Classical Chinese Literature: From the Book of Songs to the Song Ci
Classical Chinese literature is the body of texts written in the literary language known as Classical Chinese (文言, wényán) between the late Zhou and the early twentieth century. It includes the foundational poetry of the pre-Qin, the descriptive fu of the Han, the great regulated verse of the Tang, the elegant Ci lyrics of the Song, and the essays of the eight great prose masters of the Tang and Song. The classical tradition is one of the great literary inheritances of world culture, and the direct ancestor of the modern Chinese written language. This article offers a focused survey of classical Chinese literature. For a broader look at the whole imperial literary tradition, see Chinese literature and writing across the imperial era, and for the great novels of the late imperial period, see the article on the Four Great Classical Novels.
The Two Foundational Anthologies
The classical Chinese poetic tradition begins with two great anthologies: the Book of Songs (詩經, Shījīng) and the Chu Ci (楚辭, Chǔ Cí). Together they formed the double root of the Chinese poetic tradition.
The Book of Songs
The Book of Songs contains 305 poems, probably compiled over several centuries and attributed by tradition to Confucius. In fact, the poems were a living folk tradition gradually collected by court officials, and they preserve the voices of ordinary people from the late Zhou period (roughly the eleventh to seventh centuries BCE). The collection is divided into the Airs of the States (國風, guófēng), folk songs from different regions; the Lesser and Greater Court Hymns (小雅 xiǎoyǎ and 大雅 dàyǎ), aristocratic poems on dynastic themes; and the Hymns (頌, sòng), ritual songs of the Zhou temples. The poems use a simple four-character line and treat the great themes of Chinese life: love, marriage, agriculture, war, and exile. The Book of Songs was the model of simplicity and sincerity, and every subsequent Chinese poet was expected to know it intimately.
The Chu Ci
The Chu Ci is a more exotic, more southern collection, traditionally attributed to the exiled minister Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BCE) of the state of Chu. Qu Yuan’s masterpiece “Li Sao” (離騷, “Encountering Sorrow”) is a long allegorical poem in which the poet laments his exile and embarks on a magical flight through the heavens. The Chu Ci uses varied meter and a richer store of shamanic and Daoist imagery than the Book of Songs.
Han Fu and the Han Yutai
The Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) was the great age of the fu (賦), a descriptive, allusive, and rhetorically ornate genre that sits between poetry and prose. The fu was a kind of elaborate prose poem, often written in parallel phrases and devoted to grand subjects: the imperial hunt, the great forests of the west, the imperial palace. The two great Western Han fu writers were Sima Xiangru (179–117 BCE), whose Shang Lin Fu (“Rhapsody on the Imperial Park”) was a supreme example of the grand fu, and Dongfang Shuo (c. 160–c. 93 BCE), a court wit. The late Han and Three Kingdoms period also produced the famous “Nineteen Old Poems” (古詩十九首, Gǔshī shíjiǔ shǒu), a small but exquisite collection of anonymous poems on themes of separation and mortality. These short, five-character-line poems, with their quiet melancholy, were the immediate ancestor of the Five-Character Ancient Style of the Six Dynasties and the Tang.
The Six Dynasties: Tao Yuanming and Beyond
The Six Dynasties (220–589 CE) — the long period of division between the fall of the Han and the reunification of the Sui — produced a remarkable body of poetry. The supreme Six Dynasties poet was Tao Qian (365–427), also known as Tao Yuanming (陶淵明). Tao Yuanming was a minor official who resigned his post to return to his farm, and he spent the rest of his life writing poems about the simple pleasures of country life: pulling up turnips in the autumn garden, drinking wine with his neighbours, looking at the distant mountains. His poems, written in plain language and a quiet, contented voice, became the model of the Chinese pastoral tradition and were treasured by every subsequent generation.
The Six Dynasties also saw the rise of the parallel prose (駢文, piánwén) style, in which prose was organised into carefully balanced antithetical pairs. The style was dazzlingly skillful, but it could also become mere rhetoric, and the call to return to the “ancient style” (古文, gǔwén) of the pre-Qin philosophers became a recurring theme of subsequent literary history.
The Tang Explosion
The Tang dynasty (618–907) is the great age of Chinese poetry. The two great forms were the regulated verse (律詩, lǜshī), the eight-line poem with strict rules of tonal pattern, rhyme, and parallelism, and the quatrain (絕句, juéjù), the four-line poem with similar but less restrictive rules.
The High Tang Masters
The “High Tang” of the eighth century produced an astonishing concentration of talent. Li Bai (701–762), the “Poetry Immortal” (詩仙), was a wandering Taoist sage who wrote the great “Bring in the Wine” (將進酒) with its famous opening: “君不見黃河之水天上來 — Have you not seen the Yellow River come from the sky?” Du Fu (712–770), the “Poetry Sage” (詩聖), was a more sober, learned, and morally serious poet whose works chronicled the An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763. Wang Wei (699–759) was a poet, painter, and Buddhist monk whose quiet landscape poems were inseparable from his paintings. Li Shangyin (c. 813–c. 858) and Du Mu (803–852) carried the late Tang style into more allusive, melancholy territory.
The Tang Prose Movement
The Tang was also the period of the ancient-style prose movement (古文運動, gǔwén yùndòng), led by Han Yu (768–824) and his friend Liu Zongyuan (773–819). They rejected the rhetorical flourishes of the Six Dynasties parallel prose and called for a return to the plain, morally serious style of the pre-Qin philosophers. Han Yu’s essays were models of the Chinese essay form for the next thousand years. The eight great prose masters of the Tang and Song (唐宋八大家, Táng-Sòng bā dàjiā) include Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, and the six Song masters who continued the movement.
The Song Ci and the Eight Great Prose Masters
The Song dynasty (960–1279) is sometimes seen as the high point of Chinese cultural refinement. The civil service examination system was more developed, the literati culture more self-conscious, and the printing revolution transformed the production and circulation of texts.
The Ci as a Supreme Form
The Ci (詞) was originally a lyric form written to fixed musical tunes and performed in the entertainment quarters. Each Ci followed the metrical pattern of a particular melody, with specified line lengths and tonal patterns. Su Shi (1037–1101), one of the great polymaths of Chinese history, wrote Ci in a broad, heroic, philosophical style; his “Nian Nujie: Chibi Huai Gu” (念奴嬌·赤壁懷古), reflecting on the battle of Red Cliffs in 208 CE, is one of the most quoted poems in the language. Li Qingzhao (1084–c.1155), the most famous woman poet in Chinese history, wrote Ci of unmatched delicacy and emotional depth. Xin Qiji (1140–1207) gave the form a patriotic cast appropriate to the era of Mongol invasion.
The Song Masters of Prose
The Song produced a remarkable group of prose writers. Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) wrote in a clear, classical, allusive style that became a model. Su Xun (1009–1066) and his two sons Su Shi and Su Zhe (1039–1112) were a literary family whose essays, memorials, and letters were all models of prose. Wang Anshi (1021–1086) and Zeng Gong (1019–1083) rounded out the eight great prose masters.