藏春集

Cángchūn jí 藏春集

The Cáng-chūn (Storing-Up Spring) Collection by 劉秉忠 (撰)

About the work

The reduced six-juàn literary remains of Liú Bǐngzhōng 劉秉忠 (CBDB 28934, 1216–1274; original name Liú Kǎn 劉侃; zì Zhònghuì 仲晦; ordained Buddhist name Zǐcōng 子聰; hào Cángchūn jūshì 藏春居士; posthumous title Tàishī Wénzhèngōng 太師文貞公), the central political architect of Kublai Khan’s institutional founding of the Yuán dynasty. Liú was originally a young Jīn official who entered Buddhist monastic life on the dynasty’s fall; through his teacher the eminent Hǎiyún Yìnjiǎn 海雲印簡 he was presented to the future Kublai (then Tàizǔ Shìzǔ) in 1242 and entered his counsel; for the next thirty years until his death he was the principal Sinitic political-and-ritual advisor responsible for the institutional Sinification of the Mongol regime: designing the imperial city of Dàdū (Běijīng) and the Yuán summer capital Shàngdū; drafting the Yuán dynastic name (Yuán 元 from the Yìjīng “great primordial”); fixing the official ritual, hierarchy, and ceremonial codes; selecting Sinitic officials for appointment; and writing the Wànyán shū (Ten-Thousand-Word Memorial) of 1267 that summarized his program. The Yuánshǐ j. 157 records his collected works in ten juàn; what survives here is six juàn — five of verse in mixed forms (gǔtǐ, lǜshī, juéjù), one of appended gàochì, zhìwén, and xíngzhuàng. The Sìkù editors note that Liú’s surviving záwén (miscellaneous prose) — including the Wànyán shū and other memorials — has been wholly lost; what is preserved is essentially the shī. The collection was cut by the Míng Chǔzhōu Prefect Mǎ Wěi 馬偉; the principal preface is by Yán Fù 閻復 (Yuán Hànlín xuéshì tàizhōng dàifū, dated Zhìyuán dīnghài = 1287, fourteen years after Liú’s death).

Tiyao

We respectfully submit: Cángchūn jí in six juàn was composed by Liú Bǐngzhōng of the Yuán. Bǐngzhōng has the Yùchǐ jīng, already entered in the catalog. Bǐngzhōng was broadly read and loved learning, particularly deep in the Yì; for everything astronomical, geographic, calendrical, Sānshì (Tàiyī / Liùrén / Dùnjiǎ) — there was none he did not penetrate. Therefore [practitioners of] shùshù (numerological arts) frequently attached themselves to him to circulate; often [their attributions to him are] not entirely trustworthy. As for the literary collection seen in his biography — ten juàn; the present base is only six juàn — being what the Míng Prefect of Chǔzhōu Mǎ Wěi engraved. The first five juàn are poetry of various forms; the last one juàn appends gàochì, zhìwén, and xíngzhuàng. It does not reach the záwén he composed — therefore Bǐngzhōng’s submitted Wànyán shū and his other memorials, seen in the biography, are uniformly absent — presumably the prose has [already] been lost, and only the poetry is preserved; therefore the juàn count differs from the biography.

Bǐngzhōng rose from a Buddhist monastic life and personally took part in the “command of brightness”; with [Yáo] Míngdào and [Sòng] Zǐyān his footsteps were rather similar. However Míngdào at the outset constructed a nìmóu (rebellious plan) and incurred [the charge of] crimes against míngjiào; whereas Bǐngzhōng then rode the time and responded to fortune, participated in the planning of the [imperial] sleek-and-warp [i.e. fundamental institutional architecture], taking institutional rituals as his first task, finally opening a generation’s good government. As persons, their character is widely separated. Therefore what [Liú] composed is generally calm-and-correct and freely-communicating, without the gnashing-and-killing tones [of conspiracy]. The histories say his poetry is “loose-and-free, leisured-and-bland — similar to his person”; although the recommendation is somewhat excessive — yet small poems like “the cooing pigeon calls back the West-Mountain rain,” “the mulberry leaves are like clouds, the wheat begins to flower” and so on, are not without their times of revealing manner.

