Beginning in the Tang dynasty (618–907), new music from Central Asia began
entering China and soon became all the rage at the cosmopolitan Tang court and
in Tang urban culture. From the lyrics set to this so-called banquet music (yanyue),
there arose a new poetic genre, the ci (song lyric). Characterized by uneven line
lengths and strictly determined rhyme and tone schemes, this genre developed
into a major alternative to shi poetry during the Song dynasty, when it is tradition-
ally thought to have reached its height.
Early song lyrics were associated with women and the entertainment quar-
ters, where courtesans sang the popular new music. These female entertainers
were well trained in poetry and music and enjoyed extensive social and literary
interaction with intellectuals and poets. Courtesans often set to music and per-
formed the works of well-known poets, but they also performed their own songs
and exchanged poems with the literati in their circles. This “feminine” connection
played an important role in setting the ci’s thematic range and made problematic
its legitimacy as a genre for serious literary pursuit. It also makes the ci a particu-
larly interesting genre from the point of view of feminism and gender studies.1
The predominance of feminine themes in early ci meant that a female courtesan
might be found singing the female-voiced song of a male poet, whose work, in
turn, drew on female voices in the tradition as well as on male imitations of those
voices.
Although its lines may be uneven, the ci is far from free verse. The poems were
written to hundreds of tune patterns, each of which strictly determined the num-
ber of characters per line, the placement of rhymes, and the position of tones.
Originally the ci were actually sung to these tunes, but eventually the tunes them-
selves were lost, and all that remained were the hundreds of ci patterns with their
many variations. To this day, one speaks of “filling in the words” to a song lyric
(tian ci) according to the matrix associated with its tune title. The earliest ci poems
evince a thematic relationship to their tune titles (for example, a poem to the tune
“Willow Branch” is at some level about willows), but later ci are usually totally un-
related to the subject of the original tune.
Another name for the ci is chang duan ju (literally, long and short lines). The
uneven lines of the ci are able to accommodate a larger number of colloquial ele-
ments and xuzi (function words [ literally, empty words]) and tend to employ more
continuous syntax than their shi counterparts. These long and short lines origi-
nally must have reflected the structure of the new music, perhaps corresponding
❀ 12 ❀
Ci Poetry
Short Song Lyrics (Xiaoling)