Five Generations of Poetry Talks

Author: Wang Shizhen
Editor: Jiang Yun
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2001-10-01
Features: Excerpt: During the reign of Emperor Zhuangzong of Tang, the imperial guard Wang Qing petitioned for recognition of his merits and rewards, saying: "When accompanying the imperial entourage across the river, I was assigned to the rear guard; upon entering Bian, I was again assigned to the vanguard. I request promotion and reassignment." Emperor Zhuangzong nodded in approval. Later, he again spoke of it, but Emperor Zhuangzong did not accept it. Li Siyuan also spoke of his merits, but Emperor Zhuangzong said: "I know Qing has some merit, but every time I see Qing, I feel angry. How can I have the intention to reward him further?" He then quoted a poem by Emperor Taizong of Tang: "When the heart is willing, it is the time for fortune to flow." As the one who holds the power of rewards and punishments over the people under heaven, yet speaks as he does, then promotion and demotion are indeed fated.
Postscript: After the proofreading, it is recorded that the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period was a severely fragmented era in Chinese history. Politics was chaotic, people's livelihoods declined, and culture was also in a state of decline due to severe devastation. Ouyang Xiu said in the New History of the Five Dynasties: "The literature of the Five Dynasties was indeed crude, and the role of historians was abandoned due to chaos and turmoil. Many biographies and novels were lost, so their accounts are incomplete from beginning to end and mixed with errors." Thus, he believed it was unnecessary to establish the Biographies of Literary Talents and Biographies of Scholars in the style of the New Book of Tang.
Scholars from the Song and Ming dynasties, when discussing writers and works from the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, usually held a dismissive and indifferent attitude. It was not until the Qing dynasty that the of textual research, collation, and supplementing historical records became popular, and the situation began to change. The literary achievements of that period were recognized as worthy of attention, and relevant materials were collected.
The founder and editor of the Five Dynasties Poetic Discourses was Wang Shizhen, a famous poet and scholar of the early Qing dynasty. There are two published editions of the work: one is a ten-volume edition revised and supplemented by Zheng Fangkun based on Wang's collated manuscript, and the other is a twelve-volume edition signed "Collected by Master Yuanyang" and edited by Huang Shu-lin with arrangements by Song Bi. Both editions were published around the same time, approximately in the 15th year of the Qianlong reign (1750). Zheng's edition has more than double the entries added and revised compared to Wang's original collation, which was barely sufficient to form a book. It can indeed be said to have "greatly improved." As for the twelve-volume edition, the General Catalogue of the Siku Quanshu describes Song Bi's additions as "seeking breadth," which seems to be speculative and lacks basis. The original collated manuscript had 642 entries, but the surviving printed edition has only 632. Huang claimed to have "eliminated duplicates," while Song simply said he "followed the original text and made minor arrangements," indicating that they did not add any entries but made minor deletions and arrangements.
The richness of the materials is a recognized advantage of Zheng's Five Dynasties Poetic Discourses. However, Zheng compiled the book hastily under the conditions of traveling and working, even though he cited sources. The references included monographs, compiled works, and different names for the same book, with no distinction between existing and lost original texts. The chronological order and sequence of the materials, as well as errors and contradictions, were not carefully checked. In some cases, a single book or section was divided into separate entries. Wang's collation was already like this, but when later compilers revised and labeled them as "supplementary," they showed a certain arrogance in listing titles and entries to compete with predecessors. Some important books in the Poetic Discourses that Zheng could not access due to limitations, such as Wei Qingzhi's Poetic Gems of Poets, Xin Wenfang's Biographies of Tang Poets, and Hu Yinglin's Grove of Poetry, were not cited at all.
Compiling and collating to form a book, deleting and revising the original text for personal convenience—this was common among ancient scholars, and Wang and Zheng were no exception. Even unintentionally, this could lead to certain errors. Overall, this is a reference book that can be consulted for research but should not be used as a direct basis for academic research.
For this proofreading and arrangement, we adopted Zheng Fangkun's revised and supplemented ten-volume edition, using the Yue Ya Tang Series as the base text and comparing it with the original Qianlong edition of the Qi Ju Xuan. The entries originally collated by Wang were also checked against the twelve-volume edition printed by the Yang Su Tang. If there were still doubts, the original cited texts were cross-checked. To avoid excessive detail, we generally did not add annotations. For typographical errors and minor omissions, we corrected them directly. For general variations in wording that were still understandable, we left them unchanged, both to preserve the original appearance of the book and because the printed versions of works in this category were diverse, and we dared not be certain that our corrections were the ones cited by the collators.
For entries with clear errors that involved significant issues and were not suitable for unauthorized changes, we added brief notes below the entries based on our limited understanding to draw attention.
As per the convention of avoiding the names of emperors in old printed editions, we made appropriate corrections for cases where avoiding the names led to loss of meaning or historical accuracy. For example, the character "Xuan" in "Xuanjiu," "Xuanyu," "Emperor Xuanzong of Tang," "Yuan Xuanji," and "Chaochao Xuanzhi" was originally avoided as "Yuan," while the character "Hong" in "Li Hongji," "Qian Hongpin," and "Hongzhi" was avoided as "Hong," and the character "Li" in "Dali" and "Qingli" was avoided as "Li." Similarly, the character "Qiu" in "Yongqiu," "Yingqiu," and "Song Qiqiu" was avoided as "Qiu" to respect the Qing dynasty's prohibition on using the name of Confucius.
For the convenience of readers, the original prefaces, postfaces, and introductory remarks were retained, and the Bibliography of Poetic Discourses of the Five Dynasties from the original Qi Ju Xuan edition was included. Additionally, the prefaces and summaries of the two books from the Siku Catalogue, the biography of Zheng Fangkun in the Biographies of Literary Talents of Dong Yue, and the postscript to Wang's twelve-volume edition were included as appendices at the end of the book. The appendices also include an introduction by Wang Rujin to his collation of the eight-volume Five Dynasties Poetic Discourses, which I was previously unaware of. This introduction reveals that the edition was published in the fifth year of the Jiaqing reign (1800) and was based on another collated manuscript from the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods. The publisher seemed unaware that a version collated and printed by Huang Shu-lin already existed. Compared to the two versions, the entries were largely the same, but the arrangements differed. The content was indeed "full of errors," and some were even caused by the collator. For example, the seven-character poem "Jiangnan and Jiangbei, Old Homeland" was cited as a poem by Li Houzhu in the History of Southern Tang by Ma Ling and as a poem by Wu Ranghuang in the Jiangbiao Zhi, but the original collation included both, while Huang's edition noted, "It should be a poem by Li Houzhu," which was correct. This edition, however, deleted the entry from the History of Southern Tang and only kept the entry from the Jiangbiao Zhi under Wu Ranghuang, adding a note: "The History of Southern Tang cites it as a poem by Li Houzhu," which can be seen as inappropriate editing and misguided.
Despite this, including this introduction allows us to know that there was another version of the Five Dynasties Poetic Discourses besides the two by Huang and Zheng.
For any improper handling or proofreading errors in this book, we kindly ask the readers to point them out.
Proofreader: November 1984