Yǒushí shānrén yígǎo 友石山人遺稿
Bequeathed Drafts of the Friend-of-Stone Mountain Man by 王翰 (撰), compiled by his son 王偁 (輯)
About the work
A single-juǎn posthumous poetry collection by Wáng Hàn 王翰 (1333–1378), a Tangut-descent late-Yuán military official who took his own life rather than serve the Míng, edited by his son Wáng Chēng 王偁. The collection comprises eighty-four poems across several forms, prefaced by Chén Zhòngshù 陳仲述 (an ex-jìnshì and Míng jiānchá yùshǐ, written Hóngwǔ gēngwǔ 庚午 = 1390 at Mǐn — Fújiàn). After the verse the surviving editorial fascicle preserves seven memorial pieces — zhìmíng (tomb-inscription) and āicí (laments) — composed by Wú Hǎi 吳海, the Fújiàn loyalist literatus to whom Wáng Hàn entrusted his son just before his death. These memorial pieces are also preserved in Wú Hǎi’s Wénguòzhāi jí (KR4d0552) and are not duplicated in this edition’s transcript-tail. The collection’s most famous piece is the juémìng shī (verses-on-quitting-life) explaining Wáng’s choice of suicide as Yuán loyalty.
Tiyao
Yǒushí shānrén yígǎo, 1 juǎn. By Wáng Hàn of the Yuán. Hàn, style-name Yòngwén, was of Western Xià descent. At the beginning of the Yuán his family followed the armies south into the JiāngHuái and received a hereditary thousand-household command at Lúzhōu, settling there. In youth he inherited the post and gained a reputation for capacity, rising through the ranks of the Jiāngxī and Fújiàn Mobile Secretariat as lángzhōng. Chén Yǒudìng kept him in his staff, respected and feared him, and submitted to have him made zǒngguǎn of Cháozhōu, concurrently overseeing Xún, Méi, and Huì circuits. When Yǒudìng was defeated he went to sea, reached Annam but did not land, and lived in retreat at Guānlièshān in Yǒngfú, wearing the yellow-cap (Daoist priestly) garb for eleven years. During the Hóngwǔ a recruitment letter arrived twice; Hàn entrusted his young son Chēng to his old friend Wú Hǎi, and then took his own life. Hàn was of a military family, a son who had set his mind on saving the difficulties of his time, but unhappily met the ruin of his ancestral state; his crushed and fiery spirit he poured into voiced poetry — hence even though his poems are not many, the chényù dùncuò (deep, halting) cadences strikingly attest his moral resolve. As in Tí huà kuíhuā “Inscribed on a painted hollyhock”: “Pitiful, this is a thing without feeling, / Yet it still knows to incline its heart toward the great sun.” Or in Sòng Chén Zhòngshí huán Cháoyáng: “Going back, should our old friend ask after me, / From the spring mountain hence — the ferns and fern-shoots aplenty.” Largely emaciated walking-and-chanting [poems], not forgetting his old state. His final verse-on-quitting-life says: “In the past at Cháoyáng I would have died, / My lineage thread-thin, I had no son. / Then if I had died as a loyal subject — / The lineage extinguished — what shame indeed. / This year the recruitment letter has come to my gate. / My grown males beneath the roof are three. / A blade’s edge in my hand: I shall not begrudge. / One death now repays my lord-and-parent’s grace.” On the borderline of life and death his determination is thus clear and decided: one can know that his resolve was set long beforehand. Gù Sìlì’s Yuán shī xuǎn includes only twenty-seven of Hàn’s poems; this collection is the work of his son Chēng, comprising eighty-four pieces in various forms. The front bears Chén Zhòngshù’s preface; the back appends zhìmíng and āicí and seven other pieces, all by Wú Hǎi — already included in Wú Hǎi’s Wénguòzhāi jí and so not duplicated here. Respectfully collated, Qiánlóng forty-sixth (1781), tenth month. Compilers: Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì; head proofreader: Lù Fèichí.
Abstract
Yǒushí shānrén yígǎo is the principal monument of late-Yuán loyalist literature among the Tangut-descent military elite. Wáng Hàn’s biographical arc — Yuán hereditary officer → Chén Yǒudìng’s staff at Fújiàn → Daoist disguise → Hóngwǔ-era suicide — is itself a much-studied case in the historiography of the YuánMíng transition, and it is anchored chiefly by this collection and by Wú Hǎi’s memorial prose. The collection’s composition window runs from Wáng’s mid-career (c. 1360) to his death in 1378; the editorial recension was prepared by his son Wáng Chēng and prefaced in 1390 by Chén Zhòngshù in Fújiàn. The tíyào explicitly highlights the juémìng shī as a documentary anchor for Wáng’s interior reasoning: a zhōngchén identity could not be claimed without an heir, so the actuating fact was the recent birth of grown sons (three sons “beneath the roof”).
Translations and research
- The Wáng Hàn case figures in studies of Yuán-Míng loyalism: e.g. Frederick W. Mote’s coverage of Yuán-Míng transition literati in Imperial China 900–1800; in Chinese, the work has been treated in monographs and articles on Tangut-descent élites under the Yuán.
- The collection is treated as a primary witness for Chén Yǒu-dìng’s Fújiàn polity.
Other points of interest
The juémìng shī is one of the most directly self-justifying suicide-poems in the late-Yuán loyalist corpus and is regularly cited.
Links
- WYG SKQS V1217.2, p129.