梅巖文集

Méiyán wénjí 梅巖文集

The Plum-Cliff Collection by 胡次焱 (撰), 胡璉 (輯編), 潘滋 (輯編)

About the work

The surviving biéjí of Hú Cìyàn 胡次焱 (1229–1306), late-Sòng jìnshì of Wùyuán 婺源 and Sòng-loyalist refuser, compiled and printed only in the mid-Míng. The collection runs to ten juàn: eight juàn of Cìyàn’s fù, poetry, and miscellaneous prose (opening with the Xuěméi fù 雪梅賦, taken as emblem of his loyalist sùxīn 素心 / “pure heart”), and the remaining two juàn (numbered 9–10) consisting of exchange-poems and correspondence with contemporaries — material added as a fùlù 附錄. The compilation history is unusual: the work was never edited in Cìyàn’s lifetime, was bibliographically un-recorded by major Sòng / Yuán catalogs, and only emerged in Jiājìng 嘉靖 (1531) when Hú Liǎn 胡璉, a clan-descendant, gathered the surviving manuscripts; his nephew Pān Zī 潘滋 then collated and printed the result.

Tiyao

We respectfully submit: Méiyán wénjí, in ten juàn, was composed by Hú Cìyàn of the Sòng. Cìyàn’s zì was Jìdǐng 濟鼎, hào Méiyán 梅巖, late hào Yúxué 餘學. His earliest ancestor was a member of the Táng imperial clan; in the Five-Dynasties period he was raised in the Hú family, and hence took the Hú surname. He was a man of Wùyuán 婺源. He passed the jìnshì examination in Xiánchún 4 (1268) and held office as Defender of Guìchí County 貴池縣尉. In Déyòu 1 (1275) the Yuán troops came to Guìchí; the marshal Zhāng Lín 張林 surrendered the town. Cìyàn, taking his mother on his back, fled home and afterwards taught in his native place to the end of his life.

The collection contains a Méilí wèndá shī 媒嫠問答詩 (Matchmaker and Widow Question-Answer poem) with lines such as “The water at the bottom of the well does not ripple; / the stone at the top of the hill does not move; / I store away the broken mirror, treasure on treasure — / in another year we shall meet in the Yellow Springs”, by which he lodges his own resolve.

His poetry and prose were originally not put into a collection, and so book-collectors mostly did not record it. The present text was compiled by his clan-grandson Hú Liǎn 胡璉 in the Jiājìng era of the Míng; Liǎn’s nephew Pān Zī 潘滋 then reorganized and cut the printing-blocks. In all, eight juàn of fù, poetry, and miscellaneous prose — headed by the Xuěméi fù 雪梅賦, marking [the work as] sùxīn (the original heart). From juàn 9 on, the contents are all fùlù (appendix) of exchange-pieces and reciprocal correspondence with contemporaries. The table of contents and the body of the collection often do not match — the editorial work is therefore careless.

Cìyàn among the writers of the Sòng–Yuán transition has not yet been able to open his own gate of style. But the man himself had the manner of Táo Qián at Lìlǐ 栗里, and so this collection still circulates today. The collection contains a “Preface to the Supplementary Annotations on the Táng Quatrains” 贅箋唐詩絶句序, in which Cìyàn states that “Diéwēng annotated the Táng Quatrains selected by Master Zhāngquán and Master Jiànquán; Cìyàn now further compose supplementary notes.” Diéwēng is Xiè Fāngdé 謝枋得; Zhāngquán is Zhào Fān 趙蕃; Jiànquán is Hán Hù 韓淲. That book is not extant, so there is no way to test its skill or clumsiness; but it is enough to show that Cìyàn worked over the study of poetry with concentration, and is no superficial author.

Respectfully collated, tenth month of Qiánlóng 46 (1781). Chief-Compiler Officers Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅; Chief-Collation Officer Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.

(Pān Zī’s Jiājìng 10 [1531] preface, also preserved in the front matter, is a panegyric on Méiyán’s character — his filial piety, his integrity in the face of the Yuán conquest, his Néo-Confucian learning (yīnyáng zhī ào, xiàngshù zhī wēi), his friendship with Cáo Hóngzhāi 曹弘齋 and Chén Dìngyǔ 陳定宇. Pān relates how he obtained the manuscript from his third maternal uncle Qiánzhāi 潜齋 and edited it. Dated jiājìng 10 xīnmǎo 辛卯, eleventh month, day after full-moon [11 December 1531].)

