History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 12
Chapter 12: Song Dynasty Literature I — Ci Poetry, Neo-Confucianism, and the Inner Turn (960–1127)
1. Introduction: A New Literary Age
The Song dynasty (宋朝, 960–1279) is one of the most remarkable periods in Chinese cultural history — an age of extraordinary intellectual vitality, technological innovation, economic prosperity, and literary achievement that, while lacking the martial grandeur and cosmopolitan swagger of the Tang, created a civilization of unparalleled sophistication and depth. In the realm of literature, the Song accomplished two transformations of fundamental importance: it elevated the ci (词) lyric — which had emerged as a form of popular entertainment in the Late Tang — into one of the supreme vehicles of Chinese poetic expression; and it produced a body of prose writing — philosophical, historical, personal, and reflective — that ranks among the finest in the Chinese tradition.
The period covered by this chapter — the Northern Song (北宋, 960–1127) — spans the 167 years from the founding of the dynasty by Emperor Taizu (宋太祖, r. 960–976) to the catastrophic Jurchen invasion that captured the Song capital of Kaifeng (开封) in 1127, forcing the court to flee south and establishing the division between the Northern and Southern Song. This period produced a galaxy of literary figures — Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101), Ouyang Xiu (欧阳修, 1007–1072), Wang Anshi (王安石, 1021–1086), Liu Yong (柳永, ca. 984–1053), Huang Tingjian (黄庭坚, 1045–1105) — whose work collectively defined the literary culture of the Song and profoundly shaped the subsequent development of Chinese letters.
The defining characteristic of Song dynasty literature, as compared with Tang literature, is what scholars have called the "inner turn" — a shift of literary attention from the external world of landscape, adventure, and political engagement toward the internal world of personal reflection, philosophical inquiry, and the cultivation of the individual self. This shift was not absolute — Song writers were capable of great extroversion when the occasion demanded — but it represents a genuine change in literary temperament that reflects the broader cultural and political conditions of the Song era.[1]
2. The Political and Cultural Context
The Song dynasty was founded in 960 by Zhao Kuangyin (赵匡胤), a military commander who seized power from the last emperor of the Later Zhou (后周) in a military coup and spent the next two decades reunifying the Chinese heartland after the fragmentation of the Five Dynasties period (907–960). But the Song founders, determined to prevent a repetition of the military usurpations that had plagued the Five Dynasties, deliberately subordinated military power to civilian authority — creating a political culture in which the civil bureaucracy, staffed through the examination system, held supreme power, and in which military men were regarded with suspicion and kept under strict control.
This policy had profound consequences for Chinese literary culture. The supremacy of the civil bureaucracy meant that literary skill — the ability to compose elegant prose, to write persuasive memorials, to discuss philosophical and political questions with learning and clarity — was the primary qualification for political power. The Song examination system, which was substantially expanded and reformed during the Northern Song, became the principal avenue of social mobility: success in the examinations could transform a farmer's son into a government minister, while failure could condemn a man of good family to a life of obscurity. This system created an educated elite — the shidafu (士大夫, "scholar-officials") — whose members were simultaneously politicians, administrators, philosophers, historians, calligraphers, painters, and poets, and whose literary culture was the dominant culture of Song China.
The economic prosperity of the Song — driven by advances in agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce — created the material conditions for an unprecedented expansion of literary culture. The development of woodblock printing technology, which had been invented during the Tang but was perfected and commercialized during the Song, made books cheaper and more widely available than ever before. The Song has been called the first age of print culture in world history: books that had previously existed only in a few manuscript copies were now produced in editions of hundreds or thousands, and the reading public expanded from a tiny aristocratic elite to a substantial portion of the urban population.[2]
This expansion of literacy and print culture had direct consequences for literature. It created a much larger audience for literary works, encouraging writers to produce works that appealed to a broader readership. It facilitated the compilation and circulation of anthologies, encyclopedias, and reference works that codified and transmitted literary knowledge. And it created a new relationship between authors and readers — a relationship mediated not by personal acquaintance and manuscript circulation, as in the Tang, but by the impersonal mechanisms of the commercial book market.
3. The Song Ci Revolution: From Entertainment to High Art
The single most important literary development of the Northern Song was the transformation of the ci (词) lyric from a form of popular entertainment into one of the most expressive and most highly valued genres of Chinese literature. This transformation — which took place over the course of roughly a century, from the founding of the Song to the mature work of Su Shi in the 1070s and 1080s — is one of the great revolutions in the history of Chinese poetry.
