History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 13
Chapter 13: Song Dynasty Literature II — Southern Song, Patriotic Poetry, and the Novel in Embryo (1127–1279)
1. Introduction: Literature in the Shadow of National Humiliation
The year 1127 marks one of the most traumatic events in Chinese history: the Jingkang Incident (靖康之变, Jingkang zhi bian), in which Jurchen armies of the Jin dynasty (金, 1115–1234) captured the Song capital of Kaifeng, seized the emperor Qinzong (宋钦宗) and his father, the retired emperor Huizong (宋徽宗), along with the entire imperial court, and carried them off to captivity in the frozen wastes of Manchuria. The loss of the northern heartland — the Yellow River valley that had been the cradle of Chinese civilization for three thousand years — and the humiliation of having two emperors taken prisoner by "barbarians" was a shock to the Chinese national consciousness from which the literary culture of the Southern Song (南宋, 1127–1279) never fully recovered.
The Southern Song, established by Emperor Gaozong (宋高宗, r. 1127–1162), who reconstituted the dynasty with its capital at Lin'an (临安, modern Hangzhou), was a state defined by loss. Its literature is pervaded by themes of national humiliation, nostalgia for the lost north, the dream of reconquest, and the moral anguish of living in a diminished, defeated realm. These themes produced some of the most powerful and most emotionally intense poetry in the Chinese tradition — the patriotic ci of Xin Qiji (辛弃疾, 1140–1207), the passionate verse of Lu You (陆游, 1125–1210), and the exquisite lyrics of Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084–ca. 1155), who witnessed the fall of the north and gave voice to the experience of loss with an artistry that has few parallels in world literature.
But the Southern Song was not merely an age of grief. It was also an age of remarkable cultural creativity, during which several developments of fundamental importance for the future of Chinese literature took place: the emergence of vernacular fiction in the form of the huaben (话本, "storyteller's scripts"); the development of the zaju (杂剧, "variety plays") as a form of popular dramatic entertainment; the flowering of Neo-Confucian philosophy in the work of Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200); and the intensification of the debate between elite and popular literary culture that would shape the development of Chinese letters for centuries to come. This chapter traces these developments and their consequences.[1]
2. Li Qingzhao: The Female Voice in Ci
Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084–ca. 1155) is the most celebrated female writer in Chinese literary history and one of the supreme masters of the ci form. Her poetry — characterized by an extraordinary directness of emotional expression, a precise and sensuous use of imagery, and a formal mastery that earned her the admiration of even the most rigorous male critics — has been admired and imitated for nearly a thousand years.
Li Qingzhao was born into a distinguished literary family — her father, Li Gefei (李格非, ca. 1041–1101), was a noted scholar and protege of Su Shi — and married Zhao Mingcheng (赵明诚, 1081–1129), a fellow scholar and antiquarian with whom she shared a passionate interest in the collection of ancient inscriptions, paintings, and books. Their marriage — which lasted from 1101 until Zhao Mingcheng's death in 1129 — was by all accounts a union of exceptional intellectual and emotional companionship, and many of Li Qingzhao's most celebrated ci were written during the periods of separation that official duties imposed on the couple.
Her early ci — written before the fall of the north — are characterized by a delicate, precise evocation of the emotions of love, longing, and the passage of time. Her poem to the tune "Drunk in the Shadow of Flowers" (醉花阴, Zuihua yin), written to her husband during one of his absences, is one of the most admired love lyrics in the Chinese tradition:
薄雾浓云愁永昼，瑞脑消金兽。
佳节又重阳，玉枕纱厨，半夜凉初透。
东篱把酒黄昏后，有暗香盈袖。
莫道不销魂，帘卷西风，人比黄花瘦。
Thin mists, thick clouds — sorrow lasts through the long day.
Incense dissolves in the golden censer.
Once again, the Double Ninth Festival;
On the jade pillow, behind gauze curtains,
The midnight chill begins to seep through.
At dusk, drinking wine by the eastern hedge,
A hidden fragrance fills my sleeves.
Do not say this does not consume the soul —
The west wind rolls up the curtain,
And I am thinner than the yellow flowers.[2]
The poem's concluding image — the speaker comparing herself to the thin, fragile chrysanthemums, and finding herself even more wasted by longing than they — is one of the most famous conceits in Chinese poetry. The legend that Zhao Mingcheng, upon receiving the poem, spent three days trying to compose a better ci on the same tune and finally admitted defeat, testifies to the acknowledged supremacy of Li Qingzhao's art even among her male contemporaries.
