P e n ta s y l l a biC Sh i P oe t ry : ne w t o P i C s 155
To the south I climbed the slope of Ba Mound
and turned my head to gaze on Chang’an.
And I understood why someone wrote “Falling Stream”—
I gasped and felt that pain within.4Ba Mound (Baling) was the tomb of Emperor Wen of the Western Han (r. 179–157
b.C.e.), and the allusion to his reign, a period characterized by peace and pros-
perity, was intended to bring out a poignant contrast with the present state of
Chang’an. “Xia quan” (Falling Stream) is the title of a poem from the Shijing (The
Book of Poetry) that, according to the traditional commentary, expresses a longing
for a wise king:
Biting chill, that falling stream
that soaks the clumps of asphodel.
O how I lie awake and sigh,
thinking of Zhou’s capital.5Yu Xin’s quatrain is therefore like a textual set of Chinese boxes, with one box
containing another containing yet another. We should keep in mind, however, that
these literary echoes would have been so obvious to Yu Xin’s contemporaries or
any educated premodern Chinese reader that the quatrain, rich with associations,
would have remained transparent.
Just as Wang Can had looked back at Chang’an from Ba Mound, Yu Xin imag-
ined his friend ascending the riverbank at Guangling to gaze on the Fortress of
the Shooting Star, which was an indirect way of referring to the old Liang capital,
Jiankang. And yet, looking through historical sources, we find that the Shooting
Star was not a walled city (fortress) after all; there was a Hill of the Shooting Star to
the west of Jiankang, and that was the very place where the Liang troops had fought
against and eventually overpowered Hou Jing’s rebel army. As a matter of fact, the
Liang general who had set up a camp at the Hill of the Shooting Star was none
other than Chen Baxian, who later forced the abdication of the last Liang emperor
and founded the Chen dynasty. Was Yu Xin’s choice of place-name an acknowledg-
ment of the irony of history? Or was it simply a way to avoid a painful direct refer-
ence to Jiankang? Or was it because the verbal image of the shooting star matched
so beautifully with the real beacon fires raging along the Yangtze River?
In many ways, the city of Jiankang was indeed a Fortress of the Shooting Star,
whose light, although brilliant, was transient in the course of human history.
Remaining the capital of the south for three centuries, it was once the “jewel in
the crown of south China’s commercial empire,” whose population “topped one
million individuals, including Han Chinese, aboriginal peoples, and foreigners
(especially merchants and members of the Buddhist Sangha).”6 During the long,
peaceful, and prosperous reign under Xiao Gang’s father, Jiankang had reached a
dazzling height of cultural glory. But even in Yu Xin’s day, Jiankang had already
lost its former splendor; devastated by the Hou Jing Rebellion, its light had long
dimmed. What Yu Xin did not know was that, eight years after his death, following