Chǔ cí 楚辭
Songs of Chu by 屈原 (attributed), 宋玉 (attributed), 王逸 (編)
About the work
The Chǔ cí 楚辭 (Songs of Chu / Songs of the South) is the second great anthology of ancient Chinese verse after the Shī 詩. It collects late Warring-States and Hàn poetry in the sāo 騷 / zhāohún 招魂 idiom — long, flexible, irregularly metered lines marked by the caesura particle xī 兮 and a vocabulary saturated with the flora, fauna, and shamanic geography of the southern state of Chǔ 楚. The received seventeen-section corpus took shape in two stages: a first compilation by Liú Xiàng 劉向 (79–8 BCE) drawn from the imperial library, and the present recension edited and annotated by Wáng Yì 王逸 (fl. 89–158) in the Eastern Hàn, whose Chǔ cí zhāng jù 楚辭章句 (= KR4a0002) carried the text into the manuscript and print tradition. This Kanripo file ([[KR4a0001]]) carries the bare text in TLS (Thesaurus Linguae Sericae) base, divided into ten physical files; the second half of the seventeen-section corpus (惜誓, 招隱士, 七諫, 哀時命, 九懷, 九歎, 九思) is concatenated into file _010.txt after 大招.
Abstract
The seventeen received sections, in Wáng Yì’s order, are: Lí sāo 離騷 (Encountering Sorrow), Jiǔ gē 九歌 (Nine Songs), Tiān wèn 天問 (Heavenly Questions), Jiǔ zhāng 九章 (Nine Avowals), Yuǎn yóu 遠遊 (Far Journey), Bǔ jū 卜居 (Divining Where to Dwell), Yú fù 漁父 (The Fisherman), Jiǔ biàn 九辯 (Nine Arguments, attributed to Sòng Yù 宋玉), Zhāo hún 招魂 (Summoning the Soul), Dà zhāo 大招 (The Great Summons), Xī shì 惜誓 (Lament for the Pledge, attributed to Jiǎ Yì 賈誼), Zhāo yǐn shì 招隱士 (Summoning the Recluse, attributed to Huáinán Xiǎo Shān 淮南小山), Qī jiàn 七諫 (Seven Remonstrances, by Dōngfāng Shuò 東方朔), Āi shí mìng 哀時命 (Grieving the Times, by Yán Jì 嚴忌), Jiǔ huái 九懷 (Nine Yearnings, by Wáng Bāo 王褒), Jiǔ tàn 九歎 (Nine Sighs, by Liú Xiàng 劉向), and Jiǔ sī 九思 (Nine Reflections, by Wáng Yì himself). The first ten — Lí sāo through Dà zhāo — are the pre-Hàn / early-Hàn core; the remaining seven are Hàn additions composed in conscious imitation of Qū Yuán’s voice.
The dating bracket reflects the received recension, not any single poem: Lí sāo and the other Qū Yuán pieces are conventionally placed in the late 4th–early 3rd century BCE (Qū Yuán’s dates are traditionally given as ca. 343–278 BCE, though firm dates are not recoverable); the latest stratum, Wáng Yì’s own Jiǔ sī, dates to the mid-second century CE. Authorship of the early pieces is heavily contested: orthodox tradition since Sīmǎ Qiān (Shǐ jì 84) ascribes Lí sāo, Tiān wèn, the Jiǔ zhāng group, and most of Jiǔ gē to Qū Yuán, with Jiǔ biàn and Zhāo hún assigned variously to Sòng Yù 宋玉 (Wáng Yì’s view) or to Qū Yuán himself; modern scholarship treats the attributions as a partly mythologized framework constructed by Hàn editors. The sections themselves preserve heterogeneous southern ritual material, court lament, and cosmological catechism whose textual histories diverged early.
The text was canonized as the founding work of the cífù 辭賦 tradition and read for two millennia along two competing interpretive lines: the orthodox political-allegorical reading (Qū Yuán as the loyal slandered minister) and a ritual / shamanic reading (the Jiǔ gē and Zhāo hún as séance liturgies), revived by twentieth-century scholarship.
For the dating window adopted in the frontmatter (−300 / 158), see Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, §58.6.3.2 Chǔ cí; for the formation of the anthology and the controversies around Qū Yuán authorship, see the introduction to Williams (2022) and Du Heng (2019). The bare text in this file should be read in concert with the major commentaries also in the corpus: Wáng Yì’s Zhāng jù KR4a0002, Hóng Xīngzǔ’s Bǔ zhù KR4a0003, and Zhū Xī’s Jí zhù KR4a0004.
Translations and research
- David Hawkes, tr. 1985 (rev. ed.; orig. 1959). The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets. Penguin. The standard complete English translation, with extensive introductions to each section.
- Nicholas Morrow Williams, ed. and tr. 2022. Elegies of Chu: An Anthology of Early Chinese Poetry. OUP.
- Nicholas Morrow Williams. 2025. Dialogues in the Dark: Interpreting “Heavenly Questions” Across Two Millennia. HUP.
- Martin Kern et al., eds. 2023. Qu Yuan and the Chuci: New Approaches. Brill.
- Heng Du. 2019. “The Author’s Two Bodies: The Death of Qu Yuan and the Birth of Chuci zhangju 楚辭章句.” T’oung Pao 105: 259–314.
- Laurence A. Schneider. 2020 (1980). A Madman of Chu: The Chinese Myth of Loyalty and Dissent. UCP.
- Cui Fuzhang 崔富章 and Li Daming 李大明, chief eds. 2003. Chǔ cí jí jiào jí shì 楚辭集校集釋. 4 vols. Hubei jiaoyu (the principal modern variorum).
- Jiang Liangfu 姜亮夫. 1983. Chǔ cí tōng gù 楚辭通故. 4 vols. Qi-Lu.
- Michael Schimmelpfennig. 2016. The Songs of Chu (Chuci): A Bibliography. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Other points of interest
The TLS-base file preserves dense source-tracking markers (# src: CC LISAO 01:02; SBBY 10; Jin 03; Huang 01; Fu 29; tr. Hawkes 68; You 18) referencing the Sì bù bèi yào edition, Jīn Kāichéng 金開誠, Huáng Língēng 黃靈庚, Fù Xī Rěn 傅錫壬, Hawkes’ translation, and Yóu Guó’ēn 游國恩’s commentaries. These make the file usable as a research-grade base text for cross-edition comparison.