The fall of the north in 1127 transformed Li Qingzhao's life and her poetry. She lost her home, her collection of antiquities, and — with the death of Zhao Mingcheng in 1129 — her beloved husband. The remaining decades of her life were spent as a refugee in the south, impoverished, bereft, and burdened by the double loss of personal happiness and national dignity. Her late ci — written after these catastrophes — are among the most powerful expressions of grief in Chinese literature. Her poem to the tune "Slow, Slow Song" (声声慢, Shengshengman) opens with one of the most famous passages in all of Chinese poetry:
寻寻觅觅，冷冷清清，凄凄惨惨戚戚。
Seeking, seeking, searching, searching;
Cold, cold, clear, clear;
Desolate, desolate, wretched, wretched, grieving, grieving.[3]
The seven pairs of reduplicated characters — an unprecedented opening in Chinese poetry — create an almost physical sensation of desolation, as if the very language has been emptied of meaning by the weight of sorrow it must carry. Chinese critics have marveled at the audacity of this opening for centuries: to begin a poem with fourteen consecutive reduplicated syllables, and to make them not merely beautiful but devastatingly expressive, is a feat of verbal art that has never been surpassed.
Li Qingzhao was also a significant literary critic. Her "Essay on the Ci" (词论, Ci lun), written probably in the 1120s or 1130s, is one of the most important critical statements about the ci form. In it, she argued that the ci was a distinct genre with its own rules and standards — not merely a subspecies of shi poetry — and that it required a specific set of qualities: musical sensitivity, delicacy of feeling, precision of imagery, and an awareness of the formal requirements of the individual tune patterns. Her criticism of earlier ci poets — including, controversially, Su Shi himself, whom she accused of writing ci that were really shi poems in ci form — provoked fierce debate but also helped to define the aesthetic standards of the ci tradition.[4]
3. Lu You and the Poetry of National Humiliation
Lu You (陆游, 1125–1210) was the most prolific poet of the Song dynasty — approximately 9,300 of his poems survive, more than from any other pre-modern Chinese poet — and one of the most passionately patriotic. Born two years before the fall of the north, Lu You grew up in a world defined by the shame of the Jingkang Incident and the unfulfilled dream of reconquest. His poetry — written over a career of more than sixty years — is dominated by a single, consuming theme: the longing to recover the lost northern territories and the anguish of growing old without seeing this dream fulfilled.
Lu You's passion for reconquest was not merely rhetorical. As a young official, he served briefly in Sichuan under the frontier commander Fan Chengda (范成大, 1126–1193) and experienced, however briefly, the military life that he celebrated in his verse. His poems about this period — written with the excitement and energy of a man who felt he was at last living the life he was born to live — are among his most vivid and most moving. But his military career was cut short by political enemies at court, and he spent most of his long life as a frustrated civilian, watching from the sidelines as successive Song governments pursued accommodation with the Jin rather than the reconquest he demanded.
The tension between his patriotic aspirations and his political impotence gives Lu You's poetry its characteristic emotional force. His most famous poem — written when he was already eighty-five years old, a few months before his death — is a deathbed instruction to his sons:
死去元知万事空，但悲不见九州同。
王师北定中原日，家祭无忘告乃翁。
In death I know that all things become empty,
But I grieve that I shall not see the nine provinces reunited.
On the day the royal armies recover the Central Plain,
At the family sacrifice, do not forget to tell your father.[5]
The poem's power lies in its simplicity and its sincerity. On his deathbed, with all worldly concerns falling away, the one thing Lu You cannot let go of is the dream of national reunification — a dream that, he knows, he will not live to see fulfilled. The instruction to his sons — "do not forget to tell your father" — transforms the poem from a personal lament into a testament, a charge passed from one generation to the next, a refusal to accept defeat even in the face of death.
Lu You was also a significant prose writer. His Laoxue an biji (老学庵笔记, Notes from the Old Scholar's Studio) is one of the finest biji collections of the Southern Song, and his travel diary Ru Shu ji (入蜀记, Record of a Journey to Sichuan) is a masterpiece of the travel writing genre, combining vivid descriptions of landscape with historical reflections and personal anecdotes.[6]
4. Xin Qiji and the Heroic Ci
Xin Qiji (辛弃疾, 1140–1207), known by his literary name Jiaxuan (稼轩), is the greatest ci poet of the Southern Song and, together with Su Shi, one of the two supreme masters of the "bold and unrestrained" (豪放, haofang) school of ci poetry. Where Su Shi brought philosophical depth and thematic breadth to the ci form, Xin Qiji brought martial energy, patriotic passion, and a sense of heroic frustration that is without parallel in Chinese lyric poetry.
