 Hello, I'm Sophie Vulp, Chair of the Center for Chinese Studies and I'm delighted to welcome all of you to our annual limb lecture. Our speaker today is Anna Shields, Professor of Chinese Literature at Princeton University where she also chairs the Department of East Asian Studies. Professor Shields specializes in classical Chinese literature of the Tang, five dynasties and northern Song eras. Her interests include literary history and the emergence of new literary genres and styles, the sociology of literature, and the role of emotion in classical literature. Her first book, Crafting a Collection, the Cultural Context and Poetic Practice of the Collection from Among the Flowers, Hua Jin Ji, examined the emergence of the Song lyric in a pathbreaking anthology. Her recent book, One Who Knows Me, Friendship and Literary Culture in Mid-Tang China explores the literary performance of friendship in 9th century China through a wide range of genres, including letters, prefaces, exchange poetry, and funerary texts. Professor Shields served as President of the Tang Society Society from 2011 to 2018. She's a former editor of the East Asian section of the Journal of the American Oriental Society and is also an editorial board member of the Library of Chinese Humanities, Chinese English translation series. She is currently working on a new book that traces the shaping of the Tang dynasty literary legacy during the five dynasties and northern Song. Our discussant today is Robert Ashmore, Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Welcome, Anna and Robert. Thank you so much, Sophie. So let me first begin by thanking everyone for being here. Thanks to the Lim family for their generous inauguration of this lecture series. I'm very happy to be one of the invited speakers. Thanks to my colleague and longtime friend Sophie Volk for the invitation and to Robert Ashmore Chair for serving as discussant and a special warm welcome to all of the students in the room. I'm very excited to see so much interest in classical literature, and I hope we'll be able to continue our conversation after my talk. So my talk today is a is a kind of broad overview of my current book project, which is called shaping the Tang literary legacy transformations of Tang dynasty literature in the five dynasties and northern song. So I'm investigating the transformations and the transmission of knowledge of Tang dynasty literature over the two centuries after the dynasties collapse in 907 roughly to the end of the northern song and spilling over into the early northern southern song. So to some extent this is a project of reception history of jiexu shi, a field of scholarship that has become increasingly important in East Asian studies, as we ask new questions of received versions of all kinds of knowledge, including literary canons. As I'm going to show today, the transmission and transformation of Tang literature in this watershed moment of the 10th through the 12th centuries is a fascinating story to explore because it sheds light in two directions. So on the one hand, we see more clearly both the randomness and the patterns of preservation that give us something that survives as Tang literature. But on the other, if we critically examined the new works that these later scholars created, we begin to see them as active transformers of the literary tradition, not merely passive receivers and highly activist figures who are shaping the textual record to answer their own urgent questions. So I'm going to begin with some preliminaries. Walk you through the relevant historical context, say a bit about the genres that I am investigating in the book. And then we're going to look at three case studies for the Tang writers, Hanyu, Li Bai and Wen Ting Yun in three different texts from the northern southern song. And I'll conclude with some brief remarks on the impact of the transmission of Tang literature on evolving definitions of literary writing itself, Wen Zhang. Okay, so the riches of Tang literature that we have today are a result of the accidents of history and significantly of the labors of 10th and 11th century scholars. In a symbiotic mutually constitutive relationship, unlike others in Chinese history, Song Literati looked to the Tang for political guidance, cultural inspiration and literary education, and their efforts to preserve and reconstruct the Tang past resulted in countless new works. And nowhere were their efforts more important than in the shaping of the record of Bellatristic writing, Wen Zhang. Confronted with the scattered perfusion of tens of thousands of texts that survived the Tang collapse, five dynasties and Song scholars sought to shore up knowledge of Tang culture in a period of rapid social, economic and material culture change that constantly kept them aware of the possibility of loss. Now the new technology of printing expanded the impact of their efforts exponentially. Both state sponsored and commercial printing fed Northern Song Literati interest in collecting and it proliferated texts across the empire. Hundreds of new works about the Tang survived the church invasion in 1127 and went on to circulate in successive late imperial dynasties. Now the documented breadth and variety of these new productions of Tang literature are staggering from massive collections like the early Northern Song anthology, the glorious blossoms from the literary garden that contain more than 10,000 texts to smaller scale works such as collections of rubbings of Tang skilly inscriptions. Five dynasties and Song readers of Tang literature became interpreters, collectors of texts in all of their material manifestations, whether as fragile manuscripts on paper, fading stone and wood inscriptions, or as newly printed books. Their interest in the Tang extended beyond texts, of course, to the lives of Tang people, particularly the most celebrated Tang officials and writers, about whom they compiled stories and wrote biographies. And they came to idolize a kind of small number of authors over the course of the Northern Song, particularly Dufu, Li Bai, Hanyu and Liu Zongyan. Now, of course, the material and intellectual task of reorganizing knowledge in the wake of dynastic change had been a venerated state practice since at least the Han dynasty before, and it served as a consistent, legitimizing practice of successive Chinese regimes. But thanks also to Song literati interest in depicting their own labor, we have a remarkably detailed view of their activity on this score, in prefaces and colophons, letters and bg notebook entries. Their reflections reveal the rising prestige and the utility of scholarly and connoisseurial work on Tang literature in the Song cultural landscape. Song scholars admired Tang literature profoundly, but they were not slavish or uncritical followers. Rather, they boasted about their extensive knowledge and their acquisition of texts, and they labored to supplement and correct and reorganize their discoveries. And finally, from the perspective of material culture, decades of increasingly widespread practices of working with texts, handling papers and documents among Song literati, laid the groundwork for renegotiating their relationship to the cultural past, something to be handled. And it gave them a profound sense of ownership of the Tang. Their versions of Tang literary writing capture multiple reconceptualizations of the tradition. Where some works, such as the biographies in the new Tang history, became authoritative and orthodox accounts, other compilations claimed more modest ambitions, merely seeking to capture Tang literary excellence in various forms. But they are bound together by an intense desire to cement Tang literary greatness for contemporary and future readers. And their success can be measured by centuries of ongoing influence. All right, since I know that many of you are not specialists in Middle Period history, I want to orient you very quickly in time and space. So we have maps here of the Tang, Five Dynasties in Tang Kingdoms period, and the Northern Song. Just a couple of things to notice here. I have the capitals of some of the major kingdoms of the 10th century circled. A couple of things to notice here just to think about. First of all, imagine the chaos and the magnitude of the textual diaspora in Chang'an after the Huang Chao Rebellion, and then after the collapse of the dynasty, texts being scattered along with people across the former Tang Empire. And then at Song Reunification in the late decades of the 10th century, these texts are slowly recollected from the major libraries in the southern states and in the capital of Kaifeng. So that's an image we need to think about, chaos and magnitude of the textual diaspora. But on the other hand, after the founding of the Northern Song, we have a 150-year period roughly of stability minus the occasion of a significant library fire in 1015. But the stability of the Northern Song alongside the growth of state-sponsored and commercial printing meant that the Tang literary legacy had the greatest chance for survival than I think we have ever seen before in any dynastic transition. All right, let me give you a quick timeline here so you'll know when we are and a snapshot of some of the works that I'm not going to talk about all of these, but these are some of the things that I look at in the book manuscript. So the work of the five dynasties in Northern Song on the Tang literary legacy precedes in roughly three periods. One is the late 10th century, the re-accumulation of texts, the stabilizing and the creation of the great Northern Song compendia like Wanyang Yinghua, Taiping Guangji, for example, Tsifu Yuan Gui, Taiping Yulan. And then, and this is a moment of kind of intense cultural eclecticism in the early Northern Song court. The next important period is really a period from about the 1020s, 1030s to about the 1050s, 1060s, which is a period when we see the maturation of an important generation of Song literati who had been trained in the civil service examination and had very activist and informed opinions about how to shape, oops, how to shape governance and literary culture. The