The ci form, as we have seen, originated in the Late Tang as song lyrics written to be performed to specific musical tunes. The earliest ci — those of Wen Tingyun and the Huajian ji poets — were characterized by their association with the entertainment world, their focus on themes of love and longing, their use of a female persona, and their ornate, sensuous imagery. These conventions persisted into the early Song, and the ci was initially regarded by the literary establishment as a minor, even frivolous genre — a form of "small lyrics" (小词, xiaoci) suitable for entertainment but unworthy of the serious literary attention that was reserved for shi (诗, classical poetry) and prose.
The elevation of the ci from entertainment to high art was accomplished by a succession of Northern Song poets who progressively expanded its thematic range, deepened its emotional register, and demonstrated that it was capable of the same intellectual seriousness, moral depth, and artistic ambition as any other literary form. The key figures in this process were Liu Yong (柳永), who expanded the formal range of the ci and brought it to a wider audience; Yan Shu (晏殊, 991–1055) and Ouyang Xiu (欧阳修), who brought the ci into the mainstream of elite literary culture; and Su Shi (苏轼), who completed the transformation by writing ci on topics that had previously been reserved for shi — politics, philosophy, history, friendship, landscape, and the meaning of life.[3]
4. Liu Yong and Popular Ci
Liu Yong (柳永, ca. 984–1053) was the first great ci poet of the Song dynasty and one of the most popular — though also one of the most controversial — writers of his age. A man of literary talent who repeatedly failed the civil service examinations, Liu Yong spent much of his life in the entertainment quarters of the Song capital, composing ci lyrics for the singing girls and courtesans who performed them. His poetry was enormously popular among common people — the saying went that "wherever there are wells to draw water, there are people singing Liu Yong's lyrics" (凡有井水饮处，即能歌柳词) — but it was regarded with disdain by the literary establishment, who considered his subject matter (romantic love, urban entertainment, the pleasures and sorrows of the demimonde) vulgar and his style too accessible.
Liu Yong's most important contribution to the development of the ci form was his mastery and popularization of the manci (慢词, "slow lyrics") — longer, more complex ci forms that had been used only rarely before him. The earlier ci forms — the xiaoling (小令, "short tunes") of Wen Tingyun and the Huajian ji poets — were typically short (fewer than sixty characters), concentrated, and imagistic. The manci forms, by contrast, could extend to over two hundred characters and employed more complex musical patterns with more varied line lengths. Liu Yong exploited the greater length and complexity of the manci to create ci of unprecedented narrative scope and emotional range — lyrics that told stories, developed arguments, and explored emotional states with a fullness that the shorter forms could not achieve.
His most famous work, "Rain Bells" (雨霖铃, Yulinling), is a masterpiece of the farewell poem — a depiction of parting from a lover that is widely considered one of the supreme achievements of the ci form:
寒蝉凄切，对长亭晚，骤雨初歇。
都门帐饮无绪，留恋处兰舟催发。
执手相看泪眼，竟无语凝噎。
The cold cicadas cry mournfully, facing the long pavilion, as evening falls and the sudden rain has just ceased.
At the capital gate, the farewell feast brings no pleasure; lingering here, the orchid boat urges departure.
Holding hands, we gaze into each other's tear-filled eyes, and at last, speechless, choked with emotion.[4]
The poem's power lies in its accumulation of sensory detail — the sound of the cicadas, the light of evening, the rain-washed air, the boat waiting at the dock — and in the restraint of its emotional climax: the lovers, on the point of separation, hold hands and gaze at each other in tearful silence, unable to find words for what they feel. The moment of speechlessness — "at last, speechless, choked with emotion" — is one of the great silences in Chinese poetry, a silence that says more than any words could express.
5. Su Shi: The Universal Genius
Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101), also known by his literary name Su Dongpo (苏东坡), is universally regarded as the greatest literary figure of the Song dynasty and one of the most extraordinary cultural personalities in all of Chinese history. He was simultaneously a great poet (in both shi and ci forms), a great prose writer, a great calligrapher, a great painter, a significant political philosopher, a connoisseur of food and wine, an amateur pharmacologist, a hydraulic engineer, and a man of inexhaustible wit, warmth, and humanity. No other figure in Chinese literary history — with the possible exception of Cao Cao (曹操, 155–220) in the political-military sphere — combined so many talents in a single person with such apparent ease.