Respectfully collated, fourth 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.

(The frontmatter also preserves the Yán Fù preface of Zhìyuán 24 (1287), four-square the foundational paratext on Liú: invoking the Yì’s “Guān hū tiānwén, yǐ chá shí biàn; guān hū rénwén, yǐ huàchéng tiānxià,” framing Liú as the Hàn-time Zhāng Liáng / Shàogōng / Shūsūn Tōng / Lù Jiǎ / Jiǎ Yì of the Yuán founding — the one who “brought order out of the cloud-darkness of primordial dawn.” Yán describes the collection’s posthumous compilation by Liú’s widow Lady Dòu and his son Liú Zhāng 劉璋, transmitted to Yán via the Hànlín Dàizhì Wáng Zhīgāng 王之綱.)

Abstract

Liú Bǐngzhōng (CBDB 28934, 1216–1274) is the central architect of Kublai Khan’s Sinitic dynastic institutionalization and one of the most consequential individual figures of the entire Yuán founding. His career trajectory — Jīn-period local official → Buddhist monk (Zǐcōng) → Mongol-court advisor → Tàishǐyuàn director → planner of Dàdū and Shàngdū → drafter of dynastic name and institutions — embodies the Mongol-Sinitic synthesis of the early-Kublai years. The Sìkù editors carefully distinguish Liú from the parallel late-Míng figure Yáo Guǎngxiào 姚廣孝 (the Buddhist-monk advisor to Zhū Dì 朱棣 in the Jìngnán uprising) — the comparison was apparently a Qiánlóng cliché — in Liú’s favor: Liú’s institutional architecture was constructive (Sinification of the conquering regime), Yáo’s was destructive (regicide rebellion). The collection survives in this reduced six-juàn recension; the prose corpus including the famous 1267 Wànyán shū memorial is lost. The poetic content is dominated by occasional verse from the Kublai pre-accession years (1242–1260) and the early post-accession reform period — much of it bearing the imprint of Liú’s Buddhist monastic background and Yìxué / numerological learning. Composition window: post-1242 entry into Kublai’s circle through Liú’s death in 1274. CBDB 28934 confirms 1216–1274; the Yuánshǐ j. 157 biography fully corroborates. Wilkinson treats Liú extensively (§35, foundational early-Yuán Sinitic-non-Sinitic court synthesis).

Translations and research

• Hok-lam Chan, “Liu Ping-chung (1216–1274): A Buddhist-Taoist Statesman at the Court of Khubilai Khan,” T’oung Pao 53 (1967), pp. 98–146. The principal English-language scholarly treatment.
• Hok-lam Chan, “Liu Ping-chung,” in Igor de Rachewiltz et al. (eds.), In the Service of the Khan: Eminent Personalities of the Early Mongol-Yüan Period (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993), pp. 245–269.
• Nancy S. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), passim — Liú’s planning of Dà-dū and Shàng-dū.
• Mǎ Mín-jūn 馬敏俊, Liú Bǐng-zhōng yán-jiū 劉秉忠研究 (Hāng-zhōu: Zhè-jiāng dà-xué chū-bǎn-shè, 2007). Modern Chinese monograph.
• Yuán-shǐ j. 157 (Liú Bǐng-zhōng biography) — the standard biography.

Other points of interest

The Tàishī Wénzhèngōng zhìwén 太師文貞公制文 preserved at the end of juàn 6 — the imperial proclamation of Liú’s posthumous canonization — is one of the earliest formal documents of the Yuán court using fully Sinitic Confucian moral vocabulary, marking the institutionalized acceptance of Sinitic political ethics in the Yuán state. The collection is also notable for preserving Liú’s Cángchūn yǐn (Drinking at Cángchūn) and Cángchūn xiǎojí (Small Gathering at Cángchūn) cycles, documenting the social-poetic culture of the pre-Yuán Sinitic literati around the not-yet-emperor Kublai’s encampments.

Links

• WYG SKQS V1191.3, p633.
• CBDB person 28934 (Liú Bǐngzhōng)
• Yuánshǐ j. 157
• Wikipedia, 劉秉忠