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花間集

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Text ID
KR4j0062
Date
940–940
Dynasty
後蜀

Huājiān jí 花間集

Among the Flowers — Collected Lyrics edited by 趙崇祚 (編)

About the work

The Huājiān jí 花間集 is the earliest surviving anthology of cí in Chinese literature, compiled at the HòuShǔ 後蜀 court of Mèng Chǎng 孟昶 in Guǎngzhèng 3 / 940 by his courtier Zhào Chóngzuò 趙崇祚. Ten juǎn in the Sìkù arrangement, the collection preserves 500 cí by 18 late-Táng and Five-Dynasties poets — pre-eminently Wēn Tíngyún 溫庭筠 (66 pieces, the largest contribution of any author), Wéi Zhuāng 韋莊 (48 pieces), and Hèzhū 和凝, Niú Xījì 牛希濟, Sūn Guāngxiàn 孫光憲, Lǐ Xún 李珣, Ōuyáng Jiǒng 歐陽炯, and others mostly attached to the Shǔ courts. The collection’s original preface by Ōuyáng Jiǒng (then Hànlín scholar at the Shǔ court), dated Guǎngzhèng gēngzǐ (i.e. 940 — by Jìn count Tiānfú 5), supplies the founding manifesto of the cí genre: the song-lyrics of an elegant urban court culture, intended for performance with the southern Shǔ courtesans’ xiāo and gǔbǎn. The Huājiān jí is the textually attested source of the late-Táng cí repertoire (漁父詞, 楊柳枝, 浪淘沙, etc.) that transitioned between shī and the new cí form.

Tiyao

(The Sìkù tíyào source file KR4j0062_000.txt is missing from the project source tree; the text below is translated from the Zinbun digital Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù tíyào at http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/db-machine/ShikoTeiyo/0445702.html .)

Huājiān jí, ten juǎn. Edited by Zhào Chóngzuò of HòuShǔ. Chóngzuò’s zì was Hóngjī 宏基; he served Mèng Chǎng as Wèiwèi shàoqīng 衞尉少卿. His native place is not known. The Shíguó chūnqiū contains no biography. Note that Shǔ had a Zhào Chóngtāo 趙崇韜, the son of Chancellor Zhào Tíngyǐn 趙廷隱; Chóngzuò is suspected to have been his brother. The transformation of shī into cí arose in the Táng and flourished in the Five Dynasties; from the Sòng onwards its forms multiplied and the selections grew, but tracing the xīngsù (stellar source-stars) of the genre, this volume is the most ancient. The late-Táng masters of the song-lyric are owed their very survival to this book; pieces in Yúfù cí 漁父詞, Yángliǔ zhī 楊柳枝, and Làngtáoshā 浪淘沙, which the Táng themselves still entered into the shī-corpora, attest the transition between shī and cí via these very tunes. The compilers list each writer not by name but by official title — clearly the legacy of the Wénxuǎn tradition of recording by zì. Only when one writer’s cí are split over the front and back juǎn — to keep each juǎn to 50 pieces — does a feature appear that has no precedent in the older anthologies. Chén Zhènsūn says the volume selected from Wēn Tíngyún and down 18 men, 500 pieces in all; two are now lost. Bookshop reprints have made spurious additions, badly corrupting the old text. This is the late-Míng Máo Jìn’s careful reprinting of the Sòng text, still essentially sound. At the head stands the preface by the Shǔ Hànlín scholar and Zhōngshū drafter Ōuyáng Jiǒng, written in Mèng Chǎng’s Guǎngzhèng 3 — i.e. the Jìn Gāozǔ’s Tiānfú 5 / 940. After it stand two colophons by Lù Yóu 陸游. The first says that at this very moment the empire was on the brink of collapse, and yet the shìdàfū were wallowing in such things — or perhaps they did so out of boredom. He fails to see that it was precisely because the shìdàfū wallowed in such things that the empire collapsed. The second says: at the end of the Táng and during the Five Dynasties shī sank to its low; yet the songs (yǐshēngzhě) here are pure and ancient and altogether lovable. They could do this but not that; it is not easy to reason out. He fails to grasp that genres have high or low frames, and men’s powers have strong or weak grasp; when the power cannot match the frame, the result falls short; when the power can match it or exceed it, the result is generous. Regulated verse is below ancient-style verse, hence mid- and late-Táng gǔshī is often poor while their lǜshī is sometimes fine; cí is below regulated verse, hence Five-Dynasties men’s shī falls short of the Táng but their cí alone overtakes. This is like a man who can lift seventy jīn: at a hundred jīn he buckles, but at fifty he handles it with grace. What is there here that cannot be reasoned out?

Abstract

The Huājiān jí survives in two principal text-lines. The Sòng-period transmission (recorded as 500 pieces by Chén Zhènsūn) is the source, ultimately, of all later texts; Máo Jìn’s late-Míng Jígǔgé reprint, on which the WYG depends, is the most reliable late-imperial witness. Modern scholarly editions (Lǐ Yǐ 李一 et al., Huājiān jí jiào 校; Yè Jiāyíng 葉嘉瑩’s annotated Huājiān jí xīnjiě) note that two pieces of the original 500 are no longer transmitted. Stylistically the corpus is uneven — Wēn Tíngyún and Wéi Zhuāng dominate; the others range from competent imitation to specialist exoticism (Lǐ Xún’s “Southern Country” cí and Sūn Guāngxiàn’s Hézhōu wǔzǐ sequences are the major examples) — but its historical position is unrivalled. Ōuyáng Jiǒng’s preface (“we cull / the elegant words / floating from the lips of dancing girls — / and now from the brushes of officials”) is the founding theoretical statement of the cí genre, and the title “Huājiān” gave its name to an entire critical category (the Huājiānpài 花間派) that has structured the reading of the early cí tradition ever since.

The date “940” set as both notBefore and notAfter refers to the founding compilation; the work was transmitted, recut, and supplemented through the Sòng but the canonical edition’s text is fixed to Zhào Chóngzuò’s compilation.

Translations and research

  • Lois Fusek, Among the Flowers: The Hua-chien Chi (Columbia, 1982) — complete English translation with introduction. The standard Western-language edition.
  • Anna M. Shields, Crafting a Collection: The Cultural Contexts and Poetic Practice of the “Huajian ji” (Collection from Among the Flowers) (Harvard, 2006) — book-length study of the anthology, its compilation context, and its poetics.
  • Glen Dudbridge, “Huajian ji” entry in William Nienhauser, ed., Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Indiana, 1986).
  • Stuart Sargent, “Tz’u,” in Mair, ed., Columbia History of Chinese Literature, 314–336 — survey including extended treatment of the Huā-jiān jí.
  • Kang-i Sun Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry: From Late T’ang to Northern Sung (Princeton, 1980) — foundational study of how the Huā-jiān corpus inaugurates the tradition.

Other points of interest

The Sìkù editors’ explicit rejection of Lù Yóu’s moralizing colophon — that cí was not the cause of the Shǔ collapse, but a side-effect of it — is one of the most cited Sìkù-editorial defences of the cí genre. The classification of every poet by office title (e.g. “Wēn Zhùfēng” 溫助教 for Wēn Tíngyún), inherited from the Wénxuǎn, is also visible to this day in standard reference works on the Huājiān poets.

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