Su Shi's political career was a turbulent one. He rose to high office during the reign of Emperor Shenzong (神宗, r. 1067–1085) but fell afoul of the powerful reformer Wang Anshi (王安石, 1021–1086), whose sweeping economic and administrative reforms Su Shi opposed on both practical and philosophical grounds. Su Shi was repeatedly demoted and exiled — first to Huangzhou (黄州, in modern Hubei), then to Huizhou (惠州, in modern Guangdong), and finally to the remote island of Hainan (海南) — and he spent much of his mature life far from the centers of political power. But these exiles, which would have embittered a lesser spirit, became the occasion for some of his greatest literary achievements: it was in exile that Su Shi produced his finest ci lyrics, his most reflective prose essays, and his most profound philosophical meditations.
Su Shi's most famous ci poem — and one of the most celebrated lyric poems in the Chinese language — is "Prelude to Water Melody" (水调歌头, Shuidiaogetou), written in 1076 during the Mid-Autumn Festival while in exile and separated from his beloved brother Su Zhe (苏辙, 1039–1112):
明月几时有？把酒问青天。
不知天上宫阙，今夕是何年。
我欲乘风归去，又恐琼楼玉宇，高处不胜寒。
起舞弄清影，何似在人间。
When did the bright moon first appear?
Lifting my wine cup, I ask the blue sky.
I do not know what year it is tonight
In the palaces of heaven above.
I wish to ride the wind and return there,
Yet fear the jade towers and crystal halls —
The heights are too cold to bear.
Rising to dance, I play with my clear shadow —
How can it compare to the world of men?[5]
The poem's concluding lines — "People have sorrow and joy, parting and reunion; / The moon has its dark and bright, waxing and waning. / In this, nothing has ever been perfect since ancient times. / We can only wish that we may live long / And share the beauty of this moonlight, though a thousand miles apart" (人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。但愿人长久，千里共婵娟) — have become proverbial expressions of the acceptance of imperfection and the power of love to transcend distance. The poem is simultaneously a philosophical meditation (on the relationship between the celestial and the human), a personal expression (of longing for his brother), and a lyrical evocation (of the beauty of the autumn moon) — and these three dimensions are woven together so seamlessly that they cannot be separated.
Su Shi's other great masterpiece in the ci form is "念奴娇" (Niannu jiao), subtitled "Recollections at Red Cliff" (赤壁怀古, Chibi huaigu), written in 1082 during his exile in Huangzhou. Standing on the banks of the Yangtze at a site (probably erroneously) identified with the famous Battle of Red Cliff (赤壁之战, 208 CE), Su Shi meditates on the heroism of the past and the insignificance of the present:
大江东去，浪淘尽，千古风流人物。
The great river flows east,
Its waves have washed away
The brilliant figures of a thousand ages.[6]
The poem brought an entirely new register to the ci form. Where previous ci poets had written about love, longing, and the intimate emotions of the boudoir, Su Shi wrote about history, philosophy, and the grand sweep of human destiny. He created what later critics called the "bold and unrestrained" (豪放, haofang) school of ci — a style that treated the ci as a vehicle for the full range of human thought and feeling, not merely for the soft emotions of romantic love. This expansion of the ci's thematic range was Su Shi's most important contribution to the form and the foundation of his supreme reputation in Chinese literary history.
6. Ouyang Xiu, Wang Anshi, and Huang Tingjian
Su Shi did not emerge in a literary vacuum. He was the heir of a tradition of Northern Song literary innovation that had been developing since the early decades of the dynasty, and he was surrounded by contemporaries whose achievements, while less celebrated than his own, were of fundamental importance for the development of Song literature.
Ouyang Xiu (欧阳修, 1007–1072), Su Shi's patron and mentor, was the most influential literary figure of the early Northern Song. A powerful statesman who served as Vice Grand Councillor (参知政事, canzhizhengshi), Ouyang Xiu was also a historian, a prose master, a ci poet, and a literary critic whose taste and judgment shaped the literary culture of his age. His prose — direct, elegant, and conversational — continued the guwen tradition of Han Yu and became the model for Song dynasty prose style. His historical works — particularly the Xin Wudai shi (新五代史, New History of the Five Dynasties) — set new standards of literary elegance in historiography. And his ci poetry — graceful, witty, and emotionally refined — helped bring the ci form into the mainstream of elite literary culture.