attention to the Tang also becomes acute with the accession to the throne of Song emperor Renzong, who was a boy at his accession and was controlled by the Dowager Empress until 1033. And so scholars needing to educate Renzong in Tang cultural history and the history, the political history of the Tang and Tang literature really began to scrutinize the records of the Tang much more critically and that was the call begins to revise the old Tang history. We see also the expansion from the 1030s on of efforts to compile individual editions of Tang literary works. And this effort really peaks in the 1050s, 1060s, 1070s. We get to roughly the end of the 11th century and this is the period of obviously the vicious factional politics that arise in the Northern Song and this turn towards factional politics was also accompanied by a significant scholarly and intellectual turn to the reevaluation of the classics as officials sought defenses for their positions in competing definitions of the shared tradition. And so what happens here is that by the late Northern Song, the late Northern Song is of course also the moment of brilliance of Northern Song writing and the period of Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi, Wang An Shi, Sun Ma Guang to just name it, Wang Di Jian. But by the late Northern Song, the center of literary scrutiny had shifted away from the Tang and towards presentist debates and classical reexaminations. And of course the most decisive rupture here is the Jurchen invasion 1127 and the subsequent Song move south. This cataclysmic humiliation with its dislocations and cultural losses forced a new reckoning and with respect to the textual archive forced new efforts to preserve and stabilize the Song past and to reach back even before the Tang to think about earlier medieval culture as well. So the fall of the Northern Song marks what I see as the epical construction of the Tang literary tradition that had begun in 10th century collecting and printing and the Southern Song really marks new approaches to the Tang. All right, so the, let's see where am I, the book project, just a brief comment about this. Most reception history scholarship on Tang literature has to date focused on single author and edition studies. Important work that has established some consistent patterns of collection, collating and printing for different Tang writers. So my work takes a slightly different tack on the problem focusing on larger scale organizations of knowledge about Tang literature that were printed and came to enjoy wide circulation. Anthologies of Tang poetry and prose depictions of literature found in the biographies of the old Tang history and new Tang history and anecdote collections that are composed during the Song from Tang sources. Now the impact of these different forms of Tang literary knowledge stemmed from their varying relationships to state power and perceived authority which in turn affected their ability to circulate. These works also share some new common goals in reading Tang literature. We find a new interest in identifying normative styles and didactic literary models. We see a desire to create consistent and stable Tang authors and an increasingly urgent exploration of the interaction between the personal and the political with special attention to the impact of writing on the state. So some readings of the Tang tradition become both more historicist and narrower over time and biography and chronology loom larger in part thanks to the outsized influence of the new Tang history. So in these new compilations of Tang literary knowledge we see that sense of ownership being reflected in innovative and highly interventionist strategies of reframing. Even more importantly when we read across the works over time what we see is feedback loops beginning to emerge that are amplified in successive generations where new anthologies and biographies for example once put into circulation go on to influence other works downstream and we'll see this in the case studies. So I want to give you an orientation into one Song reader's views of Tang writers and text. So this is a very well-known passage from a Postvis by Northern Song scholar Ouyang Xiu which is appended to a collection of the mid-Tang writer Han Yu's works. We find a complex convergence here of the anxiety of the Song scholar about the fragility of the past the reformer's ideological critique of contemporary writing which he is going to fix by using Han Yu and the collector's pleasure in ancient artifacts. So I won't read all of this. This is the opening of the colophon where he talks about the moment of discovery as a child where he discovers the old edition of Han Yu's works. But he's still young and so he sees it's profound and brilliant but he's not yet ready to understand to plummet's depths. The center section of the colophon which I haven't put here is basically an intellectual autobiography. He talks about deepening his understanding of Han Yu and sharing it and teaching it to other people as part of this transformative moment of guan of the writing of antiquity in the mid-11th century. So this is both an intellectual Han Yu's, excuse me, Ouyang Xiu is presenting himself as both the intellectual and material mediator of Han Yu's work. So there's kind of a double argument here. On the one hand, because Han Yu's writing truly conveys the way, Ouyang Xies, that it will endure even if it lapses into obscurity for a brief moment. But on the other hand, Ouyang Xiu presents his textual and editorial interventions, his collection, which arose from his commitment to Han Yu and his texts, as a necessary act of cultural redemption and renewal, not just a kind of bookish pastime. And so this is the conclusion of the colophon, where he talks about going around and collecting, if anyone has a good edition, he goes and copies in order to correct his own copy. And his copy of this edition is now exploding. You can't even hold all of these editions that he's making to it. And he says, my house now has 10,000 yuan of books, but only the collection of Han Chang Li is an old thing, Jiu Wu. Alas, the writing and way of Han Yu will be revered by myriad generations, and thus everyone in the world will transmit them. But I especially cherish this copy because it is an old thing. Along with the collector's pride here, we see the continuing value of the manuscript copy as a source of knowledge, as Ron Egan has noted, the real scholar or true connoisseur of books prided himself on copying them after editing and collating them. The act of copying was an important, not just to demonstrate one's commitment to books, but also to the process of learning and mastering their contents. And I think Ouyang Xiu's colophon captures the reverence that many Song readers felt for Tang literary manuscripts as objects, but it also underscores their belief in the necessity of their work on the raw material of Tang texts and their pleasure in fashioning new forms. So we'll continue with Han Yu here as a case study. So the basic facts, obviously, Han Yu is very, very well known in the Chinese tradition. He's a very important, vigorous, innovative, iconoclastic mid-Tang writer of prose and also poetry and known for the revival of the Confucian way in the early eighths, excuse me, early ninth century. And during his lifetime, he assembled a circle of followers with whom he exchanged texts, and after his death, they continued to promote and advocate Han Yu's reputation and his impact on the world of Wenjiang. Now, we see in the late five dynasties in early Northern Song the emergence of more followers of Han Yu who begin to collect his work and create new editions of his work. And the beginning of a kind of cult of Han Yu is already recognizable by the late 10th century and certainly, certainly as we creep into the early 11th century. Now, Han Yu appears as a towering figure in the early Northern Song anthology Wen Sui, literature's finest, which only later comes to be known as the Tang Wen Sui. The anthology was compiled in 1011 by a private individual, a scholar official named Yao Xuan. Although explicitly modeled on the Wen Xuan, the Liang Dynasty anthology, the Wen Sui is almost three times its size, 2,000 individual texts by 362 writers, organized in 19 genre categories and divided into 100 gents. This is significant. Now, in his selections, Yao Xuan famously excluded both regulated poetry and parallel prose, which is to say, two of the most important and common forms of Tang literature from the anthology. The preface is dated to 1011. It was presented to the throne in 1020 after his death, and then it was printed in 1039. And we have a considerable amount of evidence from the Northern and Southern Song of its wide circulation and its impact. And it goes through multiple editions in the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties and circulates outside of China. Now, we see the veneration of Hanyu and other mid-Tang writers in the preface to the anthology. And this is just one portion. It's a very long and interesting preface. He says, director of personnel Hanyu's greatness soared above the crowd. Only he revered deepest antiquity, taking the two emperors and three kings as his foundation and the six classics and four teachings as his venerated teacher. In this height, he surpassed all others and was first to chant the literature of antiquity, the guan. He checked the restless flow of confusion and opened up the correct way, the Zhengdao, through his calm honesty. So what we see here, actually, is Yaxuan making both a literary historical and an ideological argument about Hanyu. So he centers the peak of Tang literature in the mid-Tang, and he includes other mid-Tang writers, and grounds it in this, what he claims, is the rediscovery of the Confucian way in the mid-Tang texts. Now, aside from the praise and the preface, we see the claims for Hanyu's importance then being substantiated in this new genre category of guan, which contains 189 pieces of prose. There are eight dzhen of guan, and they open with these texts. They open with five Hanyu prose compositions on origins, the Yuan Dao. Obviously, the