Fānghú cúngǎo 方壺存稿
The Surviving Drafts of the Square-Pot Recluse by 汪莘 (zhuàn 撰)
About the work
A 4-juan reconstructed collection of the verse and prose of Wāng Shēn 汪莘 (1155–1227), a bùyī commoner of Xiūníng (southern Anhuī) who in the Jiādìng era three times memorialised the throne by fēngshì and, when his memorials went unheeded, withdrew to the Liǔ Stream and built his hermitage Fānghú (“square pot”). Juan 1: prose (shū, biàn, xù, shuō, gēxíng); juan 2–3: gǔjīntǐ poems; juan 4: shīyú (cí). Three prefaces, by Chéng Bì 程珌 (Duānpíng 2 = 1235), Sūn Róngsǒu 孫嶸叟 (Xiánchún xīnwèi = 1271) and Wáng Yīnglín 王應麟. As the cúngǎo (“surviving draft”) title indicates, this is what his descendants Wāng Xún 汪循 et al. were able to recover from family stocks after the original — circulated separately in his lifetime, including in copies made for prefectural archives — was dispersed.
Tiyao
We respectfully observe that the Fānghú cúngǎo in four juan was composed by Wāng Shēn of the Sòng. Shēn’s zì was Shūgēng; he was a native of Xiūníng. In the Jiādìng era, as a commoner, he submitted fēngshì (sealed memorials); when these were not used, he retreated and built a residence on the Liǔ Stream, walling it off in a square stream-bed, and styled himself Fānghú jūshì. The first juan is for shū, biàn, xù, shuō, and verse-songs (gēxíng); the second and third juan are gǔjīntǐ poems; the fourth is shīyú (i.e. cí). At the front are three prefaces by Chéng Bì 珌, Sūn Róngsǒu 嶸叟, and Wáng Yīnglín 應麟. Shēn was on cordial terms with Zhūzǐ (Zhū Xī) and Zhēn Déxiù 真德秀; yet at the head of the collection his Cí huìān Zhū shìjiǎng shū (declining Zhū Xī’s invitation) repeatedly takes Zhū Xī to task for “harmonising the two palaces” — even saying that his “slight delay in jiànmíng not only fails the Way of the present age but fails the Way of all later ages”: his words are searching and unbending, regulating his friends in good — not the words of a man who courted recommendation. Zhūzǐ’s reply we have not seen; but in the collection there are two letters from Zhū Xī to Shēn, one of which warns him sharply against being too fond of lùnshuō and over-attached to wénzhāng. Looking at the present collection, the prose pieces are all sweeping and unrestrained, of distinctive qì; the verse derives from Lǐ Bái 李白 in source, but his natural endowment is not as exalted, so he often falls into Lú Tóng 盧仝’s mode — not a balanced note, but not vulgar either. His shīyú (cí) too were the work of a master-hand: in his life he most loved Sū Shì 蘇軾, Zhū Xīzhēn 朱希真 (Dūnrú 敦儒), and Xīn Qìjí 辛棄疾, calling them the “three transformations of cí”, and his own pieces often imitate their manner — striving for the rough-and-bold, somewhat hampered by the genre’s habits, but in the main spacious and worth reading. He was indeed a remarkable man of the Southern Sòng. At the end of the collection a letter by Xú Yí 徐誼 records that the prefecture circulated a directive ordering the local clerks to copy out his writings — proving that a complete collection was current at his time. After many years it was scattered and lost; his descendant Wāng Xún 汪循 and others again gathered what survived and transmitted it; hence the title cúngǎo (“surviving draft”). The transmitted copies vary among themselves at many points — the cause is unclear, but presumably each line of his descendants did its own collation, and so some additions and shifts could not be avoided. Shēn made his name through his fēngshì memorials. Sūn Róngsǒu’s preface, written in the xīnwèi of Xiánchún (1271), already says “the three memorials cannot be seen” — the original drafts had been destroyed at the time, and the collection accordingly does not preserve them. Reverently collated, ninth month of Qiánlóng 43 (1778). Editor-in-chief Jì Yún, with Lù Xīxióng and Sūn Shìyì; chief proofreader Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
The Fānghú cúngǎo is a representative late-Sòng biéjí of the yìmín commoner-poet type — a bùyī who refused examinations, memorialised the throne directly, and lived as a literary recluse in close (and frank) contact with the Dàoxué establishment. The hardest dating evidence is the three prefaces: Chéng Bì 1235, Sūn Róngsǒu 1271, Wáng Yīnglín c. 1271 (the last preface co-dated zhòngguāng yèqià by the Tàisuì cyclical name, which signals the year xīnwèi). The textual history is fluid: the tíyào notes that the variants among transmitted copies cannot be easily resolved and were probably the result of multiple parallel descendant-line redactions. The three suppressed fēngshì memorials — already gone by 1271 — would, had they survived, have been the principal historical-source value of the collection; their loss is one of the more grievous in the Lǐzōng-era bùyī corpus. Wāng Shēn’s frank letter to Zhū Xī (preserved at the start of the collection) is, separately, an unusual document of independent commoner critique of the Dàoxué establishment from a near-contemporary. The notBefore / notAfter dates here use the author’s career bracket: c. 1188 (his earliest Jiādìng-era memorialising) to 1227 (death). CBDB id 27722; Sòng shǐ has no biography. Wilkinson’s Chinese History references the yìmín / bùyī poetic strand generally.
Translations and research
- Lín Bóqiān 林伯謙, “Wāng Shēn shī jí qí Dào-jiā sī-xiǎng 汪莘詩及其道家思想” (in various Sòng-poetry conference volumes from the 1990s onwards) — situates Wāng’s poetic stance in relation to Dào-jiā / Quánzhēn currents in late-Sòng Anhuī.
- Discussions of Wāng Shēn’s letters to Zhū Xī appear in standard surveys of Zhū Xī’s correspondence (e.g. Chén Lái 陳來’s Zhū-zǐ shū-xìn biān-nián kǎo).
Other points of interest
Wāng Shēn’s self-description in the Cí huìān Zhū shìjiǎng shū — that the responsibility of those who hold the Way is to act in time and that delay is unforgivable — is a striking commoner challenge to the most senior figure of the Dàoxué establishment. The fact that Zhū Xī’s reply has not been preserved (or transmitted) is itself revealing.
Links
- Sìkù quánshū tíyào (juan 162, jíbù biéjí lèi sān).
- CBDB id 27722 (Wāng Shēn).