Zūnqián jí 尊前集
The Collection Before the Wine-Jug edited by anonymous compiler
About the work
The Zūnqián jí 尊前集 is an early cí anthology of contested origin: a companion-volume to the Huājiān jí KR4j0062 in scope and idiom (late-Táng and Five-Dynasties cí, with overlapping authorship — Lǐ Bái 李白, Bái Jūyì 白居易, Wēn Tíngyún 溫庭筠, Wéi Zhuāng 韋莊, the HòuShǔ poets, the NánTáng rulers, etc.) but with significant additional material — most importantly, almost the entire surviving corpus of cí attributed to Lǐ Yù 李煜 (HòuZhǔ of NánTáng), which the Huājiān jí does not include. The transmitted text is in two juǎn. The Sìkù tíyào concedes that the original date of compilation cannot be settled: the Wànlì preface by Gù Wúfāng 顧梧芳 reads as if Gù were himself the compiler (so Máo Jìn 毛晉 understood); Zhū Yízūn’s 朱彝尊 colophon, by contrast, claims that on the strength of a Wú Kuān 吳寬 (Míng) manuscript discovered at Wúxià identical with Gù’s text in every detail, the Zūnqián jí must be a Northern-Sòng compilation. Without settlement, the Sìkù tíyào takes the view yí yǐ chuán yí 疑以傳疑 — preserve the doubt — and admits the volume as a Huājiān-companion under conditional dating.
Tiyao
Zūnqián jí, two juǎn. The original text has no compiler’s name. At its head stands a Wànlì-era preface by Gù Wúfāng of Jiāxìng 嘉興, which says: “I loved the Huājiān jí and wanted to bring it into wider circulation; my own compilation, however, is of a like character.” The wording reads as if Gù himself were the compiler — Máo Jìn took it so. Yet Zhū Yízūn’s colophon reports that at Wúxià he obtained a manuscript by Wú Kuān (in the Míng), collated it against Gù’s printed text, and found that the order of poets and the sequence of pieces were not different in the slightest. From this he reasoned that the volume must be a Northern-Sòng compilation. Examining Zhāng Yán’s Yuèfǔ zhǐmí 樂府指迷 KR4j0080: “from the SuíTáng down, the shēngshī are interspersed with long-and-short-line verse; for the Táng-period writers there are the Zūnqián and Huājiān” — this suggests that the present book and the Huājiān jí are both Five-Dynasties leavings. Yet Chén Zhènsūn’s Zhízhāi shūlù jiětí, in its gēcí category, puts the Huājiān jí first, noting “this is the ancestor of the recent practice of filling-words to tunes” — but does not mention a Zūnqián jí at all. It is implausible that Zhāng Yán saw the volume and Chén Zhènsūn did not. Zhū Yízūn’s identification of it as a Sòng volume cannot, then, be wholly trusted; we preserve the doubt and do not press a definite verdict. But on the merits of the cí themselves, the Zūnqián jí loses nothing as a side-team to the Huājiān jí; its sensibility and colour are sufficient to be drawn on; one need not press the question of who put it together. — Qiánlóng 46 / 1781, 1st month.
Abstract
The Zūnqián jí preserves c. 280 cí (in some recensions 285), distributed across 36 poets. Its principal additions to the Huājiān jí canon are: nearly all of Lǐ Yù’s surviving cí; substantial selections from Wēi Yìngwù 韋應物 and Lǐ Bái (genuine attribution disputed); Liú Yǔxī 劉禹錫’s Yì Jiāngnán 憶江南 set, etc. The dating problem (Northern-Sòng or late-Míng?) has been pursued by Wáng Guówéi 王國維 and others; the modern consensus (Quán Sòng cí preface; Wu Hsiung-ho 吳熊和) places the compilation in the early-to-mid Northern Sòng (so the assumed window 950–1050 used here), though some pieces are clearly later interpolations. Importantly, the volume’s textual relationship to the Huājiān in defining the “Huājiān-line” canon means that even where independent compilation cannot be securely established, the Zūnqián jí is functionally the second-oldest cí anthology in the tradition.
Translations and research
- Daniel Bryant, Lyric Poets of the Southern T’ang: Feng Yen-ssu, 903–960, and Li Yü, 937–978 (UBC Press, 1982) — the standard Western-language study of the Nán-Táng cí, drawing heavily on the Zūn-qián jí.
- Kang-i Sun Chang, The Evolution of Chinese Tz’u Poetry: From Late T’ang to Northern Sung (Princeton, 1980).
- Wáng Guó-wéi 王國維, Rén-jiān cí-huà 人間詞話 — frequent reference to Zūn-qián attributions.
- Wú Xióng-hé 吳熊和, Táng-Sòng cí tōng-lùn 唐宋詞通論 — sustained discussion of the Zūn-qián jí’s textual history.