Li Yu Collection: Basic Collection of Chinese Family Classics · Selections by Famous Authors Volume

Author: Wang Xiaofeng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Li Yu (937–978), originally named Congjia, styled Zhongguang, and styled Zhongyin, was the sixth son of the second ruler of Southern Tang. He was from Xuzhou. In the late years of the establishment of the Song Dynasty (961), he ascended the throne in Jinling, ruling for fifteen years and was known as Li Houzhu. When he ascended the throne, Southern Tang had already recognized the legitimacy of the Song Dynasty and was living in temporary peace in the southern part of Jiangnan. In the seventh year of Kaibao (974), Emperor Taizu of Song repeatedly sent messengers to order him to come north, but he refused to go. In October of the same year, the Song army marched south to attack Jinling. The next November, the city fell, and the ruler surrendered in person, wearing only a loincloth, and was captured to Bianjing. He was enfeoffed as Weiming Hou. After Emperor Taizong ascended the throne, he was further enfeoffed as the Marquis of Longxi. On the Qixi Festival (the seventh day of the seventh month) in the third year of Taiping Xingguo (978), which was his forty-second birthday, Emperor Taizong resented his line "The former kingdom cannot bear to look back under the moonlight" and ordered someone to poison him with qianji medicine at a banquet. He was posthumously enfeoffed as the King of Wu and buried on Mount Mangshan in Luoyang.
In the early period, the style of Li Yu's poetry was elegant and sentimental, still influenced by the "Huajian" school. After the fall of his kingdom, during his life of soft imprisonment where "he only wiped his face with tears day and night," he composed a series of heart-wrenching and blood-stained masterpieces, making the ruler of a fallen kingdom a "Southern King" on the poetic stage (as described by Shen Xiong in "Modern and Ancient Ci Poetry"). This is precisely "When the state is unfortunate, the poet is fortunate; only through vicissitudes of life does one's words become profound." These later poems are desolate and heroic, with profound and far-reaching imagery, laying the foundation for the "heroic" style advocated by Su Shi and Xin Qiji in the history of poetry. As Wang Guowei said in "On Ci Poetry": "It was only after Li Houzhu that the scope of ci poetry broadened and its sentiments deepened." As for the clarity of his language and the harmony of his rhymes, they were unparalleled. Li Yu originally had a collected works, but it has been lost. Only forty-four poems remain, some of which may have been written by others, leaving only thirty-eight confirmed as his. Among them, several dozen are more famous and have already been entered by Xiao Fu and others. I have done proofreading and supplemented them, arranging them generally in chronological order of composition. Li Yu had a thirty-volume collected works, but most of it has been lost. During the Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, Dong Gao and others compiled the "Complete Tang and Song Prose" (Quan Tang Wen), which included seven essays by Li Yu. This book has also been annotated accordingly. At the end of this book, there are several appendices, mainly biographies of Li Yu from historical books, comments on his poems by predecessors, and the famous ci poems of his father, Li Jing, as well as the author's own "Chronicle of Li Yu," "On Li Yu's Ci Poetry," and "On Li Yu's Poetry," to help readers better understand Li Yu the person and his works. "Famous quotes" are highlighted in the main text for easy reference.