Chinese literature


The history of Chinese literature extends thousands of years, and begins with the earliest recorded inscriptions, court archives, building to the major works of philosophy and history written during the Axial Age. The Han and Tang dynasties were considered golden ages of poetry, while the Song and Yuan were notable for their lyrics, essays, dramas, and plays. During the Ming and Qing, mature novels were written in written vernacular Chinese, an evolution from the preeminence of Literary Chinese patterned off the language of the Chinese classics. The introduction of widespread woodblock printing during the Tang and the invention of movable type printing by Bi Sheng during the Song rapidly spread written knowledge throughout China. Around the turn of the 20th century, the author Lu Xun is considered an influential voice of vernacular Chinese literature.

Pre-classical period

Formation of the earliest layer of Chinese literature was influenced by oral traditions of different social and professional provenance: cult and lay musical practices, divination, astronomy, ritual, exorcism, etc. An attempt at tracing the genealogy of Chinese literature to religious spells and incantations was made by Liu Shipei.

Classical texts

There is a wealth of early Chinese literature dating from the Hundred Schools of Thought that occurred during the Eastern Zhou dynasty. The most important of these include the Classics of Confucianism, of Daoism, of Mohism, of Legalism, as well as works of military science and Chinese history. Note that, except for the books of poems and songs, most of this literature is philosophical and didactic; there is little in the way of fiction. However, these texts maintained their significance through both their ideas and their prose style.
The Confucian works in particular have been of high importance to Chinese culture and history, as a set of works known as the Four Books and Five Classics were, in the 12th century AD, chosen as the basis for the Imperial examination for any government post. These nine books therefore became the center of the educational system. They have been grouped into two categories: the Five Classics, allegedly commented and edited by Confucius, and the Four Books. The Five Classics are:
  1. the I Ching, or Classic of Changes, a divination manual;
  2. the Classic of Poetry, a collection of poems, folk songs, festival and ceremonial songs, hymns and eulogies;
  3. the Book of Rites or Record of Rites;
  4. the Book of documents, an early Chinese prose collection of documents and speeches allegedly written by rulers and officials of the early Zhou period and earlier;
  5. the Spring and Autumn Annals, a historical record of Confucius' native state, Lu, from 722 to 479 BC.
The Four Books are:
  1. the Analects of Confucius, a book of pithy sayings attributed to Confucius and recorded by his disciples;
  2. the Mencius, a collection of political dialogues;
  3. the Doctrine of the Mean, a book that teaches the path to Confucian virtue; and
  4. the Great Learning, a book about education, self-cultivation and the Dao.
Other important philosophical works include the Mohist Mozi, which taught "inclusive love" as both an ethical and social principle, and Hanfeizi, one of the central Legalist texts.
Important Daoist classics include the Dao De Jing, the Zhuangzi, and the Liezi. Later authors combined Daoism with Confucianism and Legalism, such as Liu An, whose Huainanzi also added to the fields of geography and topography.
Among the classics of military science, The Art of War by Sun Tzu was perhaps the first to outline guidelines for effective international diplomacy. It was also the first in a tradition of Chinese military treatises, such as the Wujing Zongyao and the Huolongjing.

