Líng Zhōngjiègōng jí 凌忠介公集
Collected Works of Lord Líng Zhōng-jiè (Líng Yì-qú) by 凌義渠 (撰)
About the work
The Líng Zhōngjiègōng jí in six juǎn — four of verse, two of prose — is the surviving fragment of the writings of 凌義渠 Líng Yìqú (1593–1644; zì Jùnfǔ 駿甫), Wūchéng Dàlǐsì qīng under the Chóngzhēn emperor, who hanged himself on 26 April 1644 the day after Lǐ Zìchéng entered Běijīng and the Chóngzhēn emperor’s own suicide at Méishān. Líng had himself burnt his lifetime’s accumulated poetry and prose on the night before his death; what survives was reconstructed and edited posthumously by his friend 徐汧 and Xú’s disciple 姜垓 from manuscripts and circulating copies held by others. The work is referred to under two posthumous canonisations: the Southern-Míng Hóngguāng court bestowed Zhōngqīng 忠清; the Qīng later re-canonised him as Zhōngjiè 忠介, and it is under the Qīng title that the WYG enters the work.
Tiyao
Your servants etc. respectfully memorialise. The Líng Zhōngjiè jí in six juǎn was composed by Líng Yìqú 凌義渠 of the Míng dynasty. Yìqú, zì Jùnfǔ 駿甫, a man of Wūchéng 烏程, became jìnshì in Tiānqǐ yǐchǒu (= 1625), and rose to Dàlǐsì qīng. When the roving rebels took the capital he hanged himself. The Fúwáng régime posthumously raised him to Xíngbù shàngshū and canonised him Zhōngqīng 忠清; the present (Qīng) dynasty has bestowed the canonisation Zhōngjiè 忠介. His doings are fully set forth in his Míngshǐ běnzhuàn. Yìqú in youth was known for his zhìyì (examination essays), of which the limpid and graceful manner was widely praised. Once he entered office, his integrity and forthrightness gained him the personal trust of the Zhuāngliè emperor (= Chóngzhēn). To literary composition he gave no great attention. This collection comprises four juǎn of verse and two of prose, edited by his friend 徐汧’s disciple 姜垓 (Jiāng Gāi). It carries no class of zòushū (memorials), so that the major proposals of his career — for example, while jǐshìzhōng, the request that the magistrate of Sānhé 三河, Liú Wěi 劉煒, be exonerated from compensating the requisitioned ration-silver; the memorial on the riotous burning and looting of great households; the memorial on the senior ministers’ restraint of the yánlù; the memorial on the unfitness of the Zhōngshū office; the Yùcè Dōngjiāng pànluàn memorial; and the Qǐng yángfǔ yīnjiǎo memorials — every one of them an outstanding monument of his style — none of them appears in this collection. The compilation must therefore already be incomplete. Even so, in pieces such as the Bīngxiǎng yì 兵餉議 and the Qīng shèn qín lùn 清慎勤論, his uncompromising and self-reliant spirit can still in outline be perceived. His Chónghuà lùn 崇化論 contains the words: ‘One who can be a Pángbǐ [a loyal remonstrator] regards the smashing of his head and the spurting of his blood as no different from the easy step homeward at sundown. One who can be a Shēnshēng or Bóqí regards the embrace of the stone and the strangler’s noose as no different from the morning enquiry and the supervision of the meal.’ His lifetime’s resolve was just as this; in the end, facing the danger he laid down his life and so made his words good; he is fit to be reckoned one of the perfect men of all ages — there is no need to gauge him by the polish or roughness of his prose and verse. Respectfully collated, intercalary fifth month of Qiánlóng 46 (= 1781). Chief compilation officers: your servants Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Chief collation officer: your servant Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
The Líng Zhōngjiègōng jí is the canonical surviving witness to Líng Yìqú’s prose-and-verse output, but the Sìkù compilers themselves remark that it is incomplete — Líng’s celebrated remonstrance memorials of the Chóngzhēn 3 (1630) – Chóngzhēn 11 (1638) period, when he served nine years in the Lǐkē, are wholly absent (a fragment of his memorial corpus survives separately as the Líng Zhōngjiègōng zòudú 凌忠介公奏牘 in 8 juǎn, noted in worldcat but not entered into the Sìkù). The surviving six juǎn preserve mainly the topical yì (proposal), lùn (discursive essay), and zàn / bēi / shī genres of his Húzhōu and provincial-service periods, which he had circulated more widely among friends and so escaped the auto-da-fé of his last night.
The post-1644 editorial labour was carried out by 徐汧 Xú Qiān (1597–1645) of Chángzhōu — Líng’s contemporary, also a Chóngzhēn jìnshì and Hànlín colleague — and Xú’s young disciple 姜垓 Jiāng Gāi (1614–1653) of Láiyáng. Both editors were Míng loyalists: Xú drowned himself in his garden pond at the fall of Sūzhōu in 1645; Jiāng lived on as a yímín in Húzhōu until his death in 1653. The work thus belongs to the genealogy of loyalist commemorative editions assembled by survivors for martyred friends in the immediate aftermath of the dynastic transition.
The two canonisations Zhōngqīng (Southern Míng) and Zhōngjiè (Qīng) — the latter granted by Qiánlóng as part of the same general programme that canonised 孫傳庭 Zhōngjìng (1776) and rehabilitated Míng martyrs in the wake of the Sìkùquánshū — fix the work’s two reception horizons. Líng’s Chónghuà lùn passage cited by the tiyao, comparing himself to the Zhōu remonstrators Bǐgān and Wángzǐ Bǐgān and the filial sons Shēnshēng and Bóqí, is the locus classicus of his self-presentation as both zhōng (loyal) and xiào (filial), echoing the closing line of his suicide letter to his father — ‘ability to die is what saves my father from disgrace’.
The window of composition runs from 1625 (his jìnshì) through 1644 (his suicide).
Translations and research
No standalone Western-language treatment located. Líng Yì-qú appears in:
- the DMB (Goodrich, ed., 1976) entry on him (vol. 1, pp. 925–926, by Lung Chang);
- Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise (1985), passim, in the gallery of 1644 xùn-jié martyrs;
- contemporary martyrologies — Sī Shǎn 司啟 et al., Chóng-zhēn jiǎ-shēn xùn-jié jì 崇禎甲申殉節紀, and the standard Míng-jì běi-lüè of Jì Liù-qí 計六奇 — both cover his death.
The 8-juǎn memorial collection Líng Zhōng-jiè-gōng zòu-dú 凌忠介公奏牘 cited above is the principal complement for his policy career and is reprinted in the Sì-kù wèi-shōu shū jí kān 四庫未收書輯刊 series.
Other points of interest
The omission of all zòushū from the Sìkù recension is exceptional for a late-Míng martyr’s collected works and is explicitly flagged by the compilers themselves, who name eight specific memorials they would have expected to find. The reason was probably documentary rather than editorial: Xú Qiān and Jiāng Gāi assembled the six surviving juǎn from manuscripts circulating among Líng’s friends after his death and self-incineration of personal copies; the originals or office-archive copies of his memorials remained in the late-Míng Lǐkē archive and were lost in the burning of the Cǎoréntǐ repositories in 1644. The separate Zòudú in 8 juǎn descends from a different documentary stream — court-circulating dǐbào (court-news) compilations.