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澗泉集

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Text ID
KR4d0342
Date
1180–1224
Dynasty
宋

Jiànquán jí 澗泉集

Collected works of [Hán] Jiànquán by 韓淲 (撰)

About the work

Twenty-juan poetry collection — almost entirely verse, with two epigraphic inscriptions and a single drafted decree appended — by Hán Biāo 韓淲 (Jiànquán 澗泉, 1160–1224), Yánlíng 嚴陵 (now Tónglú 桐廬, Zhèjiāng) man and son of the Northern-Sòng-revival historian Hán Yuánjí 韓元吉 (Nánjiàn 南澗, 1118–1187). Lost from the public book-trade after the Sòng — Sòngshǐ yìwénzhì and Wénxiàn tōngkǎo both fail to record it — and recovered by the Sìkù editors from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典. The Sìkù salvage yielded some 2,400 shī poems and 79 cí lyrics, plus the appended documents.

Tiyao

A respectful submission. Jiànquán jí, twenty juan, by the Sòng [author] Hán Biāo. Biāo’s Jiànquán rìjì 澗泉日記 has already been recorded; this is his collected poetry. Biāo’s verse falls a little short of his father’s, but its springs lie in the family learning and is therefore not mere ornament. His contemporary Zhào Fān 趙蕃 (style Zhāngquán 章泉) was a famed poet, and the two were paired and called the “Two Quán” 二泉 — Lǐ Gǒng’s 李龏 preface to Duānpíng shījuān speaks of “Masters Zhāngquán and Jiànquán,” and Fāng Huí’s 方回 verse “In Shàngráo there are Two Quán” refers to Fān and Biāo. Yet his collection has rarely circulated in the world: Wénxiàn tōngkǎo and Sòngshǐ yìwénzhì both fail to record it, while Fāng Huí in Yíngkuí lǜsuí 瀛奎律髓 ranked it very high — the saying that “Hán Jiànquán is no empty name” comes from him, and he singled out lines like “his family-poor Cold-Food, ever a clear day” 人家寒食常晴日 and “village elder’s spring outing, near to noon” 野老春游近午天; even so the works he managed to anthologize were few. Dài Fùgǔ’s 戴復古 elegy for Biāo has the line “Three pieces of last verse remain — let the histories transmit them,” with Dài’s own note that “Biāo at his death wrote three poems”; and the recent Sòngshī jìshì of Lì È 厲鶚, which gathered widely, recorded only the two beginning “What is the man of Shāngshān” and “What is the man of Táoyuán” — the third, “What is the man of Lùmén,” is lost. Biāo’s poems and prose, then, have lain submerged for a long time. We have now drawn from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn some 2,400-odd poems and 79 lyrics, ordering them in twenty juan; we have also recovered one drafted decree and two inscriptions, appended at the back. The “What is the man of Lùmén” piece, however, cannot be found, and we know that much else is missing — yet what we have is already a great abundance compared with the few stray fragments preserved elsewhere. Reading his Jiànquán rìjì one sees that Biāo had a deep grasp of literary craft, that his conduct was clean and lofty, that he was indifferent to honour and gain and devoted his whole strength to poetry: hence even after the ravages of loss, what survives is still this rich. Submitted reverentially, Qiánlóng 46, ninth month [October–November 1781]. Editor-in-chief Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì; chief collator Lù Fèichí.

Abstract

Hán Biāo’s father Hán Yuánjí (compiler of Nánjiàn jiǎyǐ gǎo KR4d0258) had been a leading Northern-Sòng historian, mid-level official, and friend of Lù Yóu 陸游, Yáng Wànlǐ 楊萬里, Zhū Xī 朱熹, and Zhāng Shì 張栻. Hán Biāo himself never took the jìnshì and never held substantive office; he lived in seclusion in the Shàngráo 上饒 area of north-eastern Jiāngxī, where his pairing with Zhào Fān 趙蕃 (1143–1229), the elder of the two “Quán” by some seventeen years, made the two of them the centre of a regional poetic circle on the southern (right) bank of the lower Yangzi. The “Quán” hào of both men derives from local toponyms — Zhāngquán and Jiànquán — but doubled as a Daoist-recluse self-positioning in the Zhuāngzǐ idiom of “drinking from the spring.” Hán Biāo’s verse is conventionally placed inside the Jiāngxī shīpài 江西詩派 inheritance, but his Jiànquán rìjì (recorded as KR3j0122) shows his interests stretched to historical reasoning on the Northern Sòng and to bibliographic and antiquarian notice-taking. The Sìkù tíyào notes that Fāng Huí, the Yíngkuí lǜsuí anthologist a century later, regarded him very highly. Wilkinson cites the Hán family’s Jiànquán rìjì among the most useful Sòng bǐjì recovered from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn (Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §51, item 7). The catalog meta gives 1160–1224 (matching standard biographical handbooks); CBDB (id 10187) gives 1159–1224. Either is defensible; we follow the catalog’s 1160 as the conventional figure.

Translations and research

No substantial Western-language monograph on Hán Biāo or this collection located. On the Yíng-kuí lǜ-suí reception of Hán Biāo see Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎, Sō-shi gaisetsu 宋詩概說 (Iwanami, 1962); on the Northern-Jiāngxī “Two Quán” circle see Zhāng Jiàn 張健, Sòng-dài shī-xué tōng-lùn 宋代詩學通論 (Bǎ-shǔ shū-shè, 1999), and the dedicated chapter in Mò Lì-fēng 莫礪鋒, Jiāng-xī shī-pài yánjiū 江西詩派研究 (Qí-Lǔ shū-shè, 1986).

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