Ouyang Xiu's most famous prose work, "The Old Drunkard's Pavilion" (醉翁亭记, Zuiweng ting ji), is one of the most beloved essays in the Chinese tradition — a seemingly casual account of the author's pleasures during his demotion to the provincial city of Chuzhou (滁州), which celebrates the simple joys of landscape, wine, and companionship with a grace and humor that have charmed Chinese readers for nearly a thousand years. The essay's famous opening — "Among the mountains surrounding Chuzhou, their ridges and peaks beautiful in every direction, the one with the deepest woods and most exquisite scenery that catches the eye is Langya" (环滁皆山也，其西南诸峰，林壑尤美，望之蔚然而深秀者，琅琊也) — demonstrates the flowing, rhythmically flexible prose style that Ouyang Xiu championed as an alternative to the rigid parallelism of pianwen.[7]
Wang Anshi (王安石, 1021–1086), Su Shi's political adversary and one of the most controversial figures of Song dynasty history, was also a poet and prose writer of the first rank. His political reforms — the "New Policies" (新法, Xinfa), which sought to strengthen the state through government intervention in the economy, reform of the examination system, and the creation of a citizen militia — divided the Song elite into bitterly opposed factions and dominated the political life of the Northern Song for decades. But Wang Anshi's literary reputation rests on work of a very different character: spare, precise, philosophically serious poetry and vigorous argumentative prose that earned him a place among the "Eight Great Masters of Tang and Song Prose."
Huang Tingjian (黄庭坚, 1045–1105), Su Shi's most distinguished literary disciple, founded the Jiangxi poetry school (江西诗派, Jiangxi shipai), the most influential school of shi poetry in the Southern Song. Huang Tingjian's poetic theory — which emphasized the close study of Du Fu's techniques, the creative use of classical allusion, and the transformation of borrowed materials into original art — represented a more systematic and more self-conscious approach to poetic composition than Su Shi's apparently effortless spontaneity. His doctrine of "replacing the bones" (夺胎换骨, duotai huangu) and "turning iron into gold" (点铁成金, dian tie cheng jin) — the idea that a poet could transform old materials (allusions, images, phrases from earlier poets) into new and original poetry through the power of his own genius — became one of the most influential critical doctrines in Chinese literary history.
7. Printing Technology and the Literacy Explosion
The impact of printing technology on Song dynasty literary culture cannot be overstated. The development of woodblock printing during the Tang and Five Dynasties periods, and its rapid commercialization during the Song, created what was, in effect, the first mass-literate society in human history — a society in which books were no longer rare and precious objects available only to the wealthy and powerful but relatively affordable commodities that could be purchased by anyone of modest means.
The scale of Song printing was remarkable. The government printing office alone produced editions of the Confucian classics, the dynastic histories, the Buddhist canon, and a vast array of reference works, encyclopedias, and literary anthologies. Private and commercial printers in cities such as Hangzhou (杭州), Jianyang (建阳, in Fujian), and Chengdu (成都) produced everything from scholarly editions of classical texts to popular almanacs, medical manuals, and collections of examination essays. The Song polymath Shen Kuo (沈括, 1031–1095) described the invention of movable type by the commoner Bi Sheng (毕昇, ca. 990–1051) around 1040 — an invention that, while not widely adopted in China (where the large number of Chinese characters made movable type less practical than woodblock printing), anticipated Gutenberg's European invention by four centuries.[8]
The consequences of this printing revolution for literature were manifold. The availability of printed books made it possible for a much larger number of people to read and study literary works, expanding the audience for literature and creating new markets for literary production. The compilation of anthologies — such as the Wenyuan yinghua (文苑英华, Finest Flowers of the Garden of Literature), a vast anthology of prose and poetry compiled under imperial auspices in the late tenth century — preserved and transmitted the literary heritage of earlier periods and made it accessible to a broad readership. And the emergence of a commercial book market created new economic incentives for literary production, encouraging writers to produce works that would appeal to a wider audience than the small circle of elite scholar-officials who had constituted the primary readership for Tang literature.
8. Neo-Confucianism and Literary Implications
The most important intellectual development of the Northern Song — and one of the most consequential intellectual developments in all of Chinese history — was the emergence of Neo-Confucianism (理学, Lixue, "the study of principle"), a philosophical movement that sought to revitalize Confucian thought by incorporating elements of Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics into a comprehensive system of moral philosophy and cosmology.
