Qīndìng bǔhuì Xiāo Yúncóng Lísāo quántú 欽定補繪蕭雲從離騷全圖
Imperially-Commissioned Supplementary Painting of Xiao Yuncong’s Complete Illustrations of the Lí sāo by 蕭雲從 (original illustrations) and Mén Yìngzhào 門應兆 (supplementary painting)
About the work
A three-juan imperial pictorial Chǔcí, in which the Qiánlóng court reissued the surviving illustrations of the yímín painter Xiāo Yúncóng 蕭雲從 (1596–1673; on the date discrepancy with CBDB see 蕭雲從) — printed in Xiāo’s Lí sāo tú 離騷圖 of 1645 — and supplemented the missing portions with new illustrations executed by court painters under the direction of Mén Yìngzhào 門應兆, in conscious imitation of Lǐ Gōnglín’s 李公麟 Jiǔ gē tú 九歌圖. The completed work contains 155 images: 64 surviving from Xiāo’s original (the Bǔjū / Yúfù combined frontispiece, 9 Jiǔ gē illustrations, and 54 Tiān wèn illustrations), and 91 new images supplied by the court painters (32 for the Lí sāo itself, 9 for Jiǔ zhāng, 5 for Yuǎn yóu, 9 for Jiǔ biàn, 13 for Zhāo hún, 7 for Dà zhāo, and 16 for the xiāng cǎo 香草 fragrant-plant catalog). The project was ordered on Qiánlóng 46/12/15 (1782/1) and submitted on Qiánlóng 49/11 (1784/12).
Tiyao
From the WYG tíyào of 乾隆四十九年十一月 (1784/11):
Your servants etc. respectfully report: the Imperially-Commissioned Supplementary Painting of the Complete Lísāo Illustrations in three juǎn. The original images are by Xiāo Yúncóng of our dynasty; in Qiánlóng 47 (1782) supplementary paintings were ordered. Yúncóng, zì Chǐmù 尺木, was a gòngshēng 貢生 from Dāngtú 當塗.
In examining the preface to the Tiān wèn, it is said: “When Qū Yuán was banished and wandered the mountains and marshes, he saw in Chǔ the temples of the former kings and the ancestral halls of the dukes and ministers, with painted images of heaven and earth, mountains and rivers, divine spirits, marvels and prodigies, ancient sages and worthies, strange creatures, and notable deeds; he wrote on their walls and questioned them in disgust.” So the Chǔ cí arose originally from pictorial art, and later readers, encountering its citations across astronomy, geography, insects, fish, plants, trees, and every wonderful and astonishing thing, felt them all worthy to widen the eyes and ear and to plumb the obscure. They have often, following their own enthusiasms, painted them as illustrations — figures like Lǐ Gōnglín of the Sòng excelled in this — but their illustrations covered only a single piece or chapter, and could not bring out the full state of feeling.
Yúncóng was the first to undertake, on the basis of the zhāngjù division, a comprehensive set of illustrations, then universally praised for skill, engraved and circulated. Yet the original retains only the joint illustration of the Sānlǚ Dàfū 三閭大夫 [Qū Yuán] with Zhèng Zhānyǐn 鄭詹尹 and the Fisherman at the head of the volume; nine illustrations for Jiǔ gē and fifty-four for Tiān wèn. The Lí sāo and Yuǎn yóu illustrations named in the table of contents and fánlì 凡例 (editorial principles) are all missing; for the xiāngcǎo (fragrant-plant) illustration Xiāo himself stated that he had had the intention but had not been able to carry it out. By the standards of the Chǔ cí corpus, the gaps are extensive.
His Imperial Majesty, in moments of leisure, having read it through, considered that — for all the diligence of intent — the omissions could not be overlooked, and so specifically commanded the inner-court ministers to investigate, edit, and supplement: for the Lí sāo itself, dividing the text and analyzing the clauses, they made thirty-two illustrations; for Jiǔ zhāng, nine; for Yuǎn yóu, five; for Jiǔ biàn, nine; for Zhāo hún, thirteen; for Dà zhāo, seven; and for the xiāng cǎo, sixteen. Thereby the depiction of objects and the modeling of spirit are splendidly complete, and not only is each piece traced from beginning to end with no leftover meaning, but Língjūn’s intent can also through this be inferred in its bǐxìng 比興 origins.