Xin Qiji's biography reads like the plot of an adventure novel. Born in 1140 in territory that had been conquered by the Jurchen Jin dynasty, he grew up under foreign occupation and joined a resistance movement at the age of twenty-one. In 1161, when a Jin army invaded the south, Xin Qiji led a band of two thousand guerrilla fighters, captured a traitor who had defected to the Jin, and brought him across the border to the Song court — a feat of military daring that made him a hero and won him an appointment as a Song official. For the next forty years, he served in various governmental posts in the south, repeatedly urging the Song court to launch a campaign to recover the north and repeatedly being frustrated by the pacifist majority at court, who preferred the safety of accommodation to the risks of war.
Xin Qiji's ci poetry is the product of this lifelong frustration — the art of a warrior-poet condemned to spend his life as a civilian, his military talents unused, his patriotic dreams unfulfilled. His poems are filled with images of swords, horses, battle flags, and the lost landscapes of the north — images that function simultaneously as memories of his youthful heroism and as symbols of the patriotic aspirations that the Song court refused to fulfill.
His most famous ci, to the tune "Partridge Sky" (鹧鸪天, Zhegu tian), written in old age, captures the contrast between his heroic youth and his frustrated maturity:
壮岁旌旗拥万夫，锦襜突骑渡江初。
燕兵夜娖银胡觮，汉箭朝飞金仆姑。
In my prime, flags and banners, leading ten thousand men;
In brocade jacket, swift on horseback, first to cross the river.
Yan soldiers at night fitted silver arrows to their bows;
Han arrows flew at dawn, golden shafts singing.[7]
The poem's lower stanza turns from the excitement of battle to the melancholy of the present: "Pursuing the past, I can only sigh; / At spring wind and flowering grasses on the road to the rest pavilion, / I pour the farewell wine" — the warrior reduced to a civilian, the man of action condemned to inaction, the patriotic dream deferred and finally, with old age, abandoned.
Xin Qiji's formal innovations in the ci were as significant as his thematic ones. He expanded the vocabulary of the ci to include colloquial expressions, classical allusions, historical references, and philosophical arguments that previous ci poets had considered inappropriate to the form. He wrote ci that were, in effect, political essays, philosophical meditations, and historical narratives — pushing the boundaries of the form far beyond anything that even Su Shi had attempted. His more than 600 surviving ci constitute one of the richest and most varied bodies of lyric poetry in the Chinese tradition.[8]
5. Early Vernacular Fiction: Huaben
While the elite poets of the Southern Song were perfecting the ci form and lamenting the fall of the north, a very different kind of literature was emerging in the bustling cities of southern China — a literature written not in the classical Chinese of the educated elite but in the vernacular language of everyday speech. The huaben (话本, "storyteller's scripts") — written versions of the stories told by professional storytellers in the marketplaces and entertainment quarters of cities like Hangzhou, the Southern Song capital — represent the earliest substantial body of Chinese vernacular fiction and one of the most important developments in the history of Chinese narrative.
The Song dynasty storyteller (说话人, shuohua ren) was a professional entertainer who performed in the washe (瓦舍, "tile houses") and goulan (勾栏, "balustrade enclosures") — the entertainment districts of the great Song cities. These districts, which were open to all social classes, offered a variety of entertainments: puppet shows, acrobatic performances, singing, dancing, and storytelling. The storytellers specialized in different types of tales: historical narratives (讲史, jiangshi), love stories (小说, xiaoshuo), court-case stories (公案, gong'an), and tales of the supernatural.
The huaben — the written texts associated with these oral performances — are a complex and much-debated genre. It is unclear whether they are transcriptions of actual performances, scripts prepared in advance for the storyteller's use, or literary works composed in imitation of the oral storytelling style. Whatever their origin, they share several distinctive features: they are written in a mixture of classical and vernacular Chinese; they alternate between prose narration and verse passages (reflecting the prosimetric structure of oral performance); they employ formulaic openings and closings (often beginning with "It is said that..." and ending with a moral tag or a concluding poem); and they address the audience directly, as if the reader were a listener at a storytelling performance.[9]
The subject matter of the huaben is drawn from a wide range of sources: historical events, Buddhist legends, contemporary scandals, romantic adventures, supernatural encounters, and crime stories. The best of the Song huaben — such as "The Pearl-Sewn Shirt" (碾玉观音, Nianyu Guanyin) and tales later collected in the Ming dynasty anthologies — achieve a level of narrative art that rivals the Tang chuanqi, combining vivid characterization, dramatic plotting, and sharp social observation with an accessibility and immediacy that the classical-language tales do not possess.