The founders of Neo-Confucianism — Zhou Dunyi (周敦颐, 1017–1073), Zhang Zai (张载, 1020–1077), Cheng Hao (程颢, 1032–1085), and Cheng Yi (程颐, 1033–1107) — developed a philosophical framework that explained the moral order of the universe in terms of li (理, "principle") and qi (气, "material force"), argued that human nature was fundamentally good (but could be obscured by selfish desires), and prescribed a program of moral self-cultivation — the "investigation of things" (格物, gewu), the "extension of knowledge" (致知, zhizhi), the "rectification of the heart" (正心, zhengxin) — through which the individual could realize his innate moral potential and become a sage.
The implications of Neo-Confucianism for literature were profound and complex. On one hand, the Neo-Confucian emphasis on moral seriousness, intellectual rigor, and the subordination of aesthetic pleasure to ethical purpose tended to reinforce the utilitarian conception of literature — the view that writing should serve the Way (文以载道, wen yi zai Dao) and be judged by its moral content rather than its aesthetic beauty. The Neo-Confucian philosophers were, for the most part, suspicious of literary art as a potential distraction from moral cultivation — a "plaything that saps the will" (玩物丧志, wanwu sangzhi) — and some of them explicitly argued that the serious scholar should devote his energies to philosophy and ethics rather than poetry and belles-lettres.
On the other hand, the Neo-Confucian emphasis on introspection, self-examination, and the cultivation of the inner life encouraged a literary culture of personal reflection and philosophical meditation that produced some of the finest prose and poetry of the Song dynasty. The great Song writers — Su Shi, Ouyang Xiu, Huang Tingjian — were not Neo-Confucian philosophers in the strict sense, but they wrote in a cultural environment that was profoundly shaped by Neo-Confucian values: an environment that prized sincerity over artifice, substance over ornament, and moral depth over formal beauty. The "inner turn" that characterizes Song literature — its preference for reflection over action, for philosophical meditation over narrative adventure, for the intimate and the personal over the grand and the public — is, in significant measure, a literary expression of Neo-Confucian values.[9]
9. Biji Literature: The Notebook Tradition
One of the most distinctive and most characteristically Song literary genres is the biji (笔记, "brush notes" or "notebook literature") — a genre of miscellaneous prose that encompasses everything from philosophical reflections and literary criticism to scientific observations, historical anecdotes, ghost stories, jokes, and recipes. The biji is, in essence, a writer's notebook — a collection of short, independent entries on whatever topics happen to interest the author, arranged in no particular order and governed by no particular principle of selection beyond the author's own curiosity and taste.
The biji had antecedents in the xiaoshuo (小说, "small talk") tradition of the Han dynasty and the shihua (诗话, "remarks on poetry") tradition that began in the late Tang. But it was during the Song dynasty that the biji became a major literary genre, practiced by virtually every significant writer and read avidly by the educated public. The most famous Song biji collections include Shen Kuo's Mengxi bitan (梦溪笔谈, Brush Talks from Dream Brook, ca. 1088), which ranges from scientific observations (including the earliest known description of movable type printing and the magnetic compass) to literary criticism and historical anecdotes; Ouyang Xiu's Guitian lu (归田录, Records of Return to the Fields), a collection of political anecdotes and literary reminiscences; and Hong Mai's (洪迈, 1123–1202) Rongzhai suibi (容斋随笔, Random Notes from the Rongzhai Studio), which covers an extraordinary range of topics in history, literature, philology, and folklore.
The biji genre is important for literary history in several ways. First, it preserves an enormous amount of information about Song dynasty literary culture — anecdotes about poets and writers, records of literary debates, accounts of how particular poems or essays were composed, and descriptions of the social contexts in which literature was produced and consumed. Much of what we know about the literary life of the Song dynasty comes from biji sources. Second, the biji represents a distinctive literary ideal — the ideal of the cultivated generalist whose curiosity encompasses all of knowledge and whose writing style is informal, personal, and conversational. This ideal — the scholar who writes about everything that interests him, in a tone of relaxed erudition — is quintessentially Song and reflects the intellectual breadth and cultural confidence of the Song shidafu class.[10]
10. The Zeitgeist: Introspection, Refinement, and the Art of Living
The Northern Song literary sensibility — the characteristic tone and texture of Song writing — is markedly different from that of the Tang. Where Tang literature is dominated by images of grandeur, expansion, and heroic achievement — the galloping horse, the frontier campaign, the cosmic vision, the wine-drinking session that lasts through the night — Song literature gravitates toward images of quieter pleasures: the garden, the library, the tea ceremony, the appreciation of a fine piece of calligraphy, the contemplation of a plum blossom in the snow.