Yuan Dao, Yuan Xin, et cetera. Now, the Yuan Dao had long been regarded as the major statement of Hanyu's social and political thought, and these essays as a group were written in an entirely new essay style. But though Hanyu at various moments discussed something called guan with his disciples and friends, and he sketched out in various places how it might be practiced, neither he nor the executor of his collection, Li Han, ever specifically identified any of these pieces under a rubric called guan. So this is one of the most influential achievements of the Yuan Sui, selecting certain Tang texts based on Hanyu's model, defining them as guan, and placing Han at the head of the lineage, which sort of trademarks Hanyu as the inventor of guan. In a lasting way. But the final strategies that I think make the Yuan Sui vision of Tang literature so coherent are the subtler implicit cues for reading that actually pervade the text, which not only give us hierarchies of literary value, but draw the outlines of a retrospectively imagined Tang literati community, and this is especially true in its treatment of Hanyu. So, for example, Yao Shun, he organizes the anthology by genre and then beneath that level of organization by topoi, by lei, by topic matter. But this allows him actually to ignore chronology, so he feels free to repeat authors anywhere he likes, even within a single dren, and he does this with Hanyu and the other mid-Tang writers. But there's another really wonderful feature here, which is the intratextuality, which is a very powerful tool in the collection. So not only does he include dozens of texts by Hanyu, but we also have at least 17 more texts about him. And this is some of the examples, and these are all texts that praise Hanyu and commemorate him in very admiring ways. So Yao Shun uses multiple strategies to defend Hanyu's significance in the anthology, praising him in the preface, including 76 of his own compositions, putting him at the head of a brand new genre, and finally recruiting other voices from the mid-Tang literati community to commemorate him. I focused on the example of Hanyu here in the Wen Sui, because we see so clearly how he is produced as a Tang luminary across the text. But we can see the same strategies of organization and recursion and intratextuality being used to promote other mid-Tang writers, such as Liu Zongyuan and Chen Deyu. As far as we know, there had been nothing like the Wen Sui in the Tang, whether in its exclusive preference for old-style verse and non-parallelistic prose, or in its reverence for an antiquity-centered reading of Tang literary culture. But we know that later, from the print history of Wen Sui, that later readers found this very persuasive. Perhaps surprisingly, the best-represented poet in the Wen Sui is not a mid-Tang writer, but the high-Tang poet Li Bai, whose old-style poetry, Yue Fu and prose texts, are represented across the anthology in great numbers, and it's to him and his biography that we turn next. Now, the Tang poet Li Bai needs very little introduction to this audience, particularly for scholars who have written extensively on him, including on his reception history. Known for his vigorous and bold and innovative poetry and also for his outsized personality, Li Bai gained fame within and well beyond the literary scene at Tang Emperor Shenzong's court before the An Lushan Rebellion and his poems such as The Heart of the Road to Shu Shu Danan and Chang Jin Jiu, Bring in the Wine, circulated throughout the empire in lots of different forms. A few facts about his life. He lived a very peripatetic life as a young man, traveling throughout China, and though he was summoned to serve at Shenzong's court, he lasted there barely two years. His life during the rebellion took a troubling turn in 756 in the initial years of the fighting. Li Bai served as an advisor to Li Lin, who was the Prince of Yong, who was competing with later Tang Emperor Shenzong for control of the throne. When Li Lin, when the Prince of Yong was defeated, Li Bai was imprisoned, later released, and died in obscurity. Now, the sources on how Li Bai's late years unfold are hard to reconcile, which we're going to see. But it's useful to reflect a moment on what versions of Li Bai were circulating up through the mid-11th century as far as we can determine. We can say with some confidence that Li Bai was among the best surviving of Tang poets by the middle of the Northern Song. During the Tang, we have evidence of at least three collections to compile immediately after his death, and then another one in 817, none of which survive. And so we need to assume that during the Tang, people largely had access to Li Bai's poetry through the oral tradition and through smaller collections, the Xiao Ji of his verse. And he's also well represented in several Tang anthologies that survive into the Song. So Li Bai was certainly in his lifetime, his own best publicist, frequently boasting of his own brilliance and fame. And perhaps not surprisingly, this is echoed in the praise of Li Bai by later Tang readers and by the many anecdotes that circulated about him during the Tang. Now, where the eulogistic works promoted Li Bai's dazzling, unparalleled literary skill and style, the anecdotes tended to celebrate his wild behavior, his drinking, and his impoverished end. And Li Bai's poetry, of course, reveals an extraordinary range of topics and styles and forms. There are many, many different Li Bai's out of the corpus itself. Now, Li Bai was very fortunate to have his collected works compiled and edited in the late 10th century by the early Northern Song scholar, originally from southern Tang, Yue Shi, in two works, Li Hanlin Ji and Li Hanlin Biedin. Although no firm copy of Yue Shi's edition of Li Bai's collection survives, we do have a preface and a postfist, and Yue Shi also composed a Li Bai Zhuang, which no longer survives. But it seems very likely that Yue Shi undertook the first serious Song rehabilitation of Li Bai as a historical figure in addition to trying to stabilize his collection, and that may have in turn influenced later revisions. So, we have an extant Tang through early Northern Song sources, multiple and inconsistent versions of Li Bai, including in his biography in the Old Tang history. And this messy record posed a very serious challenge for Song readers attempting to rationalize the corpus and the life in stable forms. So, we see these challenges in the very brief 300-word Jiu Tang Shu biography of Li Bai, which is really just kind of a mash-up of different stories about the poet and quotations from various sources. Now, although the biography repeats He Zhizhang's famous characterization of Li Bai as the Zhe Xianren, and in credits him with having a stalwart spirit that was vast and carefree and a soaring desire to transcend the world, it only mentions his literary work in association with his drinking. In fact, the chief theme of this biography is drunkenness. The word Jiu appears six times and drunk Zui, no fewer than four. And out of 300 words, that's a lot. Now, one famous story about Li Bai being hauled into Emperor Xuanzong's presence to compose poetry hasn't been pulled out of a tavern. And another, which quotes two ninth-century anecdotes, shows Li Bai insulting the eugenic advisor Gao Li Shi by ordering him to take off his boots. But the most serious charge in the biography that scholars are still debating, ad nauseam, is whether Li Bai sought a position with the Prince of Yong. And also that after his release from prison, as it says here, in the end due to his excessive drinking, he died of drunkenness in Xuanzong. Now, where the revision of the... when the revision of the Jiu Tang Shu, including all of its biographies, was undertaken, was commanded by Ren Zong in the mid-11th century, Li Bai was certainly among the writers whose accounts needed reworking. But more importantly for my purposes, the refurbishing that Li Bai gets is entirely consistent with the other improvements made across the board to Tang literary biographies in the Xintang Shu. So Li Bai's exceptionalist reputation did not preclude him from refashioning. On the contrary, the very importance of such a great Tang poet demanded that he be revised. Now, the Jiu Tang Shu was compiled in the 940s, excuse me, in one of the five dynasties successor states to the Tang, the latter Jin dynasty, presented to the throne in 945. It is, of course, compiled from sources, from successive periods of the Tang, and is very messy, inconsistent in places. And as we move into the 11th century, it was increasingly seen as a problem and in need of desperate revision. And this was ordered in 1045. So what became known as the Xintang Shu, the replacement official history, was completed by a team of historians over the next 15 years, presented to the Song court in 1060, and immediately printed. Though Ouyang Xiu is credited as the chief historian and was responsible for the annals and the general integrity of the work, the historian Song Qi, unofficial, widely respected for his literary and editorial skills, was given chief responsibility, and Ouyang Xiu says full responsibility for revising the biographies. And his revisions were systematic and thoroughgoing. Whether within the biographies of Tang officials or in the Wen Yi, the literary biographies, literary arts biographies, which included Li Bai and Du Fu, Song Qi revised the Xintang Shu portraits of literary composition to depict Wen Zhang as the manifestation of individual moral integrity and political loyalty. He consistently reduced the visibility of literary writing. He shortened or cut quotations from primary sources. He deleted titles of texts and notes about the size of the content of people's literary collections, and he rarely mentioned textual sources when including a quotation from another offer, for example. All of these were details that the Xintang Shu biographies included. But more significantly, for conceptions of authorship, the Xintang Shu biographies are more coherent as narratives. Song Qi creates internally consistent explanations for individual actions by omitting