The significance of the huaben for the long-term development of Chinese literature is immense. They established vernacular Chinese — the language of everyday speech — as a medium for literary narrative, breaking the monopoly that classical Chinese had held over written fiction since the Tang. They created the narrative conventions — the episodic structure, the prosimetric form, the use of formulaic phrases and audience-address formulas — that became the standard features of Chinese vernacular fiction. And they provided the immediate models for the great vernacular novels of the Ming dynasty — the Sanguozhi yanyi, the Shuihu zhuan, the Xiyou ji — which are, in a sense, vastly expanded huaben, written in the vernacular storytelling style that the Song storytellers had created.
6. Song Zaju: The Beginnings of Chinese Drama
Alongside the huaben, the Southern Song also witnessed the development of the zaju (杂剧, "variety play") — a form of theatrical entertainment that combined dialogue, singing, dancing, and comic routines. The Song zaju was not yet the fully developed dramatic form that it would become under the Yuan dynasty — it was shorter, less structurally coherent, and more focused on comic entertainment than dramatic narrative — but it represented an important stage in the evolution of Chinese drama from the miscellaneous entertainments of the Tang and Five Dynasties to the sophisticated dramatic art of the Yuan and Ming.
The Song zaju was performed in the same washe entertainment districts that housed the storytellers, and it shared many features with the oral storytelling tradition: both were commercial entertainments aimed at a socially diverse urban audience; both employed a mixture of speech and song; and both drew their subject matter from the common stock of Chinese historical and legendary narrative. The performers of Song zaju were organized into troupes (usually of five members), and their performances combined scripted dialogue with improvised comic routines, topical satire, and audience interaction.
No complete texts of Song zaju survive — our knowledge of the form comes from fragmentary sources, including the descriptions in Meng Yuanlao's (孟元老) Dongjing menghua lu (东京梦华录, Dreams of Splendor of the Eastern Capital, 1148) and Zhou Mi's (周密, 1232–1298) Wulin jiushi (武林旧事, Former Events of the Wulin Capital) — but these sources make clear that the Song zaju was a thriving and popular art form that attracted large audiences and generated significant commercial revenue. The Song zaju performers were celebrities in their own right, and the best of them were known by name and admired for their skill.
The transition from the Song zaju to the more fully developed dramatic forms of the Yuan dynasty — the Yuan zaju and the southern nanxi (南戏, "southern drama") — was a gradual process that involved the integration of the comic and performative elements of Song entertainment with the narrative structures of the storytelling tradition and the musical forms of the ci lyric. The southern drama tradition, or nanxi, which developed in the Wenzhou (温州) region during the late Song, was particularly important: it created a dramatic form in which a continuous narrative was told through a combination of spoken dialogue and sung arias, using the musical modes and tune patterns of southern Chinese music. The nanxi became the direct ancestor of the great chuanqi dramas of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
7. The Mongol Conquest and Literary Consciousness
The final decades of the Southern Song — from the initial Mongol attacks in the 1230s to the fall of the last Song court in 1279 — were an era of protracted military crisis that profoundly affected the literary consciousness of the age. The knowledge that the dynasty was dying — that the world the Song literati had known was coming to an end — produced a literature of extraordinary emotional intensity, combining patriotic defiance, nostalgic longing, and a profound awareness of the impermanence of all human institutions.
The most celebrated literary figure of this final period is Wen Tianxiang (文天祥, 1236–1283), the loyalist general and statesman who led the last desperate resistance against the Mongol invasion and was eventually captured and executed after refusing to surrender. Wen Tianxiang's poetry — written during his imprisonment and in the face of death — is the supreme expression of the Song loyalist spirit. His most famous poem, "Song of Righteousness" (正气歌, Zhengqi ge), written in a Mongol prison, is a roll call of heroic figures from Chinese history who chose death over dishonor, culminating in Wen Tianxiang's own defiant assertion of the indestructible nature of moral courage:
天地有正气，杂然赋流形。
Between heaven and earth, there is a righteous energy
That takes on myriad forms and flows through all things.[10]
His equally famous couplet — "Since ancient times, who has escaped death? / Let me but leave a loyal heart to shine in the annals of history" (人生自古谁无死，留取丹心照汗青) — became one of the most quoted lines in the Chinese language, a declaration of moral defiance that has inspired Chinese patriots and revolutionaries for seven centuries.
