鳳池吟稿

Fèngchí yín gǎo 鳳池吟稿

Verse Drafts from the Phoenix Pool by 汪廣洋 (撰)

About the work

Fèngchí yín gǎo 鳳池吟稿 in ten juǎn is the principal surviving literary collection of Wāng Guǎngyáng 汪廣洋 (d. 1379), one of the earliest civil officials of the Hóngwǔ administration and briefly Right Senior Grand Councillor 中書右丞相 in 1379 — at which point he was demoted in connection with the Hú Wéiyōng 胡惟庸 affair and executed en route to Guǎngdōng. The title Fèngchí 鳳池 is the standard literary kenning for the Secretariat (中書省), in which Wāng spent the bulk of his official career. The collection is principally verse: gǔshī 古詩, lǜshī 律詩, juéjù 絕句, with a small body of prose appended.

Tiyao

Examined respectfully: Fèngchí yín gǎo, ten juǎn, by Wāng Guǎngyáng of the Míng. Guǎngyáng, zì Cháozōng 朝宗, native of Gāoyóu 高郵, in displacement at Tàipíng 太平. When Tàizǔ crossed the Yangtze, he was summoned and appointed Yuánshuàifǔ lìngshǐ 元帥府令史 (Recorder in the Marshal’s Headquarters). He rose through office to Zhōngshū yòuchéng 中書右丞 and was enfeoffed Zhōngqínbó 忠勤伯; shortly after he was promoted to Yòu chéngxiàng 右丞相. Sharing the office of chéngxiàng with Hú Wéiyōng 胡惟庸 yet unable to expose Hú’s treachery, he was sentenced to demotion to Guǎngdōng and on the way was granted death. The events are recorded in his Míng shǐ biography. Wāng in his youth studied under Yú Què 余闕; he was broadly versed in the Classics and Histories, and skilled in zhuàn and lì script. The cast of his poetry is clear, vigorous, classical, and weighty — sweeping away in one cleansing the slender allure of Yuán verse. Zhū Yízūn 朱彛尊 selected from his wǔyán lines such couplets as “On the level sand, who teases the horses? / In the setting sun, alone I climb the terrace”; “Lake water by the door, pines and clouds beside the pillow”; “When thinking of him through the long night, the moon rises on the sparse paulownia / Meeting a guest, I open the spring wine”; “By the door I sweep fallen blossoms / Heaven hangs fragrant grasses on the earth”; and “Fisherman’s song in the evening-sun village” — several dozen couplets which Zhū judged worthy of inclusion in Zhāng Wéi’s 張為 Tang-rén zhǔkè tú 唐人主客圖 [Diagram of T’ang Poets, Hosts and Guests], such that Zhāng Yǔ 靜居 [張羽 KR4e0042], Xú Bēn 北郭 [徐賁 KR4e0043], and Yáng Jī Mèngzǎi 孟載 [楊基 KR4e0041] would have to yield place to him. Zhū’s esteem for him was at this height. Yet the various Míng critics surveying the poetic schools and lineages mostly do not mention him: this is because at the time he was overshadowed by the great fame of 宋濂 宋濂 and his circle, so that he is little spoken of. But examining the surviving works he is in truth not unworthy of the dynasty-founding voice. Reverently collated on the ninth month of Qiánlóng 43 (1778). General compilers: Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì. General collator: Lù Fèichí.

Abstract

The catalog meta lifedates (d. 1379) accord with the Míng shǐ biography (Míng shǐ j. 127). Wāng Guǎngyáng’s birth-year is not recorded; he is generally taken to have been born c. 1325 (Goodrich & Fang). The collection is prefaced by Sòng Lián 宋濂, whose preface lays out the early-Míng critical commonplace of a “literature of the mountains and forests” vs. a “literature of the towers and halls” 山林之文/臺閣之文, and locates Wāng’s verse firmly in the latter — the táigé literature of the early-Hóngwǔ court — while crediting it with an unusual freshness that derives from Wāng’s earlier shānlín phase. The internal evidence dates the verse to roughly the Yuán end-period (c. 1356, when Wāng joined Zhū Yuánzhāng’s camp at Tàipíng) through to his execution in 1379. The political circumstances of Wāng’s death — caught in the prelude to the Hú Wéiyōng case (Hú himself was executed in 1380, with a much larger purge) — were a major reason for the relative suppression of his poetic reputation in the later Míng. The Sìkù tíyào’s project of recovering Wāng’s verse from this suppression is one of its small but characteristic gestures of canonical re-evaluation.

Translations and research

• Goodrich & Fang. 1976. Dictionary of Ming Biography. Columbia UP, 2:1374–1377 (entry on Wāng Guǎngyáng).
• Edward L. Farmer. 1995. Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation. Brill. Treats the Wāng–Hú political crisis of 1379–1380 in detail.

Other points of interest

• Yú Què 余闕 (1303–1358), Wāng’s youthful teacher, was a late-Yuán jìnshì who died defending Ānqìng 安慶 against the Hóngjīn 紅巾 rebels — a martyrdom commemorated in the Yuán Shílù and in many YuánMíng literary collections. The thread of Yuán-loyalist learning under which Wāng was trained is one of the principal lines of intellectual continuity into the early Míng.
• The Sìkù tíyào’s mention of Zhāng Wéi’s Tang-rén zhǔkè tú 唐人主客圖 is a learned reference: Zhāng Wéi was a late-Táng critic whose typology of poetic lineages by zhǔ (host) and kè (guest) was an important precedent for MíngQīng poetics.

Links

• Wang Guangyang (Wikipedia)
• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, §28.4 (Míng biéjí).