inconsistencies and counter-evidence, throws the counter-evidence out and also inserting new judgments to guide the reader. But following the age-old practice of historians before him, Song Qi more often chose to simply delete the negative examples or minimize them greatly and amplify his positive moral models. So in the case of Li Bai's Xintang Shu biography, as in so many others, we see all of these techniques marshaled to improve the poet's reputation, influence, and historical stature. Song Qi doubles the biography in length. He adds information on Li Bai's lineage, a little dubious, adds new anecdotes, and deletes critical depictions of Li Bai's conduct. So although Li Bai is still drunk, he's still hauled in drunk in front of Emperor Shenzong to compose poems, he is depicted as using drunkenness at court in a highly strategic way, this form of very venerated form of reclusion at court, a kind of a protest against the increasingly troubled Tianbao moment. Now, Song Qi also adds a new anecdote about Li Bai encountering the renowned general Guozhi, the hero of the rebellion earlier before the rebellion, where he aided Guozhi, Guozhi recognizes Li Bai's moral integrity and he then is the one who redeems and releases Li Bai from prison after he's imprisoned for treason. So this is a kind of acclamation and a promotion of Li Bai's integrity. But the Shintang Shul biography does not end with Li Bai's ignominious drunken death. Instead, Song Qi concludes by adding praise of Li Bai taken from those eulogies composed by Tong writers in the late 8th and early 9th centuries. So this redemption of Li Bai's character and posthumous reputation is not focused on his poetry or his literary skills, but it's focused on repackaging him as a more admirable Tong figure. And Li Bai's revised biography is by no means as hagiographic as some of the other revisions, particularly in the cases of Hanyu and Dufu. But its new form is entirely consistent with the ideological and literary strategies that Song Qi deploys throughout the new Tong history to create exemplary figures. All right, our last case study. So Li Bai was a messy challenge, in part due to the miscellaneous and contradictory nature of the sources that survived the Tong about him. But the messiness of the Song record for Tong writers is even more challenging in this final case study, the late Tong poet Wen Tingyun. And here's a slide just to remind us where we are. And this is the text we're talking about. So here we need to not start with Wen Tingyun, but actually with the collection itself, the Tang Shi Ji Shi, the records of events concerning Tong literature, a truly unusual early Southern Song compilation. The Tang Shi Ji Shi was, as far as we know, the first compilation of Tong literature to collect historical and anecdotal materials on Tong writers chronologically in the format of dynastic history biographies, and to include the writer's own poems in the manner of anthologies. So the structure of the collection reveals its ambition and scope. In the 81 chapters containing the 1,150 poets, we see the first two emperors, first two Zhen are devoted to Tong emperors, followed by Zhen on emperors and consorts, and then it moves chronologically through Tong history, concluding with a handful of Buddhist monks, women, and recluse poets. So we have no evidence of any previous Song anthology, let alone Tang anthology, or anecdote collection of this breadth or diversity. And the only Tang anthology of this nature that seems to have survived into the Northern Song was the 10th century work Cai Diao Ji, which also includes monks and women, but no emperors. And it was an important source text for Tang Shi Ji Shi. Now, the compiler Ji You Gong left very few historical traces. We know he passed the Jin Shi in 1121, just before the fall of the Northern Song, so his early education is actually undertaken in the Northern Song. And then he served in the Southern Song Imperial Archives for more than 20 years, with the decade away from the capital in the 1140s, where he apparently began compiling the work. And so in 1162 he has a final transfer to Sichuan, to Meishan, which is where he was originally from. And he spent the rest of his life there, dying perhaps in the 1170s. And so it is actually a later person, one Wang Shi, who obtains the manuscript copy from his youngest son and has it printed in 1224. From that first printing, however, it goes on to multiple reprintings and it spawns multiple imitations in later dynasties. So the Tang Shi Ji Preface, which is actually fairly short, begins with what we should recognize now as a typical statement or a lament about loss, the countless numbers of Tang writers whose works have been lost. And then we get an account of Ji O Gong's own labor to compile this work. Living in retirement, I sought throughout 300 years of history, 300 years of literary collections, miscellaneous accounts, biographies, private histories, epitaph sense dealies, even down to couplets or lines that have been transmitted orally. And I selected from them, examined, copied and recorded them. In addition to including their works so that their persons could be examined here, I roughly recorded the outline of their good characters in the hope that by reading the poetry one may know the person. Ji Ji Ji Yuan is the oldest bromide in the book about poetry, right? So I think Ji O Gong reveals here a very characteristic song relentlessness in his efforts to acquire materials on Tang poets and his desire to showcase poets of good character. But nowhere in the preface, which is short, does he explain his selection principles, his personal tastes, or how he organizes the material within individual entries. So all of this has to be inferred by reading the collection. Now, what makes that challenging is that within these 1150 entries we find highly variable quotation and selection strategies and very few linear narratives. The text doesn't really tell us how to read it in the same way that other texts do. So I should emphasize that although political history and biography create a kind of a top level order for the text, any attempt to discern a real system as you move from entry to entry is doomed to failure. Because the text displays a truly provocative hybridity by culling such different forms of knowledge about Tang literature, the entries sometimes reveal tensions among sources. Sometimes biographies and anecdotes serve to contextualize poems, but at other times the poems suggest other ways of reading the poet. In the entry for Wen Ting Yun, the disparate pieces of the poet's reputation stand in productive tension with one another, I think. And they ask us to reflect critically on how the components of political history and anecdote and poetry could be mobilized to create new knowledge. So in the case here of Wen Ting Yun, unlike the cases of Hanyu and Li Bai at the end of the Northern Song, we have to realize that the textual record as Ji You Gong saw it was highly fragmented. We know from Song bibliographical records that the poetry survived in partial and multiple editions, and even Wen Ting Yun's biographies in the two Tang histories don't disclose very much. They're very brief. They contain few facts and are heavy with gossipy stories. So Wen Ting Yun lived approximately from 812 to 866. He was descended from a very prominent early Tang official family, but he never passed the examinations and he gained a reputation for licentious behavior. But he left a beautiful body of poems, many in song forms, including early examples of the zi, the song lyric genre. So asking what did Wen Ting Yun look like to early 12th century readers is itself an impossible question to answer. In fact, in Tang Shi Ji Shi, the attention paid to Wen Ting Yun itself is new. Ji You Gong was apparently the first Song scholar to try to collect and rationalize the available evidence for Wen Ting Yun's life and poetry. So the entry is not long, and the printed edition is about two and a half pages. It makes it about medium length compared to the average of entries. But it's interesting because it reverses some key patterns that we see elsewhere in the collection. It opens with an excerpt from Wen Ting Yun's brief New Tang History Biography, and it closes with three poems, very judiciously selected examples of Wen's poetry. In between, however, it quotes from two poems that provide evidence of Wen's interest in song forms and by extension his decadent playboy inclinations, and it includes anecdotes with explicit condemnation of Wen's character and taste. So in this entry, we see Ji You Gong, I think, wrestling with some of the intractable elements in Wen's reputation and political career, but attempting in the end to redeem the poetry in order to defend his inclusion of Wen Ting Yun in the book. So the opening frame for the entry, which is this brief quotation from the New Tang History Biography, is not especially promising as a start. This biographical sketch establishes the theme of much of what follows. Wen was a poet of noble ancestry who frittered away his demonstrated literary talent in drinking and never rose to high position. Now the entry as a whole, all of its eight passages, basically front loads the negative evidence in the first half. So the two poems that follow this opening are not, this is just the second of them, are not illustrations of Wen Ting Yun's social conduct, so they don't constitute events in a narrative fashion as Shi. They are, in fact, songs, or ge and shu, that exemplify Wen's stylistic tastes and formal skills. So the first poem, we're not here, is an elaborate and ornate stanzet ballad on the experience of listening to music at Tang Xuan Song's court. And the next, this one, Yang Chun Qu, Song of Sunny Spring, is a verse to the Yue Fu Tun. Now these two songs capture the synesthetic, semantically dense and fragmented style that characterizes much of Wen Ting Yun's extant poetry, including his romantic song lyrics. And I would note that the song lyrics are actually alluded to in one of the anecdotes but are not quoted here. The feminine imagery in both poems, their attention to rich surfaces and the