The Book of Songs & Classical Foundations

Four bodies of work matter most: the Book of Songs, the Songs of the South, the poetry of the Han dynasty, and the writers of the divided centuries between Han and Tang. Each contributed something the later tradition could not have done without.

What the Book of Songs actually is

The Shijing contains 305 pieces, conventionally dated between roughly the eleventh and the seventh centuries BCE, which makes it one of the oldest surviving poetry collections anywhere. It is divided into three parts. The Airs of the States are 160 shorter pieces attributed to fifteen regions. The Odes, in two groups, are longer court pieces. The Hymns are ritual songs used in ancestral sacrifice.

The material is remarkably varied. There are songs of courtship and of abandonment, complaints about conscription and taxation, harvest songs, dynastic legends, a woman warning her lover to be careful of the neighbours' talk, and a soldier remembering that the willows were soft when he marched away and it is snowing now that he returns. That last comparison of the departure and the return became one of the most quoted moments in the language.

Who compiled it, and the Confucius story

Tradition says Confucius selected the 305 from a pool of some three thousand. This is almost certainly not true. Confucius quotes the collection as something already fixed and familiar, the number 305 appears to have been stable before his lifetime, and the story of the selection appears only centuries later in Sima Qian.

What is true is that Confucius treated the collection as essential education, said that without studying it one had nothing to say, and used it as a common reference in conversation. That endorsement is why the collection survived, became a classic, and was memorised by every educated person for the next two millennia.

The commentaries and how the text reached us

Four schools of interpretation existed in the Han. Three were lost. The fourth, the Mao tradition, is the version everyone reads, and it comes with a preface attached to each poem explaining what the poem is really about.

These prefaces are the source of the political reading described elsewhere on this site. A song that reads plainly as a woman missing a man is glossed as praise of a virtuous consort or criticism of a negligent duke. Modern scholarship generally sets the prefaces aside and reads the poems as what they appear to be, but it is worth knowing that for most of Chinese history the prefaces were read as inseparable from the text. When a Tang poet alludes to a Song, he is often alluding to the Mao reading of it rather than to the plain sense.

The six principles

The Great Preface names six terms, which later readers organised into three genres and three techniques. The genres are the airs, the odes and the hymns. The techniques are fu, direct exposition; bi, comparison of the kind English calls simile or metaphor; and xing, which has no European equivalent and has been argued about ever since.

An xing is an opening image, usually from nature, that is not a metaphor for what follows and is not simply scene-setting either. Ospreys call on an islet, and then the poem speaks of a man seeking a wife. The relation is not stated and does not reduce to comparison. The best modern account is that the natural image establishes a mood and a season and a rightness of pairing, into which the human matter is then placed. Whether early audiences experienced it that way or whether the images were simply conventional song openings is genuinely unresolved.

The Songs of the South

The Chuci is the second foundation and it is completely different in character. It comes from the southern state of Chu, its language is more ornate, its lines are longer and irregular, and its world is populated by spirits, shamans, magical plants and journeys through the sky.

The central figure is Qu Yuan, traditionally a loyal minister slandered at court who drowned himself in the Miluo river, and who is commemorated by the Dragon Boat Festival. Whether he wrote the poems attributed to him is disputed and the attributions are certainly not all reliable. The long poem Li Sao, usually rendered as Encountering Sorrow, is the tradition's central text of political disappointment: the speaker, rejected by a corrupt court, travels through the heavens seeking a worthy partner and finds none.

For readers interested in Taoism this collection matters a great deal. The shamanic flight, the ascent through the heavens, the herbs and the encounters with divinities feed directly into later poetry about immortals and into the imagery of internal alchemy. The far journey of the Chu poems is one of the ancestors of the Taoist celestial journey.

Han poetry and the five-character line

The Han inherited both traditions and produced something new. The Music Bureau collected or composed yuefu, ballad-like poems often narrative, often in the voice of an ordinary person, dealing with war, poverty, abandoned wives and orphaned children. These are direct, unornamented and frequently harsh.

Out of this milieu came the five-character line, which would remain the dominant form for the next thousand years. The anonymous set known as the Nineteen Old Poems, probably late Han, is where the form arrives fully formed: short poems on separation, the shortness of life, the traveller far from home, the grass on the graves. Their tone is plain, unliterary and unusually moving, and later poets returned to them constantly as a standard of unforced feeling.

The divided centuries

Between the fall of Han in 220 and the reunification under Sui in 589, China was divided and often at war. This was not a fallow period for poetry. The Jian'an writers around the Cao family made the personal lyric respectable. Ruan Ji and the group associated with the Bamboo Grove wrote obliquely under political danger, and the habit of encoded complaint dates largely from them.

Two developments matter most for what follows. Xie Lingyun made landscape itself a subject, describing terrain in detail for its own sake rather than as background. And Tao Yuanming resigned from office, went home to farm, and wrote about fields, wine, chrysanthemums and the relief of having stopped. His plain style was not much admired in his own time and became, several centuries later, one of the most influential bodies of work in the tradition.

Tao Yuanming and the reclusive ideal

Tao Yuanming deserves separate treatment because of how much later writing depends on him. He is the model for the scholar who withdraws, and the model matters because withdrawal in the Chinese context was never simply private. An educated man was supposed to serve. Going home was a statement about the state of the times, and everyone read it that way.

His poems are honest in a way that is easy to miss. He records that the farming went badly, that he was often hungry, that he drank too much, and that he was not certain he had chosen rightly. That mixture of principled withdrawal and admitted difficulty is what makes him credible, and it is why the ideal he founded is more interesting than a straightforward pastoral would have been.

How the classics were held in memory

It is difficult to overstate how completely educated Chinese held this material. The Book of Songs was memorised entire. Candidates for office were expected to produce apt quotations under examination conditions and in ordinary official correspondence.

This changes how you should read later poetry. When a Tang or Song poet uses a phrase from the Songs, he is not showing off obscure learning; he is using something his readers knew as well as he did, in the way an English writer might once have used a line of the Psalms. The allusive density that looks forbidding to us was, for its intended readers, the ordinary texture of educated speech.

Reading the foundations today

If you want to approach this material in translation, the Book of Songs is best sampled rather than read straight through, since the hymns and court odes are of limited interest to most modern readers while the airs are immediately accessible. The Songs of the South rewards patience but is genuinely strange, and a translation with good notes is close to essential.

The Nineteen Old Poems are the easiest entry point in the whole classical corpus and require almost no background. Tao Yuanming translates well. Between them these two bodies of work give you the plain register of the tradition, which is a useful counterweight to the impression that classical Chinese poetry is uniformly ornate.

Key points

• The Book of Songs is a collection of 305 early songs in three sections, and its survival as a classic owes much to Confucius treating it as essential education.
• The Mao prefaces attached political readings to the poems, and for most of Chinese history those readings were taken as part of the text.
• The technique called xing, an opening natural image that is neither metaphor nor mere setting, has no European equivalent and remains disputed.
• The Songs of the South supplied the shamanic flight and celestial journey that later Taoist poetry and alchemical imagery draw on.
• The five-character line emerged in the Han, and the anonymous Nineteen Old Poems set a standard of plain unforced feeling that poets returned to for a thousand years.
• Tao Yuanming founded the model of principled withdrawal, and his admissions of hunger and doubt are what make the model credible.