We respectfully behold our Great Sage’s diversion in the arts and observation of culture, intent on what is deep and far; and Yúncóng, by the small craft of painting, was favored with imperial regard and made the rough wheel for the great chariot, and so receives lasting glory. Respectfully collated and submitted, eleventh month of Qiánlóng 49 (1784). Chief compilers Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; chief collator Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
Xiāo Yúncóng’s original Lí sāo tú 離騷圖 was completed in yǐyǒu zhōngqiū (Shùnzhì 2, 1645/9 — see Xiāo’s own preface dated to the Mid-Autumn festival of 1645, “the seventh day,” at the Yìng yuǎn táng 應遠堂 of Wànshí Mountain), as an yímín 遺民 work in the bitter aftermath of the Manchu conquest of Nanjing earlier that year. The book entered the imperial library through Qiánlóng’s Sìkùquánshū project in 1781; on Qiánlóng 46/12/15 (1782) the emperor issued an edict noting that “for those who would penetrate the meaning of the classics, one must verify it in detailed images” and ordering the supplementation. The court painter Mén Yìngzhào 門應兆, working from drafts approved by the Nán shū fáng hàn lín 南書房翰林 (Southern-Study academicians), executed the new 91 images in conscious imitation of the brush-manner of Lǐ Gōnglín’s Jiǔ gē tú. Each new image is marked in the table of contents jīn bǔ 今補 (“supplemented now”) to distinguish it from Xiāo’s jiù yǒu 舊有 (“original survivals”).
The structural emphasis on the xiāng cǎo 香草 (fragrant-plant) sequence at the end — sixteen botanical plates, distinguishing the noble plants representing the gentleman from the ignoble ones (which the fán lì expressly excludes from illustration) — places the work in dialogue with the natural-historical strand of Chǔcí commentary represented by Wú Rénjié’s KR4a0005. The decision to follow Zhū Xī’s reading rather than Wáng Yì’s is made explicit in Xiāo’s original preface: “I have humbly followed the master from Zǐyáng [Zhū Xī] in his commentary.” (余不敏抒毫補綴一宗紫陽之注).
The political subtext — Xiāo’s Lí sāo tú as an yímín lament for the fallen Míng, then taken up by the Qiánlóng court and “completed” by court painters — is unstated in the tíyào but is the central scholarly interest of the work for modern art-historical reception.
Translations and research
- Bā Tóng 巴桐 et al., eds. 1986. Lí sāo tú: Xiāo Yúncóng huì běn 離騷圖: 蕭雲從繪本. Tianjin renmin meishu — modern facsimile of Xiāo’s 1645 original.
- Cahill, James. 1982. The Compelling Image: Nature and Style in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Painting. HUP — discusses Xiāo Yúncóng’s painting and the Gū-shú school.
- Wu, Hung. 1996. The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. UChP — discusses pictorial Chǔ cí in the Lǐ Gōng-lín lineage.
- Schimmelpfennig, Michael. 2016. The Songs of Chu (Chuci): A Bibliography. University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Other points of interest
This is one of the very few pictorial works in the Chǔ cí sub-section of the Sìkù jí bù — the section is otherwise entirely text-and-commentary — and its inclusion is a small marker of the Qiánlóng court’s willingness to elevate technical book-illustration into the imperial literary canon. The court’s editorial insertion of fresh sequences (notably the 32-plate Lí sāo and the 16-plate xiāng cǎo) effectively re-authored a yímín book as an imperially-validated vision of the same poems, an act of cultural absorption characteristic of late-Qián-lóng politics.
The Sìkù tíyào opens by quoting Xiāo’s own Tiān wèn preface to the effect that the Chǔ cí itself originated as a poetic response to mural images in the Chǔ ancestral halls — making the pictorial mode the work’s original condition rather than a derivative one. This is a sharp piece of literary-theoretical framing on the part of either Xiāo or the Qiánlóng editors.