evocation here of a lover's parting all give substance to the charge, which is repeated in a subsequent anecdote, that Wen's literary talent was lush and beautiful, which is to say decadent and morally suspect. Now the portrait of Wen as a wasteful but talented scion of a noble clan is underscored by the anecdotes that follow, which is a long interwoven series of stories that are copied from the 10th century anecdote collection, Bei Meng Su Yan. Now the anecdotes serve to illustrate Wen Ting Yun's moral deficiencies in part. He helped people cheat. He was arrogant, dismissive, and sharp-tongued. And that these failings culminated in his insulting the Tang Emperor Xuan Zong who was wandering around Chang'an in disguise as he was want to do. And this insulting of the emperor leads to Wen Ting Yun's condemnation and disgrace in the anecdote. And he never succeeded in passing examinations. Now, I mean, I have to say, in terms of a takedown across the course of Tang Shijie, it hardly gets worse than being taken out by an emperor, being told that you are deficient in moral conduct and even though you are talented, it's not sufficient to make up for that deficiency. So despite their illustration of Wen Ting Yun's bad judgment, there are positive features given in other anecdotes about Wen Ting Yun as a poet, a poet of erudition and wit and facility, someone who quite reasonably mocked the pretension and ignorance of high officials like Ling Hu Tao, who could rapidly compose a full and parallel couplets, beautiful parallel couplets on demand, even for the emperor. So whether they depict him as admired, exploited, or condemned, the stories as a whole very energetically attest to Wen Ting Yun's fame as a poet in his own day, even if one of dubious character. But the three poems that conclude the entry offer yet another perspective on Wen as poet that challenges the portrait created to this point. Rather than extending the oppression of Wen's lush, beautiful style, the final three poems, all regulated verses in the seven-character line are evocative poems of historical reflection. These are Huai Gu Shi. On sites associated with three great heroes of Chinese history. As was common in Huai Gu verse, all three implicate Wen Ting Yun himself as a visitor to the historical sites. The first is a poem on passing by, Five Staves Plain, where the famous three kingdoms general Zhu Ge Liang died after his last battle. The second is on passing by Xin Feng, the rebuilt village of Liu Bang, the first Han emperor, and then finally here, a melancholic poem on the temple for Han diplomat and loyalist Su Wu. So these familiar historical topoi are handled in what I think we would now characterize as a quiet version of late Tang style. Lyrical and imagistic rather than narrative, emotionally understated, ambivalent about the moral lessons of history, and more concerned with the thematics of loss and remnants than with the great hero's patriotism or historical achievements. In these three poems, we see Wen Ting Yun as a poet not merely of erotic, beautiful vignettes, but one capable of serious and important historical reflection. It also seems no coincidence that the closing poem included in this 12th century collection in the entry for Wen Ting Yun, compiled by a man who had personally survived the Jurchen invasion of the Northern Song, concerns the Han official Su Wu. Su Wu, like the Northern Song emperor Huizong, was held captive by the Xiong Nu in the north for 19 years. But unlike Huizong, who died after nine years in gene captivity, Su Wu was able to return. Though as the poem reminds us, his return was fraught with the losses and bitterness over the passage of time. This poem surely resonated deeply with Jiu Gong's Southern Song readers. So the Playboy reputation that so vividly informs the first two-thirds of the entry is questioned and I think partly undermined through these final three poems, which are presented as redemptive, alternative examples of the poet's talent. Despite the emperor's harsh dismissal, the poems provided here forestall a simple moralistic reading or even a definitive conclusion about Wen Ting Yun, which is what makes this entry, like so many others in Tang Shi Ji Shi, a compelling text in its own right. So to conclude, what I've tried to give you today is a sense of the complex and interwoven concerns that Song Literati brought to their reconceptualizations of Tang literary writing and Tang authors in these large-scale compilations of literary knowledge. As I noted at the outset, readers' approaches to the Tang became more intensely biographical, historicist, and political. And as their familiarity with and material possession of the Tang deepened, they engaged the literary record in increasingly interventionist ways, seeking to produce narrower, perhaps more refined definitions of Tang Wen Zhang as models for their own work. It's in this respect that I think we can see these scholars sustaining a mutually constitutive and symbiotic relationship with Tang literature. Tang literature becomes not just good to think with, but essential to think with throughout this transformative moment of Chinese history. So I will leave you with this image of Northern Song poet and calligrapher's Huang Tingjian's calligraphy for his nephew Zhang Datong, which Huang Tingjian wrote after copying out one of Hanyu's essays as an example of Gu Wen for Zhang. We are fortunate to still possess Huang Tingjian's vigorous but poised artistry in the scroll, a quintessential example of a Song artist inspired to new creativity by a Tang predecessor. In a poignant twist of transmission history, though we have Huang Tingjian's calliphon here in the scroll, the other half, his copy of Hanyu's essay, has long been lost. And I'll stop here for today. Thanks very much to Professor Shields for a very simulating talk. Much appreciated. And I think that today I will just talk about two or three trains of thought that are started for me in reading the paper and in hearing you deliver it just now and then open the floor for what I hope will be a stimulating discussion that can involve the whole group. In general, the paper reminds me of something that I often think about, which is that it's maybe an anomalous feature of the discipline of literary history that I think it really works best when we suspend any idea that we know what literature is. That is, if we put a black box around those moments when someone is claiming or being granted cultural cache, prestige, authority, getting ahead, getting behind based on writing. If we just put a black box around all those things and not be in a rush to define it and name it and just kind of see what hang out there and see what's going on. And this seems to be a nice example of that to really show that across this 200 or 300 year period of a very pivotal moment in the formation of what we come to know in modern day literary textbooks as literary history is in fact a very highly contingent process that is not a matter of someone writing something down at one moment but is rather a collaborative stream of back and forth and negotiation and various kinds of interventions and dialogues that you know constantly at every turn we're reminded it could have been otherwise. So this is a very fascinating case study, a complex and wide-ranging case study of this sort of general feature of what I find about my favorite work in literary history is this notion of okay, one of the things we're doing is let's think about what literature means and what it can mean. I'm also reminded I think not to be contentious but to open up discussion I remember the term that you used about the late 11th century when you see a pivot away from discussion of Tang dynasty authors as the core of discussions around literary value in the northern Song you describe that as a turn to more presentist concerns and so not in the spirit of disputatiousness but in the spirit of promoting conversation I would propose that it was always presentist and so what I have in mind is this sort of a tunnel effect that we see when we look at this the relationship between Oh Yang Xiu and Hanyu is one of the most important relationships in the entire history of really medieval literature especially as it comes to be remembered this is where this is the mother and father of the big the eight masters you know so by the mirroring effect I have in mind for example the role that Hanyu is playing not just writing certain kind of text but also in being quite involved in the cementing for example of the duopoly of Li and Du in the poetic history of the dynasty and also by his joining his consciously and explicitly joining of whatever we describe in his poetry practices being with the sort of oppositional cultural stance and with the active cultivation of a social circle and a circle of disciples and so what I think comes to mind here is 1057 because the same Oh Yang Xiu who is identifying and treasuring and advocating and claiming to understand Hanyu is doing the same moves in a wrong way and that's the 1057 Jin Shui examination when we have the arrival of these guys from this backwater who we later come to know a little bit with the surname Su this is this pivotal moment where Hanyu is in charge of the examination and he is really this is a moment where we really can say this is especially in terms of the way this comes to be remembered this is this is pivotal in our understanding of what I mean to this day this is how the research is going to look at what's important in northern song literary history so I also I really appreciated and enjoyed the the textured treatment of this the wonderful set of case studies when we can look at we have this just by by the luck of our of how the the transmission and the series of compilations of these historical biographies to compare the 940s version and then a mid 11th century version when we have the Jiu Tang Shu and Xun Tang Shu and I think that what you've done with your focus on specifically the literary biographies is to show that it's not simply a matter of the sort of fleshing out we see a lot of fleshing out of accounts based on subsequent at you know post mid 10th