,000 fragments of such inscriptions have been found. They range in length from just a few to several dozen characters and preserve accounts of royal divinations on a wide range of topics – the well-being of the king, military success, the timeliness of sacrifices, the weather, and so on – that affected both the person of the ruler and the prosperity of his state.

Literature of the early Ming to mid-Ming (1375–1572)

Overview In the available histories of Chinese literature today, early and mid-Ming literature has been largely ignored. This problem is partly due to our obsession with the late Ming (i.e. 1550–1644), which has led us to ignore some equally important, if not more important, literary phenomena occurring before 1550. In fact, many of the important trends that have been associated with the late Ming actually find their origins much earlier. For example, it was during the early Ming – especially the Yongle reign (1403–1424) – that literature began to flourish in the court, when scholar–officials considered themselves to be somewhat like European courtiers. For the sake of convenience, the literature of the early and middle Ming can be divided roughly into three periods: 1375 to 1450, 1450 to 1520, and 1520 to 1572. The beginning of the first period was far from being a cultural revival. Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor, was suspicious to the point of paranoia, and was completely unpredictable in his responses to poetry. His persecution of authors whom he believed to have secretly criticized him was often brutal. Once a poor peasant and a local leader during the Red Turban revolt, the emperor assumed that the cultural elite would despise him; thus, reading between the lines for evidence of disloyalty, he brought death or banishment upon countless literary men. Given his persecution of writers and artists, it is ironic that among the past emperors of imperial China, Zhu Yuanzhang is the one whose portraits have been best preserved. At present, twelve portraits of Zhu are kept in the Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, and one is in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The cultural Tang (650–1020)

Overview The cultural Tang does not correspond exactly with the political dynasty, founded in 618 and lasting until 907, by which time it had ceased to be a viable polity for a quarter of a century. We begin our cultural Tang with Empress Wu’s rise to power in the 650s and carry on into the first decades of the eleventh century, over half a century after the Song dynasty was established. This period is bounded on one side by the reign of Emperor Taizong (r. 627–649), the final phase of northern court culture and the full assimilation of the sophisticated legacy of the south. On the other side our period ends with the rise of the great political and cultural figures of the eleventh century, such as Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) and, most of all, Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), writers who were to give Song literati culture its characteristic stamp. Three hundred and seventy years is too long a span to constitute a meaningful literary-historical period, but comparison of literary culture at the beginning and end of this long era can bring out some of the fundamental changes that occurred. In the 650s, literature was centered almost entirely in the imperial court; by the end of the era literature had become the possession of an educated elite, who might serve in government, but whose cultural life was primarily outside the court. Both before and during the Tang there were writers who used literature in a very personal way; it is not surprising that these were often the writers who continued to be read in later ages. At the same time, however, it is important to remember that literature was primarily a social practice, shared by an increasingly widening community. The Tang inherited a system of classical prose genres and poetic subgenres and extended it. Most of those prose genres and poetic subgenres were tied to specific occasions in life.