Historical texts, dictionaries and encyclopedias

The Chinese kept consistent and accurate court records, and although their calendars varied from court to court, these disparate records could be aligned without evident contradiction by the year 841 BC, at the beginning of the Gonghe Regency of the Western Zhou dynasty. The earliest known narrative history of China was the Zuo Zhuan, which was compiled no later than 389 BC, and attributed to the blind 5th-century BC historian Zuo Qiuming. The Book of Documents is thought to have been compiled as far back as the 6th century BC, and was certainly compiled by the 4th century BC, the latest date for the writing of the Guodian Chu Slips unearthed in a Hubei tomb in 1993. The Book of Documents included early information on geography in the Yu Gong chapter. The Bamboo Annals found in 281 AD in the tomb of the King of Wei, who was interred in 296 BC, provide another example; however, unlike the Zuo Zhuan, the authenticity of the early date of the Bamboo Annals is in doubt. Another early text was the political strategy book of the Zhan Guo Ce, compiled between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, with partial amounts of the text found amongst the 2nd century BC tomb site at Mawangdui. The oldest extant dictionary in China is the Erya, dated to the 3rd century BC, anonymously written but with later commentary by the historian Guo Pu. Other early dictionaries include the Fangyan by Yang Xiong and the Shuowen Jiezi by Xu Shen. One of the largest was the Kangxi Dictionary compiled by 1716 under the auspices of the Kangxi Emperor ; it provides definitions for over 47,000 characters.
Although court records and other independent records existed beforehand, the definitive work in early Chinese historical writing was the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian written by Han dynasty court historian Sima Qian. This text laid the foundation for Chinese historiography and the multiple official Chinese historical texts compiled for each dynasty thereafter. Sima Qian is often compared to the Greek Herodotus in scope and method, because he covered Chinese history from the mythical Xia dynasty until the contemporary reign of Emperor Wu of Han while retaining an objective and non-biased standpoint. This was often difficult for the official dynastic historians, who used historical works to justify the reign of the current dynasty. He influenced the written works of a number of Chinese historians, including the works of Ban Gu and Ban Zhao in the 1st and 2nd centuries, and even Sima Guang's 11th-century compilation of the Zizhi Tongjian, presented to Emperor Shenzong of Song in 1084 AD. The overall scope of the historiographical tradition in China is termed the Twenty-Four Histories, created for each successive Chinese dynasty up until the Ming dynasty ; China's last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, is not included.
Large encyclopedias were also produced in China through the ages. The Yiwen Leiju encyclopedia was completed by Ouyang Xun in 624 during the Tang dynasty, with aid from scholars Linghu Defen and Chen Shuda. During the Song dynasty, the compilation of the Four Great Books of Song, begun by Li Fang and completed by Cefu Yuangui, represented a massive undertaking of written material covering a wide range of different subjects. This included the Taiping Guangji, the Taiping Yulan, the Wenyuan Yinghua, and the Cefu Yuangui. Although these Song dynasty Chinese encyclopedias featured millions of written Chinese characters each, their aggregate size paled in comparison to the later Yongle Encyclopedia of the Ming dynasty, which contained a total of 50 million Chinese characters. Even this size was trumped by later Qing dynasty encyclopedias, such as the printed the Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China, which featured over 100 million written Chinese characters in over 800,000 pages, printed in 60 different copies using copper-metal Chinese movable type printing. Other great encyclopedic writers include the polymath scientist Shen Kuo and his Dream Pool Essays, the agronomist and inventor Wang Zhen and his Nongshu, and the minor scholar-official Song Yingxing and his Tiangong Kaiwu.