century anecdotal tradition but rather in the case of literary a reconfiguration in effect of the definition of the genre of the literary biography and hand in hand with that in effect a redefinition or a re-articulation of the category of authorship that is the authorship as the status of the person whose life you have to really understand as the pivot for an engagement with the literary with a literary work so both literature and author are being defined in this process so I think that one thing that would be interesting to add to the picture here is we've talked you discuss in very illuminating fashion the big compilations of the northern song the Tang Wen Cui, the Weng Ying Hua Tai Ping Guang Ji and then later the Tang Shu Ji Shi there's a really big one in there that I think would be interesting to try to fit in and that's the Suo Fu Yuan Gui because the Suo Fu Yuan Gui this is 1013, I looked it up 1013 and it's a very unwieldy text because it's bigger than all of them so it's a very unwieldy text to try to deal with but it has a nice family of paratexts that shed a lot of light on the underlying conception of what it's about and so I think this is another thing we could think about is what an anthology is not an anthology is not an anthology so an anthology is not ipso facto by definition a record of literary history whatever we mean by that an anthology can be all sorts of things including I think the boundary between the anthology and the leishu is a very interesting one to think about that as an anthology is can be a reservoir of material and that's in fact arguably one of the primary functions of the anthology it's a reservoir of material authors can be listed or not listed but in effect it's material for use and I think the Suo Fu Yuan Gui and the history of the court sponsored compilation of Suo Fu Yuan Gui I would include in the paratexts of the Suo Fu Yuan Gui the Xikun Tou Chang Ji the anthology of poetry which is kind of in terms of its origins in the way it's presented this is the kind of poetry that that kind of Wen Ren would produce in their spare time or in their banqueting time and I think that little universe is a very nice counterpoint and of course in a way this is rehashing I think we have to not be afraid of simply rehashing the old version of the literary histories where we say this is basically the bad this is the bad literature of the early 19th century that was good magically in the middle 11th century I think we cannot be afraid of the inanity of that narrative if we actually engage with figuring out again what's going on in that black box because there's really interesting stuff and that's a plausible path not taken that I think would be interesting to include in some way because I think that would really bring out again more forcefully the kind of mystery of this that happened in terms of these moments that you're getting into in this study it could have been otherwise and that's a really interesting thing to think about in history in general so those are just some of my preliminary thoughts and I'll leave it at that just because I know people will have a lot of questions and I'd like to get into general conversation but thanks again and it was a wonderful read and thanks for coming Robert thank you so much I'm very glad this was recorded because I just wanted to listen and so I didn't take notes but I just got to listen I just want to say one last thing thank you so much about Sifu Yongwei and I've actually been very very invested in precisely that inane literally historical narrative of the early Northern Song and going back to and seeing Wen Sui even though I presented something like the kind of traditional view of Wen Sui I've looked at Wen Sui from another perspective in an article that's coming out in a book that comes out next year with this representation of Daoistopoi in the Shenzhen and arguing that in fact if we look harder at Wen Sui it's much more diverse and typical of early Northern Song cultural richness and eclecticism then it goes on to be to be read I think the reception of Wen Sui is actually different from its initial formation and origins but anyway I want to look at both for sure and Shikun Chotanzi the preface as well and in its relationship to Li Shangyi so thank you at any rate but the floor is open so I'd love to hear questions just a quick announcement before we do questions since we're recording we're going to pass around the microphone just so we can make sure that we can accurately record your question so if you have a question just raise your hand and I'll bring the mic over thank you for this interesting talk it's going to be the icebreaker with the first question which might lead away and thank you again for your talk but I couldn't help and be reminded by this trend that we can now see going on within the Song reminiscing about the Tang and draw a comparison to what happens in the Ming with the Song and I just wondered if you can say some words how that might like how you see like a reoccurrence of this trend or how we can place that I would not be foolish as to talk about the Ming as to take up the Ming but I will say that I do think you know I've made a very strong bold and contestable argument about the Song relationship to this Tang is being mutually constitutive and kind of symbiotic in ways that were unlike in the tradition but I also think that their relationship to the Tang because it was so famous and negotiated so publicly across so many corpora does serve as a model in later dynasties for how you renegotiate your relationship with the cultural past so there I think the impact is great I mean I really would not presume to speak of the Ming but I would argue that the practices of imitation poetic imitation, stylistic imitation that happened in the northern Song of Tang predecessors also stand as interesting models and not necessarily ones to imitate in later dynasties that perhaps somewhat simplistic but I'm not going to venture much further than that I do think though that this stands as a very important it's a moment of reception and renegotiation that survives so vividly in the northern Song textual record and people go back to it to think about what that looks like I just want to say that was so much fun and beautifully done I didn't get to read it but I felt like it was a page turner I really appreciate that so turning to the anthologization of poetry itself and you did at one point mention the question of exemplarity which I think is really an undercurrent of a lot of what is going on here is the notion of poetry exemplary in particular ways so I was wondering if you would go a little bit deeper into that aspect of what was happening in the Song and what types of poetic exemplars kind of start emerging at that time that maybe were not what as Robert was saying things could have happened differently and I'm just wondering do you see any manifestations of this particular sequence of gestures and events that gave rise to long-lasting archetypes of poets I actually assumed that somebody in the room would pop a hand up and say what about Dou Fu I kind of name checked him a couple of times but I didn't talk about him one of the reasons I didn't talk about him in this talk is that he's been written about so much and his reception history has been talked about so much but obviously he is the most important example of a reception of a single-tongued poet I mean as I wrote in something that I published on Li Bai so Northern Song readers inherited Li Bai but they made Dou Fu so they created Dou Fu they invested themselves into the shaping of Dou Fu in ways that are pivotal and to a certain extent unique but at the same time as he becomes this very important poetic and kind of moral historical exemplar the things, the operations that Northern Song readers undertake and editors undertake on Dou Fu are very typical and consistent with the other kinds of editorial interventions that they do with other-tongued poets so there's a Dou Fu example but I would flip your question around actually to talk about randomness and utter contingency and mention one of the anthologies I am going to talk about in the book the Tang Bai Jia Xu Xuan which might be subtitled a collection of poems that Song Mingqiu happened to have on his shelf because there the anthology and Yang Shaoshan has written a chapter on his book on Wang Anshi about Tang Bai Jia Xu Xuan because there the anthology both reproduces a lot of Tang and the pre-mediated Tang anthology selections copies the Qian Zhongji into the Tang Bai Jia Xu Xuan and also simply simply seems to include types of poems on topoi that suited their tastes I think Song Mingqiu and Wang Anshi's taste so there I think is a terrific example of an anthology that actually goes on to be people scratch their heads about it even to this day right so it's not it was probably not intended to be an anthology of exemplars but a collection of shared personal taste so I think there are two examples of counter examples but also I think if we take the example of Song Mingqiu Song Mingqiu did 10 at least 10 editions of different Tang writers works and some of those were because he believed in the absolute necessity for example for Meng Jiao of saving their work and transmitting in that same kind of deeply reverential way that we see with Ouyang Xiu's approach to Hanyu but some of them were simply out of personal interest we don't have the prefaces for all of them so there is clearly when we look at commentary on this kind of activity it's a past time as well and so you may be posted to a particular place and you make a discovery of a trove of poems that may stimulate your interest in that particular poet or that moment that will then spawn literary activity so this emplarity is absolutely I think a commitment of a lot of these large literary compilations but not always sometimes randomness matters A lot of it would happen retrospectively in fact Well and that's what drives everybody crazy about Tang Bai Jiaxu Xun because Wang Anshun wrote the preface and what was he intending so there's this kind of centuries of attempts to decode Tang Bai Jiaxu Xun when I