The fall of the Song to the Mongols in 1279 — the first time in Chinese history that the entire Chinese heartland came under the rule of a non-Chinese dynasty — created a crisis of cultural identity that had profound consequences for Chinese literature. The Song loyalist poets — Wen Tianxiang, Xie Fangde (谢枋得, 1226–1289), Lin Jingxi (林景熙, 1242–1310), and others — expressed this crisis in poetry of searing patriotic anguish, while the intellectuals who chose to serve the new Mongol dynasty — or who simply survived it — were forced to develop new strategies for preserving and transmitting Chinese literary culture under alien rule.[11]
8. Elite Versus Popular Literature: A Widening Divide
One of the most significant developments of the Song dynasty — and one whose consequences extend far beyond the Song itself — was the emergence of a clear and self-conscious distinction between elite and popular literature. Before the Song, this distinction had existed in practice — the literary productions of the educated elite were always different in language, form, and subject matter from the songs, stories, and performances of the common people — but it had not been the subject of systematic critical reflection. During the Song, the growing commercial culture, the expansion of literacy through printing, and the emergence of new popular literary forms (the huaben, the zaju, the popular ci) forced the literary establishment to confront the relationship between their own classical literary culture and the vibrant, commercially successful popular culture that was flourishing in the cities around them.
The elite response to popular literature was complex and often contradictory. On one hand, many elite writers were fascinated by popular culture and drew upon it in their own work: Su Shi used colloquial language in his ci; Lu You recorded folk songs and popular customs in his travel diaries; and many shidafu were avid consumers of popular entertainment, attending storytelling performances and zaju shows in the washe districts. On the other hand, the elite literary establishment maintained a firm distinction between "literature" (文学, wenxue) — which was written in classical Chinese, addressed to an educated audience, and governed by aesthetic and moral standards — and "popular entertainment" (俗文学, su wenxue) — which was written in the vernacular, aimed at a mass audience, and judged by the standards of commercial success.
This distinction had important consequences for the subsequent development of Chinese literature. The great vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties — the Sanguozhi yanyi, the Shuihu zhuan, the Xiyou ji, the Hongloumeng — grew out of the popular storytelling and dramatic traditions that the Song literary establishment had regarded as beneath serious literary attention. These novels were written in the vernacular, employed the narrative conventions of the oral storytelling tradition, and addressed a readership that included both the educated elite and the common people. Their authors — many of whom are anonymous or pseudonymous — occupied an ambiguous position between the elite and popular literary worlds, drawing on the resources of both traditions to create works of extraordinary literary power.
The story of how Chinese vernacular fiction evolved from the humble huaben of the Song storytellers to the supreme achievements of the Ming and Qing novelists is one of the great narratives of world literary history — a narrative that begins in the marketplaces and entertainment districts of Song Hangzhou and culminates, six centuries later, in Cao Xueqin's Hongloumeng. The foundations of that narrative were laid during the Southern Song.
9. Zhu Xi, Philosophy, and Literary Culture
The most influential intellectual figure of the Southern Song — and one of the most influential thinkers in all of Chinese history — was Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200), the Neo-Confucian philosopher whose synthesis of earlier Song philosophical thought into a comprehensive system of metaphysics, ethics, and pedagogy became the orthodox ideology of the Chinese state for the next seven centuries.
Zhu Xi's direct contribution to literature was modest — he was not a major poet or prose stylist, though he wrote competently in both forms. But his indirect influence on Chinese literary culture was immense. His establishment of the "Four Books" (四书, Sishu) — the Daxue (大学, Great Learning), the Zhongyong (中庸, Doctrine of the Mean), the Lunyu (论语, Analerta), and the Mengzi (孟子, Mencius) — as the core curriculum of the examination system meant that every educated Chinese person for the next seven hundred years was trained in a specific set of texts and a specific mode of philosophical thinking that profoundly shaped their literary sensibility.