This difference in sensibility reflects, in part, the different political and military circumstances of the two dynasties. The Tang was a great military empire, confident in its power and open to the world; the Song was a smaller, weaker state, constantly threatened by the nomadic empires to its north and west — the Liao (辽, 907–1125), the Western Xia (西夏, 1038–1227), and, ultimately, the Jurchen Jin (金, 1115–1234) — and acutely aware of its military vulnerability. The Song shidafu compensated for this political and military weakness with cultural refinement — creating a civilization of extraordinary artistic sophistication, in which the appreciation of beauty — in literature, calligraphy, painting, ceramics, gardens, food, and tea — was cultivated as a way of life and as an assertion of cultural superiority over the militarily dominant "barbarians."
Su Shi embodies this ideal of cultured living more fully than any other figure. His writings about food (he is credited with inventing the famous "Dongpo pork," 东坡肉), his enthusiasm for tea and wine, his love of travel and landscape, his calligraphy and painting, his philosophical equanimity in the face of political adversity — all these qualities made him the model of the cultivated Song gentleman, a man who could find pleasure and meaning in the simplest experiences of everyday life. His famous essay "Record of Red Cliff" (前赤壁赋, Qian Chibi fu) — a rhapsody written during his exile in Huangzhou, in which a moonlit boat ride on the Yangtze becomes the occasion for a meditation on the transience of human life and the eternal beauty of nature — is the quintessential expression of the Song literary temperament: reflective, philosophical, attentive to the beauties of the natural world, and consoled by the conviction that art and friendship can redeem even the most difficult circumstances.
11. Conclusion
The Northern Song dynasty, in its 167 years of literary achievement, created a literary culture of extraordinary richness and sophistication. It transformed the ci lyric from a form of popular entertainment into one of the supreme vehicles of Chinese poetic expression, producing in Su Shi a ci poet whose range, depth, and humanity rival those of any poet in any language. It continued and deepened the guwen prose tradition, creating a body of philosophical, historical, and personal prose that ranks among the finest in the Chinese tradition. It produced the biji genre — the notebook tradition — which preserved an invaluable record of Song intellectual and literary life and embodied the ideal of the cultivated generalist. And it developed, under the influence of Neo-Confucianism and the broader cultural conditions of the age, a literary sensibility of unprecedented introspection, refinement, and philosophical depth.
The literary culture of the Northern Song was, in a sense, more mature, more self-conscious, and more reflective than that of the Tang. If Tang literature represents the youth of the Chinese literary tradition — its period of bold experimentation, heroic aspiration, and confident expansion — Song literature represents its maturity: a period of deeper reflection, greater subtlety, and more complex self-awareness. The Fall of the North in 1127 — the Jurchen invasion that drove the Song court south and divided the dynasty in two — would add to this already rich literary culture a new dimension of patriotic passion and national sorrow, transforming Song literature once again and producing the extraordinary poets and writers of the Southern Song, who are the subject of the next chapter.
References
- ↑ Ronald C. Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1994), 1–30.
- ↑ Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002), 1–50.
- ↑ Kang-i Sun Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz'u Poetry: From Late T'ang to Northern Sung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 1–50.
- ↑ Translation adapted from James J.Y. Liu, Major Lyricists of the Northern Sung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 51.
- ↑ Translation adapted from Ronald C. Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi, 183.
- ↑ Translation adapted from Burton Watson, trans., Selected Poems of Su Tung-p'o (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1994), 76.
- ↑ James T.C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu: An Eleventh-Century Neo-Confucianist (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 1–40.
- ↑ Thomas F. Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward, 2nd ed., revised by L. Carrington Goodrich (New York: Ronald Press, 1955), 1–60.
- ↑ Peter K. Bol, This Culture of Ours: Intellectual Transitions in T'ang and Sung China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 1–40.
- ↑ Alister D. Inglis, Hong Mai's Record of the Listener and Its Song Dynasty Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 1–30.