really think it ought to be subtitled in this bookshelf So I'll just ask a brief question I was interested I'm always looking at thoroughness in the sense that I'm always trying to find as much stuff as possible so that's kind of how I look at everything and I was wondering if that's also what's the place for that in this story just people who just want to find something and because every little tidbit is interesting and so bring it all together you know sort of where does that fit in in some sense I would you know the last one you mentioned almost had more of that than some of the earlier ones but it's unlikely that that's the natural last step of some developmental process so I Yeah no I can talk about that I mean I think a couple of things I do I do frame Tang Shijie really not so much as a because I do think we see new directions in the compilation of Tang literature and we see the printing of course of Wang Yinghua in 1204, 1201 to 1204 but Tang Shijie strikes me as a very, as a culmination of a lot of trends that we see developing in the Northern Song but also kind of a backward looking collection not concerned with things that go on to be important in Northern Song but his his claim of thoroughness I think is very much grounded in his service in the Imperial Library one of the fascinating things in fact about Tang Shijie is that there's lots of evidence he had access to Wang Yinghua before it was printed because there are reproductions of order and quotations of poets from Wang Yinghua in Tang Shijie so this claim of thoroughness is in fact substantiated in the collection in lots of different ways maybe also typing Guangji that's still an open question but I don't think we see it as much in earlier Northern Song claims. Yaoshuan in the section of a preface that I didn't read actually makes that claim as well and what I think this raises for us is the question of access that Song scholars and readers had to text and so we know because we know about the laws passed in the late 11th century about keeping people from stealing things from the Imperial Library right because things were disappearing so we know in fact that Song scholars had surprisingly liberal access to certainly compared to the Tang to the Imperial Archives given their depending on their position they would make copies and they would take texts so when we get into the 11th century we're actually talking about a new universe of access to things. Now that entirely depends on a particular position and service at the capital and that becomes much more haphazard and contingent when you're talking about being sent out on a series of different official posts and there what you often do is you turn to the locale and see what you can collect there and then you write to friends and ask them to send copies of things and so we see that in letters I have found an old edition or ten new poems by Meng Jiao in this place and I'm copying them out here to send to you. So I think thoroughness becomes of cultural value in claims about compilation and addition not just about the Tang certainly by the late 11th century but now we need to think also let's think about Sima Guang, Fan Ziyu think about the late northern Song historians who would also make similar claims about thoroughness that they have comprehensively gone through every available source for compiling the Tang Ji of the Ziju Tongjian for example I think it really does become an important cultural value I think it comes from sheer physical material handling of texts and it matures over time in the 11th century I don't think we see it quite as much in the early northern Song so my thoughts about that Only because nobody else is asking a question right now I don't know if this is a little bit too far out but we were talking about the renegotiating sort of recreating identities in a sense he said with Li Bai it was received you know his identity was received and yet still somewhat renegotiated it sounds like and repositioned what do you think can you make any comment about how Li Bai has been received and negotiated in Japanese popular culture I mean just because you know Li Bai not because I'm asking you as a Japanese specialist but you know although maybe somebody else would like to comment about that I would say Paula might like to comment about that no and that's not that is actually not an area that I have pursued very much Robert you you know we're throwing that ball around I mean he's absolutely I mean he's iconic you know the terrific thing as I alluded to briefly as I went through is that the Li Bai corpus has many many Li Bai's in it and of course the corpus itself so we have a kind of chicken and egg problem here which a lot of scholars have acknowledged is that you know the kinds of poems that get included in the corpus probably a little too liberally by Yue Shi in his desire for comprehensiveness you know there are probably poems in that corpus that are how to put it generic enough to sound like Li Bai that got pulled into the corpus that weren't necessarily Li Bai compositions so Li Bai is just such a fascinating example because because the personality and the reputation is also played out in the corpus itself and he lends himself to kind of endless reinvention so I've published an article called avatars of Li Bai and so I think Li Bai eventually ends up being something and this is true in the in the painting excuse me in the painting in material culture tradition as well Catholicum has written about this that Li Bai is endlessly reproducible and endlessly re-inhabitable so those are my thoughts but can't say more about Japanese popular culture so there was a moment in the Ouyang Xiu piece about Hanyu that was just so beautiful and so called out for closer reading and I wondered if you had anything more to say about what he says about Lu Chang Li Xian Xiong Wei Jiou Wu Wei Jiou Wu and you know the personhood and the object and then you know he says that he especially loves it because it is a Jiou Wu yeah so you know I just wondered if you wanted to talk a little bit more about that yeah I mean actually what I find interesting in well there are many things it's just a beautiful beautiful call of fun and it's famous because it is so beautiful and it captures this relationship this intense relationship that Northern Song readers had with Tang texts it's Jiou Wu not a Gu Wu so that actually I think is very important as is the talking about the manipulation and the pasting in the kind of loving care and that finally this thing has exceeded its limits because he's sought so much to compile and collate so there's an intimacy about this call of fun that I think is quite unusual and so it's Jiou Wu it's antique but it's also old and familiar and familial because it was a thing found in the family's house and that it's the intimacy almost more than the intellectual biography which was a section I skipped that I find that I find most gripping and amusing you know Li Qing Zhang right and there's something about the active supplementation and taking care of the old tattered manuscript yep yes thank you thank you very much for the very fascinating talk so I think about when we usually when we talk about the critics of the Tang Song Shi usually they use Shi Zhuang Si Mei like the poetry is classic and normative but the poetry is kind of flashy or fabulous I'm wondering for the receiving of the previous dynasty the literature maybe both the genre and the personality has some relationships there for example even Hai Yu write about very confused works but also have writing poetry about very strange things like his shaking peas like Su Dong Po also write about Jia Zai Niunan Xi Fu Xi something like and also Mei Yao Chen I'm wondering when the maybe the fact of both the personality and the genre could affect the later generation the receiving of the previous one thank you absolutely that's a terrific question I really didn't talk about the boundary drawing the kind of mapping of genres that I think happens very vigorously in the first decades of the early northern Song and so you know we have this problem which is Steve what is Wei Ying Hua that's a question that we still haunted with what is Wei Ying Hua what does it represent but one of the things it is as Robert suggested it is as much a Lei Shu as it is a Wen Xuan but it is divided by genres but one of the things that it does is that it maps out new genres and topoi within genres that we don't see at least in extent anthologies from the Tang we don't see conceptualized before so there is some very important drawing of boundaries around genres and sub-genres so within prose Ji for example expands, expands, expands in really interesting ways Yue Fu shifts tsi emerges but is absent from the significant anthologies it's marginalized and silenced in the major anthologies so this is very much happening and I would argue that that personalities and the kind of personal histories and biographies of Tang writers didn't necessarily map in seamless or clearly articulable ways with conceptions of the boundaries of genres but Northern Tang writers were very interested in drawing clear boundaries and so the Gu Wen Moven of the 1057 moment is itself a claim to establishing a new kind of generic boundary and of course it doesn't in fact eliminate parallel prose far from it in the Northern Song but as a cultural claim, as a moment it's incredibly important and there are others like it so that's a great question Hi this may be coming a little out of left field because I'm used to thinking about later things but there's an evolution you know from Northern the Wen and Dao problem and whether you have any kind of reflections on whether that you know by the Southern Song with Alicia you have kind of a breaking out of a kind of critique of Wenshire as such as sort of missing the true legacy of the ancients which is something different but is that part of the same arc that you're tracing here or is this coming out of someplace else completely? Thank you very much for the question and this is a question that I have been thinking I've taken very very seriously since the beginning of the project and you know one of