Zhu Xi's literary criticism — scattered through his philosophical writings, his letters, and his commentaries — emphasized the primacy of moral content over aesthetic form. He argued that the purpose of literature was to "convey the Way" (载道, zai Dao) — to communicate moral truth — and that literary beauty, while not inherently objectionable, was secondary to moral substance and potentially dangerous if it became an end in itself. This view — which carried enormous authority because of Zhu Xi's status as the supreme intellectual arbiter of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy — reinforced the utilitarian conception of literature that had been advanced by Han Yu and Bai Juyi and created a critical climate in which moral seriousness was valued above aesthetic innovation.
The influence of Zhu Xi's literary philosophy was both positive and negative. Positively, it sustained a literary culture in which moral engagement, intellectual depth, and sincerity of feeling were highly valued — qualities that characterize the best Song literature at every level. Negatively, it encouraged a tendency toward didacticism, moral rigidity, and suspicion of aesthetic pleasure that could stifle literary creativity and reduce literature to a vehicle for philosophical instruction. The tension between these positive and negative impulses — between moral seriousness and aesthetic freedom, between literature as a tool of moral cultivation and literature as an autonomous art — remained a central preoccupation of Chinese literary culture throughout the late imperial period.[12]
10. Conclusion: The Song Legacy
The Song dynasty, in its three centuries of literary achievement, created a body of literature that is, in many respects, the richest and most varied in the Chinese tradition. The Northern Song transformed the ci lyric into a vehicle for the full range of human thought and feeling, producing in Su Shi a literary genius of unparalleled breadth and depth. The Southern Song added to this achievement the dimension of patriotic passion and national sorrow, producing in Li Qingzhao, Lu You, and Xin Qiji poets of extraordinary emotional power and formal mastery. The Song prose tradition — the guwen essays, the biji notebooks, the historical and philosophical writings — created a body of non-fictional prose that is among the finest in any language. And the popular literary traditions that emerged during the Song — the huaben storytelling scripts, the zaju plays, the commercial book culture — laid the foundations for the great vernacular novels and dramas that are the supreme achievements of Chinese fiction.
The Song dynasty's literary legacy is, in the end, a legacy of complexity — of a literary culture that was simultaneously elite and popular, philosophical and emotional, morally serious and aesthetically refined, patriotic and cosmopolitan, conservative and innovative. The fall of the Song to the Mongols in 1279 brought this extraordinary civilization to an end, but its literary achievement endured — in the poems, the prose, the stories, and the critical traditions that shaped Chinese literature for the next seven centuries and that continue to shape it today.
The Mongol conquest that ended the Song also created the conditions for the next great phase of Chinese literary development: the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), during which the exclusion of Chinese scholars from political power drove many of the most talented writers into the world of popular entertainment, producing the golden age of Chinese drama and the first great flourishing of Chinese vernacular fiction. That extraordinary transformation is the subject of the chapters that follow.
References
- ↑ James T.C. Liu, China Turning Inward: Intellectual-Political Changes in the Early Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1988), 1–30.
- ↑ Translation adapted from Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, trans., Li Ch'ing-chao: Complete Poems (New York: New Directions, 1979), 21.
- ↑ Translation adapted from Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 588.
- ↑ Kang-i Sun Chang, "Li Qingzhao," in Kang-i Sun Chang and Haun Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 89–106.
- ↑ Translation adapted from Burton Watson, trans., The Old Man Who Does as He Pleases: Selections from the Poetry and Prose of Lu Yu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 96.
- ↑ Michael A. Fuller, Drifting Among Rivers and Lakes: Southern Song Dynasty Poetry and the Problem of Literary History (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 2013), 1–40.
- ↑ Translation adapted from Irving Yucheng Lo and William Schultz, eds., Waiting for the Unicorn: Poems and Lyrics of China's Last Dynasty, 1644–1911 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), cited in Shuen-fu Lin and Stephen Owen, eds., The Vitality of the Lyric Voice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 261.
- ↑ Xiao Chi, The Chinese Garden as Lyric Enclave: A Generic Study of the Story of the Stone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2001), cited alongside Qian Zhongshu 钱锺书, Song shi xuan zhu 宋诗选注 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1958), preface.
- ↑ Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1–50.
- ↑ Translation adapted from Frederick W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 418.
- ↑ Richard L. Davis, Wind Against the Mountain: The Crisis of Politics and Culture in Thirteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1996), 1–30.
- ↑ Daniel K. Gardner, Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects: Canon, Commentary, and the Classical Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1–30.