156 t He siX Dy na s t i e s
the conquest of the Chen in 589, an edict by Emperor Wen of the Sui ordered the
destruction of the entire city of Jiankang: “its walls, palaces, temples and houses
were to be destroyed and the land returned to agriculture.”7 Yu Xin’s quatrain was
prophetic in a way that he would never have wanted it to be. The star fell from
heaven; once the raging beacon fires died out, it would be dark.
From the time he left Jiangling in 554 until his death in 581, as far as we can tell
from the historical sources, Yu Xin not only never returned to the south, but never
even got as close to Jiankang as Guangling. The quatrain, one of his last, envisions
his old capital illuminated by a blazing light before being engulfed by darkness.
The pathos lies not only in seeing one’s hometown torn apart by war and destruc-
tion, but also in witnessing the fall of an empire and the end of an age.
The Chinese like to situate a poem in the context of a poet’s life and times:
indeed, without the background information, we would never have known what a
poignant poem “In Response to Director Liu Zhen” is, and how much emotional
power, intensified by restraint, is packed into a quatrain of twenty words. Yu Xin
was the last of the Southern Dynasties masters. It would soon be the Tang, the
golden age of Chinese poetry.
Xiaofei Tiannotes- Stephen Owen, trans. and ed., An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New
York: Norton, 1996), 326. - Cynthia Chennault, “Odes on Objects and Patronage During the Southern Qi,” in Studies in
Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History: In Honor of Richard B. Mather and Donald
Holzman, ed. Paul W. Kroll and David R. Knechtges (Provo, Utah: T’ang Studies Society, 2003),
- Kang-i Sun Chang, Six Dynasties Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986),
- Wang Can, “Qi ai” (Seven Sorrows), in Owen, Anthology of Chinese Literature, 252.
- “Xia quan” (Falling Stream), in Owen, Anthology of Chinese Literature, 253.
- Shufen Liu, “Jiankang and the Commercial Empire of the Southern Dynasties: Change and
Continuity in Medieval Chinese Economic History,” in Culture and Power in the Reconstitution of the
Chinese Realm: 200–600, ed. Scott Pearce, Audrey Shapiro, and Patricia Ebrey (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Asia Center Press, 2001), 35–36. - Arthur F. Wright, “The Sui Dynasty (581–617),” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 3,
Sui and T’ang China: 589–906, Part 1, ed. Denis C. Twitchett (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979), 112.
suggest eD reaDingse ng l i sH
Birrell, Anne M., trans. New Songs from a Jade Terrace: An Anthology of Early Chinese Love Poetry.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
Chang, Kang-i Sun. Six Dynasties Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Chennault, Cynthia. “Odes on Objects and Patronage During the Southern Qi.” In Studies in
Early Medieval Chinese Literature and Cultural History: In Honor of Richard B. Mather and
Donald Holzman, edited by Paul W. Kroll and David R. Knechtges, 331–398. Provo, Utah:
T’ang Studies Society, 2003.