the arguments that I really want to make in the book that in fact this renegotiation of the cultural past takes place out ahead of and influences the ideas of Dalshia that emerge in the late Northern Song. So the adoption of Ha Yu and the Gu Wen authors as models and idols to be venerated and their particular approach to the way runs out ahead of ideas about writing the failure of writing to carry the way and in fact of course as we know Dalshia turns around and critiques Ha Yu's position said he should not be considered as someone who actually carried the way but that's really a later moment so in fact the stabilization and the compilation this desire to stabilize Tang literature really runs out ahead of that now what the relationship of that is to say the Chang Reather's conceptualization of Wen I am not entirely sure I haven't quite entirely decided that that's a question that haunts me but I will say I think from a very simple perspective that the critique of certainly by the 1060s we see a much more serious critique of both Tang political history and Tang literary history there is a sense that there is a more aggressive reinterpretation of events of the Tang and so I would point both to Zhizhi Tongjian but Fan Ziyu's Tangjian as well a new desire to maybe attack the emerging canonicity of certain Tang writers so that would provide them more distance on the Tang and again I'm not going to talk about the Chang Reather's since that's that's beyond me but I guess my major concern is actually to lay out this relationship before that it really does run ahead of what happens in the development of Dalshia I think that's really important thanks thank you so much I'm not an expert in Chinese history I'm only a sophomore actually great thank you for being here it's awesome thank you so this question may seem relatively simplistic I was just wondering I guess it speaks to the significance of literary history in general what was the extent of the impact of Tang literary history in the song and by that I mean was it really just literati sitting around and being like wow that Han Yu was really something or was it like you mentioned the printing press and how these anthologies were printed and widespread like the average merchant maybe reading Tang poetry I know the song valued education but I'm just curious really it's a fantastic question and it's a really important question I would kill for more evidence of circulation kill for it and I really have to think about one example at a time so Wen Sui is actually an example that during the Northern Song we do have repeated references including in the records of Buddhist monastics for example talking about the Wen Sui and having copies of the Wen Sui people mentioned it in letters and then in the Southern Song it goes into reprinting and people also talk about it particularly around the time that Wei Yinghua was printed but not enough we don't have enough for Northern Song and we have very few Northern Song editions not until the Southern Song that we get more text to actually printed editions to look at there's just not enough evidence and what we have though is certainly discussions imitations of Tang literature imitations of Tang poetry and so what we can see is not just colophons, prefaces, random comments but we can also see writing sites where Li Bai visited and writing a poem about it we see that kind of engagement as evidence we also see references to this kind of thing referring to Han Yu or my final piece of evidence there the Huang Tingjian colophon so he is literally writing out a copy I just love this piece of calligraphy this is in the Princeton Art Museum and I have to say that in the vault as it's called and it is one of the most exciting experiences in my semester when I teach the intro to Chinese literature is having them their jaws drop when they're standing next to this so this was in fact he says he's copying out a piece of gulun to send to his nephew so we have this kind of evidence but not enough really as much as I wish we did about numbers of copies or sales or anything like that that's really late imperial some of my conclusions are speculative just one quick question so I am really curious about the practice of imitation of particular poets and I wonder if you could just speak a little bit about the role that that played in the establishment of what the Tang was because often these imitations are pretty terrible speaking about Li Bai he's like the most tone deaf reader of Li Bai ever these are caricatures yes they are especially in the case of Li Bai because he seems so eminently imitable but in fact he's so it's a very interesting thing so I was just wondering are you going to write about this in the book is there going to be a chapter on this there's not going to be a chapter on that I've got I think probably two articles to do about that I want to do about this to me the most and this goes back to what Robert said I absolutely agree the most fascinating relationship is the Ouyang Shou Mei Al Chen relationship which maps on to Hanyu and Meng Jiao and it's on the one hand almost a kind of cosplay they're so attempting to so fully inhabit these roles which of course puts Mei Al Chen in the Meng Jiao role which is their downsides to that right there's just problems with that but also you know imitating their poetic voices so this imitation I argue in the mid 11th century this is what I want to do really takes a brand new a brand new turn in the 11th century 11th century poetic practice and as you said there's this wide range of incredibly tin-ear awful caricature like imitations and you can you can feel it you know it's like sort of like nails on a blackboard or something when somebody gets it wrong right badly by is terrible and bad tofu is pretty clunky too but the development of that imitation poetics is itself a I think a fascinating problem right it speaks to the idea that we're recognizing a voice that there is a voice that they're constructing and reaffirming the voice as a moment in literary history yeah hi I was really drawn to what you said about I think it was one thing and I'm not sure about how conflicting depictions of authors and tongue anthologies lead to a new knowledge or a new like new knowledge creation I was wondering if you could say more about that maybe clarify because I think when we look at Chinese literary history there's so many like gaps and so many conflicting like sources so how do we like kind of make sense or piece together these authors from with like so such conflicting information I think my first answer would be we have to live with the messiness we have to live with the conflicts and the tensions and so you know what I'm showing is the kind of desire to rationalize and clarify but what I'm trying to do in the book is expose is to shed light on these moments of intense messiness and contention because you know I mentioned a kind of feedback loop that these that these texts and Robert talked about this as well that these texts influence and help shape later views but there are also contentious relationships between texts and you know one could argue that the Xin Tang Shu revision of Jiotang Shu is in fact in competition and contention with the very literariness of the Jiotang Shu's vision of Tang culture which I of course want to think is closer to the Tang reality but I wouldn't say that so so I think that that more granularity more messiness is richer much more interesting as a way to think about these writers as they're evolving as long as we understand that you know there is a desire to stabilize there is a desire to create a coherent literary historical narrative and for didactic purposes I mean you know that's a very long standing desire in the Chinese literary tradition and for important reasons but I want to push back against that simply to show the more exciting kind of chaos out of which these portraits emerge. Thank you for this wonderful talk my questions maybe just die in the clock back a little bit so I wonder if you can provide a little bit more about your assessment of the role that the five dynasties play in terms of influencing or kind of dictating the northern Xin Tang literary culture especially considering that as you have said earlier in your presentation you were part of the dissemination and transformation of the entire legacy of the Tang but also because many of the literary figures in the northern or I think products of the education and culture of the five dynasties and not five dynasties but also the kingdoms themselves so I wonder if you can provide a little bit more on that. I would be happy to there's also a historian in the room who's working on five dynasties and culture and so we could talk to Professor Tackett about this as well but I would say I mean historians are still not just literary historians but I mean historians of political and social history are still trying to build out a picture of the understudied period of 907 to 960 in the 980s and you're absolutely right and I think it's incredibly important including to compilations of Tang literature to look at the roots of some of the early northern Song courtiers such as Xu Xuan Xu Xuan being very very important but others who come from, so Xu Xuan comes from the Nan Tang former Nan Tang official, the influence that their erudition and reading and knowledge had on the shaping of early northern Song compilations I mean the picture is less clear for Xu so which I've written about Xu itself right but because there is less a direct line as there are for the southern Tang officials to the northern Song court fewer of officials from the later Xu go on to immediately influence the northern Song court that being said Xu Xuan, did we notice that Xu Xuan came up like four or five times in my talk becomes this I think unique repository for Tang literature not everything gets shipped off and for a particular culture of erudition and learning in Tang literature that story is still to be told I mean I think there's just a lot more work to be done on five dynasties and the southern kingdoms influence on what happens here so I just want to thank Thank you all for coming