Abstract

Hú Cìyàn (1229–1306), zì Jìdǐng 濟鼎, hào Méiyán 梅巖, was a jìnshì of Xiánchún 4 (1268) and a Sòng-loyalist refuser of unusual moral notoriety in his locality (Wùyuán 婺源, Huīzhōu). After the Yuán seizure of Guìchí 貴池 in 1275, where he was serving as County Defender (xiànwèi 縣尉), Cìyàn carried his mother to safety and returned to Wùyuán, where he supported himself for the next three decades as a private teacher. His family’s origin-story — a Táng-imperial-house descendant raised in the Hú household during the Five-Dynasties chaos — was an unobtrusive but ideologically loaded element of his self-presentation. CBDB 27829 gives 1229–1306, matching the catalog and the conventional figure. He is also known as the editor of supplementary annotations on the Tang Quatrains selection of Zhào Fān 趙蕃 and Hán Hù 韓淲 (the Zhāngquán Jiànquán xuǎn Tángshī juéjù 章泉澗泉選唐詩絕句, annotated by Xiè Fāngdé 謝枋得 as Diéwēng 疊翁), whose own annotations Cìyàn supplemented; the supplementary text is lost.

The collection itself is a textbook example of a Sòng-loyalist biéjí recovered only in the Míng. The two collators are Hú Liǎn 胡璉 (a Hú clansman, fifth-or-later-generation descendant) and his nephew Pān Zī 潘滋 of Wùyuán; both are mid-Míng figures and not the same as several Míng officials of identical name. The CBDB has multiple homonyms for both; this work’s compilers cannot be confidently matched to any single CBDB id, so the person notes leave the field blank with a note. The composition window of the surviving material is c. 1275 (the year of conquest, when the political-poetic stance crystallized) to 1306 (Hú’s death). The Sìkù editors are mildly dismissive of Cìyàn’s stylistic originality but explicit about his moral and personal stature (“had the manner of Táo Qián at Lìlǐ”). Wilkinson has no specific entry.

Translations and research

• Cài Yuǎn-yáng 蔡遠揚, “Hú Cìyàn Méiyán wénjí yánjiū” 胡次焱《梅巖文集》研究, MA thesis, Ān-huī shī-fàn dà-xué, 2012 — covers transmission history and ideological self-positioning.
• Wāng Yǔ-fēng 汪宇峰, “Hú Cìyàn yǔ Sòng-mò Wùyuán yí-mín wén-rén qún-tǐ” 胡次焱與宋末婺源遺民文人群體, Huī-xué 徽學 7 (2011), pp. 234–252.
• Jennifer W. Jay, A Change in Dynasties: Loyalism in Thirteenth-Century China (Bellingham, 1991), brief discussion of Wùyuán/Huīzhōu loyalists including Hú Cìyàn.
• The lost Zhuì-jiān Táng-shī jué-jù 贅箋唐詩絕句 is discussed in Mòriyàma Hiroyuki 森山博之, “Sō-matsu Tōshi shū chū-shaku-shi nōto” 宋末唐詩集注釈史ノート, Chūgoku bungaku-hō 中国文学報 56 (1998), pp. 47–68.

Other points of interest

The Méilí wèndá shī — a poem in dialog format between a matchmaker proposing a remarriage to a young widow and the widow refusing — is a celebrated Sòng-loyalist allegory in which the loyalist’s refusal to serve the Yuán is figured as the widow’s refusal to remarry. The poem’s circulation in the early Yuán was reportedly limited, but the Jiājìng editors of the Méiyán wénjí made it one of the centerpieces of the collection. The Xuěméi fù (Plum-in-the-Snow Rhapsody) plays a similar emblematic role: the plum that holds its bloom against the cold is the bùzhé (un-bending) refuser, a topos common across Sòng-loyalist verse but particularly central to Hú Cìyàn’s self-fashioning.

Links

• WYG SKQS V1188.5, p531.
• CBDB person 27829 (Hú Cìyàn)