Classical poetry

The rich tradition of Chinese poetry began with two influential collections. In northern China, the Shijing or Classic of Poetry comprises over 300 poems in a variety of styles ranging from those with a strong suggestion of folk music to ceremonial hymns. The word shi has the basic meaning of poem or poetry, as well as its use in criticism to describe one of China's lyrical poetic genres. Confucius is traditionally credited with editing the Shijing. Its stately verses are usually composed of couplets with lines of four characters each, and a formal structure of end rhymes. A number of these early poems establish the later tradition of starting with a description of nature that leads into emotionally expressive statements, known as bi,, or sometime. Associated with what was then considered to be southern China, the Chuci is ascribed to Qu Yuan and his follower Song Yu and is distinguished by its more emotionally intense affect, often full of despair and descriptions of the fantastic. In some of its sections, the Chu Ci uses a six-character per line meter, dividing these lines into couplets separated in the middle by a strong caesura, producing a driving and dramatic rhythm. Both the Shijing and the Chuci have remained influential throughout Chinese history.
During the greater part of China's first great period of unification, begun with the short-lived Qin dynasty and followed by the centuries-long Han dynasty, the shi form of poetry underwent little innovation. But a distinctively descriptive and erudite fu form developed that has been called "rhyme-prose", a uniquely Han offshoot of Chinese poetry's tradition. Equally noteworthy is Music Bureau poetry, collected and presumably refined popular lyrics from folk music. The end of the Han witnesses a resurgence of the shi poetry, with the anonymous 19 Old Poems. This collection reflects the emergence of a distinctive five-character line that later became shi poetry's most common line length. From the Jian'an reign period onward, the five-character line became a focus for innovations in style and theme. The Cao family, rulers of the Wei dynasty during the post-Han Three Kingdoms period, distinguished themselves as poets by writing poems filled with sympathy for the day-to-day struggles of soldiery and the common people. Taoist philosophy became a different, common theme for other poets, and a genre emphasizing true feeling emerged led by Ruan Ji. The landscape genre of Chinese nature poetry emerged under the brush of Xie Lingyun, as he innovated distinctively descriptive and complementary couplets composed of five-character lines. A farmland genre was born in obscurity by Tao Qian also known as Tao Yuanming as he labored in his fields and then wrote extolling the influence of wine. Toward the close of this period in which multiple later-developed themes were first experimented with, the Xiao family of the Southern Liang dynasty engaged in highly refined and often denigrated court-style poetry lushly describing sensual delights as well as the description of objects.
Reunified China's Tang dynasty high culture set a high point for a number of things, including poetry. Various schools of Buddhism flourished as represented by the Chan beliefs of Wang Wei. His quatrains describing natural scenes are world-famous examples of excellence, each couplet conventionally containing about two distinct images or thoughts per line. Tang poetry's big star is Li Bai also pronounced and written as Li Bo, who worked in all major styles, both the more free old style verse as well as the tonally regulated new style verse. Regardless of genre, Tang poets notably strove to perfect a style in which poetic subjects are exposed and evident, often without directly referring to the emotional thrust at hand. The poet Du Fu excelled at regulated verse and use of the seven-character line, writing denser poems with more allusions as he aged, experiencing hardship and writing about it. A parade of great Tang poets also includes Chen Zi'ang, Wang Zhihuan, Meng Haoran, Bai Juyi, Li He, Du Mu, Wen Tingyun, and Li Shangyin, whose poetry delights in allusions that often remain obscure, and whose emphasis on the seven-character line also contributed to the emerging posthumous fame of Du Fu, now ranked alongside Li Bai. The distinctively different ci poetry form began its development during the Tang as Central Asian and other musical influences flowed through its cosmopolitan society.
The Song dynasty, another period of reunification after a brief period of disunity, saw a fresh high culture. Several of its greatest poets were capable government officials, including Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi, and Wang Anshi. The ci form flourished as a few hundred songs became standard templates for poems with distinctive and variously set meters. The free and expressive style of Song high culture has been contrasted with majestic Tang poems. One scholar writes that "it has long been fashionable, ever since the Song itself, for poets and critics to think of the poetry of the Song as stylistically distinct from that of the Tang, and to debate its merits relative to the earlier work." Additional musical influences contributed to the Yuan dynasty's distinctive qu opera culture and spawned the sanqu form of individual poems based on it.
Classical Chinese poetry composition became a conventional skill of the well-educated throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties. Over a million poems have been preserved, including those by women, such as Dong Xiaowan and Liu Rushi, and by multiple other voices. Painter-poets, such as Shen Zhou, Tang Yin, Wen Zhengming, and Yun Shouping, created worthy poems as they combined art, poetry and calligraphy with brush on paper. Poetry composition competitions were socially common. While China's late imperial period is not known for innovative approaches to poetry, the scholar Jonathan Chaves urged that the "sheer quantity of Ming poetry, the quality of so much of it, and its stylistic richness and diversity all cry out for serious attention."