154 t He siX Dy na s t i e s
and his friend Hui Shi look at the fish swimming in the water and hold a famous
discussion about “whether one knows if the fish are happy.” The irony here, of
course, is how the fish might be swimming happily under the ice while completely
ignorant of their menacing observer and the danger they face.
The political situation in the Northern Zhou court toward the last years of Yu
Xin’s life was indeed unstable, as the ambitious minister Yang Jian (Emperor Wen
of the Sui [r. 581–604]) garnered all power into his own hands. In 579, Yu Xin
retired because of illness. In the following year, several of his former imperial
patrons, including the prince of Teng, who had written a preface to Yu Xin’s col-
lection of literary writings, were executed on Yang Jian’s orders. In 581, Yang Jian
forced the abdication of the last Northern Zhou emperor and established the Sui
dynasty (581–618).
In the autumn of 581, the Sui emperor commanded a military campaign against
the Chen dynasty in the south. Yu Xin’s friend Liu Zhen (d. 598), who had also
served under the Liang in his youth, was sent along as the commander-in-chief ’s
secretary. The following quatrain, “In Response to Director Liu Zhen,” was ap-
parently composed on this occasion. If so, it would have been one of Yu Xin’s last
datable poems, for he died soon afterward in the same year.
In this quatrain of twenty characters, there are two place-names (which take
up one-fourth of the poem): Guangling and the Fortress of the Shooting Star. The
Fortress of the Shooting Star was to the west of Jiankang (modern Nanjing), the
capital of the Liang, where Yu Xin had spent most of his youthful years. Guangling
(modern Yangzhou) is located just to the north of the Yangtze River, very close to
Jiankang. It had been conquered by the Zhou army two years earlier. Yu Xin, an
old man now, did not take part in the military campaign undertaken in 581, and his
description of Guangling and the Fortress of the Shooting Star was, as indicated by
the title of the poem, imagined from his friend Liu Zhen’s perspective:C 7. 1 0
In Response to Director Liu Zhen 和劉儀同臻 (hè liú yí tóng zhēn)To the south I climbed the bank of Guangling, 南登廣陵岸 (nán dēng guăng líng àn)
And turned my head toward the Fortress of the
Shooting Star. 廻首落星城 (huí shŏu luò xīng chéng)
Who would have thought of facing the former
shore again 不言臨舊浦 (bù yán lín jiù pŭ)
Only to see beacon fires illuminating the River? 烽火照江明 (fēng huŏ zhào jiāng míng)
[XQHWJNBCS 3:2401]The first two lines are directly taken from a well-known poem, “Qi ai” (Seven
Sorrows), written by Wang Can (177–217). In 192, Wang Can was forced to flee the
western capital Chang’an and go to the south during the chaos of the civil war. On
his way there, he observed the devastation caused by years of fighting; before going
on, he turned back and looked at the once prosperous metropolis once more: