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The Upright Brush

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THE
UPRIGHT
BRUSH
Yan Zhenqing’s Calligraphy
and Song Literati
Politics

Amy McNair

University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu
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© 1998 University of Hawai‘i Press

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

03 02 01 00 99 98 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McNair, Amy.
The upright brush : Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphy and Song literati
politics / Amy McNair.
p. cm.
Originally presented as the author’s thesis (Ph.D.—University of
Chicago, 1989) under the title: The politics of calligraphic style
in China.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–8248–1922–5 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0–8248–2002–9
(paper : alk. paper)
1. Yen, Chen-ch‘ing, 709–785—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Calligraphy, Chinese—History—T‘ang-Five dynasties, 618–960—
Political aspects. I. Yen, Chen-ch‘ing, 709–785. II. Title.
NK3634.Y45M39 1998
745.6’19951’092—dc21 97–39661
745.6’19951’092—dc21 97–3CIP1

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper

and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
Council on Library Resources

Book design by Kenneth Miyamoto

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To my parents
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Contents

List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii

1. The Politics of Calligraphy 1

2. Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 16
3. “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”: The An
3. Lushan Rebellion 38
4. Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 60
5. From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal 83
6. Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 96
7. The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 116
8. Confucian Martyrdom 140

Notes 143
Glossary 157
Bibliography 163
Index 171

vii
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List of Figures

11. Ouyang Xiu, Colophon to the Han Inscription for the Temple 12
on the Western Peak of Mount Hua, detail.
12. Copy after Wang Xizhi, Ping’an Letter, detail. 14
13. Copy after Wang Xizhi, Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang 19
Shuo, detail.
14. Yan Zhenqing, Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo, 20
detail.
15. Zhang Xu, Stomachache Letter, detail. 24
16. Yan Zhenqing, Manjusri Letter, detail. 25
17. Xu Hao, Epitaph for Amoghavajra, detail. 27
18. Yan Zhenqing, Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele, detail. 28
19. Yin Zhongrong, Stele for Li Shenfu, detail. 28
10. Diamond Sutra, detail. 30
11. Yan Zhenqing, Stele for the Temple of Confucius in Fufeng, 36
detail.
12. Yan Zhenqing, Draft of the Eulogy for Nephew Jiming. 46
13. Huang Tingjian, Written on the Cliff After the Stele, detail. 54
14. Yan Zhenqing, Paean to the Resurgence of the Great Tang 55
Dynasty, detail.
15. Su Shi, Record of Enjoying Rich Harvests Pavilion, detail. 56
16. Yan Zhenqing, Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu, detail. 57
17. Yan Zhenqing, Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol, 69
detail of opening section.
18. Su Shi, Copy of the Letter on the Controversy over Seating 70
Protocol, detail of opening section.
19. Su Shi, Colophon to the Copy of the Letter on the Controversy 71
over Seating Protocol.
20. Yan Zhenqing, Letter on the Controversy over Seating 74
Protocol, detail.

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x List of Figures

21. Su Shi, Copy of the Letter on the Controversy over Seating 75

Protocol, detail.
22. Yan Zhenqing, Defending Government Letter, detail. 76
23. Yan Zhenqing, Writing a Letter Letter, detail. 77
24. Yan Zhenqing, Guangping Letter, detail. 77
25. Yan Zhenqing (attrib.), Poem for General Pei, detail. 78
26. Su Shi, Huangzhou Cold Food Poems, detail. 80
27. Su Shi, Eulogy for Huang Jidao, detail. 80
28. Yan Zhenqing, Record of the Altar of the Immortal of Mount 84
Magu, Nancheng District, Fuzhou, detail.
29. Mi Fu, Record of the Immortal Duke of Lu, detail. 88
30. Yan Zhenqing, Request to the Emperor to Write a Heading 106
for the Ponds for the Release of Living Creatures Throughout
the Subcelestial Realm Stele, detail.
31. Yan Zhenqing, Letter for Cai Mingyuan, detail. 106
32. Yan Zhenqing, Cold Food Letter, detail. 108
33. Yan Zhenqing (attrib.), Self-Written Announcement of Office, 112
detail.
34. Yan Zhenqing (attrib.), Self-Written Announcement of Office, 114
detail.
35. Yan Zhenqing, Yan Family Temple Stele, detail. 119
36. Yan Zhenqing, Inscribed Record of a Visit to the Shrine 119
of Shaohao, detail.
37. Yan Zhenqing, Guo Family Temple Stele Inscription, detail. 121
38. Yan Zhenqing, Stele for Li Xuanjing [Li Hanguang], detail. 121
39. Han Qi, Two-Night-Stay Letter, detail. 121
40. Yan Zhenqing, Spirit Way Stele for Yan Qinli, detail. 124
41. Yan Zhenqing, Epitaph for Yuan Cishan, detail. 126
42. Cai Xiang, Colophon to Yan Zhenqing’s Self-Written 131
Announcement of Office, detail.
43. Cai Xiang, Record of the Wan’an Bridge, detail. 133
44. Cai Xiang, Letter to Yanyou, detail. 133
45. Yan Zhenqing, Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter. 138
46. Yan Zhenqing (trad. attrib.), Huzhou Letter, detail. 138
47. Yan Zhenqing (trad. attrib.), Poems Written at Magistrate Pan’s 138
Bamboo Hill Library, detail.
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Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation written under the direction of Harrie

A. Vanderstappen at the University of Chicago. My gratitude to Father
Vanderstappen for serving as a model scholar, teacher, and man of God
is too profound to express here properly. For support during my time at
Chicago, thanks to the American Oriental Society for honoring me with
the Louise Wallace Hackney Fellowship for the Study of Chinese Art in
1985–1986 and the Committee on Chinese Studies of the University of
Chicago for granting me a fellowship in 1984–1985. I thank my friends
and fellow students Margaret Chung and Stanley Murashige for spend-
ing long hours looking at Chinese ink rubbings with me in the store-
rooms of the Field Museum. The photographs of Field Museum ink
rubbings were taken by Dr. Murashige.
My dissertation was written in San Diego, where I was sheltered by
employment in the library of the University of California. For their
kindness, I thank Dorothy Gregor, Marilyn Wilson, and Karen Cargille.
This book was written at the University of Kansas, for which I am
grateful to Marsha Weidner and the faculty of the Kress Foundation
Department of Art History. Travel and writing time were supported by
the Art History Faculty Travel Fund and the General Research Fund of
the University of Kansas. For their helpful comments on the manu-
script, I am grateful to Robert E. Harrist Jr. and Richard M. Barnhart.
For their excellent editorial work, I thank Patricia Crosby, Don Yoder,
and Masako Ikeda of the University of Hawai‘i Press.
I would especially like to acknowledge my teachers in Chinese lan-
guage and literature at the University of Washington and the University
of Chicago: Paul L.-M. Serruys, William G. Boltz, Anthony Yu, and
David Roy. I am particularly indebted to Esther Jacobson and Jerome
Silbergeld, professors in the history of Chinese art at the University of
Oregon and University of Washington. There are no better teachers
than these. For encouragement and support, I owe the greatest debt to
my dear friend Jay Yancey.

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Introduction

Few who study Chinese calligraphy escape learning the style of Yan
Zhenqing (709–785). This is true for those who study the history of
Chinese calligraphy and for those who practice Chinese calligraphy
with the brush. His style is taught today as a standard, and Chinese
bookstores all over the world stock inexpensive reproductions of his
famous works for sale as copybooks. What a westerner may find curi-
ous about this situation is that Yan Zhenqing’s style cannot be called
conventionally attractive. Upright, correct, severe, serious, and forceful
are terms habitually applied to describe his style by traditional and
modern critics, but rarely has it been called graceful or beautiful. Of
course, the use of terms relating to human character in aesthetic criti-
cism was a long-standing tradition even by Yan Zhenqing’s day, but in
his case there is a special pertinence to their use. This is because the
popularity of the man’s style is based as much on his reputation as a
person as on the utility of his calligraphic manner.
If Yan Zhenqing’s style is not beautiful, how did he earn such an emi-
nent place in the history of calligraphy? That is the question I have set
out to answer in this book. Simply put, Yan Zhenqing’s prominent
place was created by certain literati of the Song dynasty (960–1279)—a
handful of influential men in elite positions in society who were highly
educated in philosophy, literature, and art. They had their own specific
political uses for the reputation Yan Zhenqing left to posterity, and so
they adopted his calligraphic style as a way to clothe themselves in his
persona. They copied and collected his artworks, incorporated elements
of his style into their own, and celebrated his reputation and style as
one indissoluble unit in their critical writings on art.
To tell the story of Yan Zhenqing, I begin with a chapter that sets the
stage for the many uses to which Yan Zhenqing’s style and reputation
were put by the Song-dynasty literati. I explain the notion of character-
ology as the ancient pseudoscience of assessing a man’s character and
fitness for government office from examination of his aesthetic effect,

xiii
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xiv Introduction

both in his physical appearance and comportment and in his practice of

the polite arts. Such things as the composing of prose and poetry, the
playing of chess or the seven-stringed qin, and the writing of calligraphy
result from the gesture of the hand in obedience to the mind and thus
were seen as outward manifestations of inner character. The practice of
characterology began in the Han dynasty (206 b.c.e.–220 c.e.) as part
of the Confucian ideology of service in government. In the centuries fol-
lowing, philosophical thought was dominated by Daoist and Buddhist
speculation; but in the Song dynasty, Confucian ideas about the role of
the educated gentleman in politics and culture were revived. The cul-
tural elite of the eleventh century had an interest in antiquarianism and
the objects and styles of the past. Not surprisingly, the Confucian politi-
cians among them made characterology a conspicuous element in the
choice of models from the past in art and literature. The model they
chose in calligraphy was Yan Zhenqing, a man of upright character and
an upright style of writing.
The rest of the book uses an artistic biography of Yan as its matrix.
Each chapter treats a discrete period of his life, beginning with his illus-
trious family background and his meteoric early career and ending with
his crowning appointments to high national office and his martyrdom
as a loyalist. In each chapter I also focus on a specific work of calli-
graphy done during the period covered. I explain its content, situate it
within Yan’s life and contemporary events in Tang-dynasty China (618–
907), and place its style within the development of Yan’s oeuvre and
calligraphy in the eighth century. We then move to investigation of the
Song literati response to this specific work and to Yan Zhenqing and his
style generally.
Chapter 2 treats Yan Zhenqing’s early career as a successful young
literatus in and around the capital, Chang’an (modern Xi’an). Here the
masterpiece is his Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo of 754, in
which Yan’s distinctive style begins to be glimpsed. Spurred by the com-
ment of the Song-dynasty renaissance man Su Shi (1037–1101) that
Yan’s Encomium matched the style of the earlier version by the “Sage of
Calligraphy,” Wang Xizhi (303–361), I investigate the true relationship
between the two works and the various sources that did constitute
Yan’s foundational study in calligraphy, including the legendary master
of “mad cursive,” Zhang Xu (675–759), styles favored at court, and the
calligraphy of Yan’s male relatives.
Chapter 3 narrates the course of the An Lushan Rebellion (755–762)
from the point of view of the Yan family, which was shattered by its
violent events. In this period, Yan Zhenqing wrote the Draft of the
Eulogy for Nephew Jiming, which is the only certain autograph work
by Yan Zhenqing extant today. American audiences saw it on display at
the National Gallery of Art in early 1997 as part of the exhibition
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Introduction xv

“Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace

Museum, Taipei.” Many Song-dynasty literati, but especially the poet
and calligrapher Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), responded to the imme-
diacy inherent in the draft form, the simplicity of the calligraphic man-
ner, the monumental yet personal events it describes, and the emotion in
Yan Zhenqing’s voice. The qualities of awkwardness and sincerity in the
Draft of the Eulogy were the very effects that Huang was predisposed
to see in the art and literature of the Rebellion period and that he
sought in his own poetry and calligraphy.
In Chapter 4 we follow Yan into exile and service in humble posts far
from the capital. Upon his return to court, he threw himself into parti-
san politics there, writing an insulting letter to a powerful military man,
which is known to posterity as the Letter on the Controversy over Seat-
ing Protocol. This jeremiad was much studied in the 1080s and 1090s
by Su Shi, Huang Tingjian, and Mi Fu (1052–1107): all considered it
Yan’s finest work and admired its plain, natural, and unpremeditated
style. Su Shi made many copies of the Letter, one of which survives in
ink-rubbing form. In a colophon to this copy, he revealed his admira-
tion for the upright, or centered, brush technique of Yan Zhenqing. Yet
his own brush technique in the copy is not the centered brush, but the
slanted brush, which creates greater visual drama in the brush strokes. I
can only conclude that while Su Shi followed the critical line taken by
his mentor, the Confucian reformer Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), that the
upright brush of Yan Zhenqing was the appropriate model for the
scholar-official, in practice Su Shi continued to use the slanted brush of
his early model, Wang Xizhi. Su Shi’s relationship to the style of Yan
Zhenqing reveals that the paramount symbol of political identification
was not the faithful reproduction of the ideal style but the affiliation in
one’s critical writings with the accepted patriarchs of one’s political
group.
Chapter 5 traces Yan’s resulting exile to the south and explains the
circumstances surrounding his writing of the Record of the Altar of the
Immortal of Mount Magu. Following a translation of this inscription
for a Daoist sacred site, I offer documentary evidence for the widespread
belief in the ninth and tenth centuries that Yan himself had become a
Daoist immortal upon his death. Mi Fu, a connoisseur and art collector
who served the Daoist court of Emperor Huizong in the twelfth century,
wrote out a Daoist hagiography of Yan in imitation of Yan’s own calli-
graphic style. Mi Fu did so, I argue, in order to recast Yan’s image from
that of the narrow moralist championed by the Confucian reformers to
that of a supernatural immortal the Daoist court could appropriate as
their hero.
Chapter 6 tells how Yan Zhenqing arrived as prefect of Huzhou in
773, where he found congenial company, writing poetry and working
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xvi Introduction

on his long-standing dictionary project with the monk poet Jiaoran

(ca. 724–ca. 799), the tea expert Lu Yu (733–804), and others. There he
transcribed his Ponds for the Release of Living Creatures Throughout
the Subcelestial Realm inscription of 759, which described the late Em-
peror Suzong’s establishment of ponds to be used for the pious Buddhist
practice of releasing captive fish and turtles. Since no evidence exists
that Yan was a believer in Buddhism, Su Shi formed the theory that
Yan’s original memorial was written to criticize Suzong for unfilial be-
havior toward Retired Emperor Xuanzong. This is a likely explanation,
but Yan’s later completion of the project should probably be seen as a
posthumous reconciliation with Suzong and an offering of gratitude to
the reigning Emperor Daizong, both Buddhist believers. This inscription
survives only in an engraved calligraphy compendium dedicated to the
works of Yan Zhenqing, called the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness
Compendium (Zhongyi tang tie), compiled in 1215 by Liu Yuangang, a
high official from a prominent Confucian family. The history of engraved
calligraphy compendia in the Song dynasty reveals how they embodied
the political tensions between the scholar-official class and the throne.
The compendia of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries display the
universal acceptance of the classical tradition of Six Dynasties calligra-
phy championed by the throne. The crucial difference between the early
compendia created by scholars and the imperial compendia is that only
the former contained works by Yan Zhenqing. Scholars’ compendia of
the mid-eleventh century included epigraphy and other nonclassical
calligraphy, but imperial compendia still excluded them. Finally, in 1185,
a work by Yan Zhenqing was published in an imperial compendium,
thereby signaling imperial acceptance of the Confucian reformers’ posi-
tion that cultural models should be chosen on the basis of their character.
In Chapter 7 we see Yan Zhenqing return to court in 777, where he
was named to a succession of high positions. In 780 he wrote a grand
summation of his family’s achievements, called the Yan Family Temple
Stele. Its open, even, four-square manner came to be known and imi-
tated in the Song dynasty and afterward as the “Yan style.” This was no
accident, of course, but a result of the deliberate promotion of Yan’s
style as a contrast to the court-sponsored style of Wang Xizhi. The
revival of Yan Zhenqing’s style began in the 1030s, in the circle of the
Confucian reformers Han Qi (1008–1075) and Fan Zhongyan (989–
1052), but the most zealous propagandist for the regular-script calligra-
phy of Yan Zhenqing’s final decade as the “Yan style” was Ouyang Xiu.
His collection of one thousand ink rubbings contained a score of works
by Yan Zhenqing and only one or two by Wang Xizhi. The critical com-
ments he wrote on Yan’s works reveal that his admiration for Yan’s
upright regular-script style was due to its manifestation of his upright
personality. Ouyang promoted Yan as the Confucian standard in callig-
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Introduction xvii

raphy. In the cultural arena he used Yan’s style as a sword in his attack
on court styles in the arts; in the coliseum of court politics he used Yan’s
reputation as a shield, to defend himself against charges of disloyalty.
The artist who made Yan Zhenqing’s style a workable tool was the
Confucian statesman Cai Xiang (1012–1067). A longtime friend of
Ouyang Xiu, he spent more than thirty years discussing and studying
the works in Ouyang’s collection of ink rubbings, including the many
pieces by Yan Zhenqing. Cai Xiang promoted Yan Zhenqing as a moral
exemplar in the Confucian fashion, as well, advocating his calligraphy
on the basis of the correspondence of personality and handwriting. A
superb calligrapher, Cai Xiang not only imitated Yan’s style directly but
incorporated aspects of it into his own personal style. His imitations of
Yan’s style followed the monumental regular script of Yan Zhenqing’s
last decade that predominates in Ouyang Xiu’s collection. In his own
style, Cai Xiang created a blend of the styles of Yan Zhenqing and
Wang Xizhi, executing the firm rectangular structures of Yan’s charac-
ter compositions in the fluid, modulating brush strokes of the Wang
style. By offering the possibility of interpretation of Yan’s style, he was
as responsible as Ouyang for making the study of the “Yan style” part
of the standard curriculum of future generations of scholars. So influen-
tial were the critical writings of Ouyang Xiu and the art of Cai Xiang
that by the end of the Southern Song, their view of Yan Zhenqing pre-
vailed. The visual and critical record is dominated by their image of an
upright Confucian martyr who wrote an upright regular script. This
image is the one that has come down to us.
The final chapter tells the poignant story of Yan Zhenqing’s martyr-
dom in the cause of loyalty to the dynasty. For his refusal to serve under
a rebel leader, he was hanged at the age of seventy-six. His self-sacrifice
set the seal on his life as a moral exemplar. Thanks to the belief in char-
acterology, the manner of his life and death made his calligraphy an
ideal standard in the Song-dynasty Confucian reformers’ struggle to
gain political and cultural parity with the throne.
In sum, then, this study seeks to reveal the mechanisms by which art
embodies and enacts tensions in philosophy, culture, and politics. The
Song-dynasty struggle over the art and reputation of Yan Zhenqing is
but one of many episodes in the history of Chinese culture in which the
creative reinterpretation of the art of the past has been used to political
ends.
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The Politics
of Calligraphy

What is the politics of calligraphic style? How can calligraphy be used

to make a political statement? This book explores one very prominent
episode in the history of the politics of calligraphy in traditional China.
In the eleventh century, historical circumstances converged to allow a
highly educated and ambitious group of government officials to involve
the art of calligraphy in creating their political identity. These historical
circumstances included the persistence of the traditional belief in the
personal expressiveness of handwriting and a resurgence of the con-
viction that Confucian values should be expressed in politics and cul-
ture. These themes combined to make calligraphy a significant venue
for the public expression of one’s self and one’s values and to allow the
imitation of earlier styles of calligraphy to serve as a sign of those
values.
The idea that writing expresses the personality of the writer is at
least two thousand years old. The Confucian scholar-official Yang Xiong
(53 b.c.e.–18 c.e.) encapsulated it in his famous pithy phrase, “Writing
is the delineation of the mind (shu xin hua ye).”1 This simple idea is
part of a larger theory of the study of man called characterology. Char-
acterology is based on the belief that because the style of the inner being
and the outer person is unitary, moral character can be deduced from an
examination of a person’s external manifestations, such as appearance,
behavior, or aesthetic endeavor. A classic expression of this philosophy
is the statement by the historian Sima Qian (145–90 b.c.e.): “When I
read the writings of Confucius, I can envision the kind of man he was.”2
The use of characterology in practical matters can be documented
from the Han dynasty onward; its principal use has been to assess the
virtue and ability of candidates for government office. Those who
would be government officials were judged not only on their ability to
express themselves in writing, but also on their appearance, their
speech, and their calligraphy. During the Tang dynasty, the criteria were
as follows:

1
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2 The Politics of Calligraphy

There are four areas considered in the method for choosing men [for
office]. The first is stature: a physique and appearance that are hand-
some and imposing. The second is speech: the vocabulary and diction
to debate the truth. The third is calligraphy: a regular script that is
powerful and beautiful. The fourth is judgment: logical writing that is
excellent and strong. Success in all four areas, then, is the precedent
for virtuous conduct [in office].3
Thanks to the force of the belief in characterology, calligraphic style
was granted moral significance. And due to the equation of moral fit-
ness with fitness for political office, calligraphic style took on political
significance, as well.
The correlation between style and personality affects the use of
calligraphy in the private sphere also. Since style is believed to commu-
nicate the personality of the writer, people collect personal letters and
other manuscripts as a souvenir of the writer. This practice, too, may be
traced back to the Han dynasty. The History of the Later Han records
the unusual appearance and behavior of the literatus Chen Zun and
says that the recipients of his letters collected them in the belief that his
handwriting reflected his extraordinary character.4
The concomitant notion that a virtuous character produces good art
is also present from at least the Han dynasty. This belief was evidently
so broad that even the philosopher Wang Chong (27–97), who was gen-
erally skeptical of many Confucian tenets, wrote: “The greater a man’s
virtue, the more refined is his literary work.”5 In a well-known anec-
dote from the Tang period, Emperor Muzong (r. 821–824) asked his
minister Liu Gongquan (778–865), who was famous as a calligrapher,
about the proper method for the brush. Liu’s reply taught the emperor a
lesson about the role of character in calligraphy (and in rulership): “The
use of the brush lies in the heart. If your heart is upright, then your
brush will be upright.”6 In other words, good art is founded on good
character.
What if a person wants to feign a virtue he does not possess? Could
he imitate the writing of a virtuous person and thereby disguise his true
character? Other critics seem to have considered this possibility, un-
sure whether an individual’s personality is always cleanly expressed
in his aesthetic endeavors. They argued that one’s own personality
should be expressed naturally: any attempt to create artificial expres-
sion or to disguise one’s personality was wrong. The Han critic Zhao Yi
wrote:
Now of all men, each one has his particular humours and blood, and
different sinews and bones. The mind may be coarse or fine, the hand
may be skilled or clumsy. Hence when the beauty or ugliness of a
piece of writing must depend both upon the mind and the hand, can
there be any question of making (a beautiful writing) by sheer force of
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The Politics of Calligraphy 3

effort? When there are (natural) degrees of difference in beauty and

ugliness in peoples’ faces, how can one strive to look like someone
else?7
Zhao Yi believed that one should not try to represent oneself as other
than one is. Wang Sengqian (426–485) recorded the view that anything
but natural expression would not only falsely represent the writer, but
would also result in hackneyed art. He wrote:
Your mind must lose itself in the brush and your hand lose itself in the
writing, so that your mind and hand will convey your feelings. For if
calligraphy has not forsaken premeditation, we say that it seeks what
it cannot find and examines what is already evident.8
Why did the problem of forcing or disguising personal expression in
calligraphy arise for the literati? Although traditional Chinese calli-
graphy criticism often uses the terminology of nature to describe callig-
raphy—and any number of calligraphers have claimed inspiration from
nature itself—the fact remains that writing is an artificial creation, and
to learn Chinese characters one must have a model. That model will be
the handwriting of another person. Yet if you learn the writing of
another and slavishly reproduce it, you have simply adopted someone
else’s heart/mind and hand and thereby obscured the expression of your
own. Somehow the delicate trick of creating your own expression
through the style must be achieved. Otherwise you are no better than a
sutra scribe or government clerk who must write anonymously and con-
ventionally. By extension the choice of a model becomes utterly crucial,
in terms of the character of the calligrapher, rather than simply the
beauty of his style. The student will want the style to represent a facet
of his personality. If he wishes to paint himself as a man of virtue, how
better than to choose as a model a figure from the past with a reputa-
tion for virtue? Furthermore, if the same model were adopted by a
group, it would become their means of identification.
Gradually this cluster of concepts grew to surround characterology
and calligraphy. By the eleventh century, great political significance
came to be attached to the choice of a model in calligraphy. An anec-
dote attributed to the premier Song Neo-Confucian philosopher, Zhu
Xi (1130–1200), illustrates the importance that the choice of calli-
graphic models came to have in the Song dynasty:
When I was young, I liked to study the calligraphy of Cao Mengde
[Cao Cao (155–220)]. At that time, Liu Gongfu [Liu Gong (1122–
1178)] was studying the calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing. I ridiculed him
for the mixing of modern characters with ancient in [Yan Zhenqing’s]
Lexicon for Gaining Employment. But Gongfu said to me sternly,
“The one whom I study was a loyal official of the Tang dynasty, while
the one whom you study was but a usurping traitor of the Han.” I fell
CH1 Page 4 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

4 The Politics of Calligraphy

silent and made no reply. That was how I learned that the choice of a
model cannot be made without due consideration.9

By the eleventh century, the imperial choice of a calligraphic model

had already been firmly established for more than five hundred years.
The calligraphy of Wang Xizhi (303–361), a prominent member of the
aristocratic ruling class of the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420), was
considered a supreme expression of the sophisticated Chinese culture of
the south when China was divided during the Northern and Southern
Dynasties period (317–589), and his calligraphic works were handed
down within the family and his style practiced in elite circles. Several
influential rulers practiced Wang Xizhi’s calligraphic style and engaged
in discussions of the authenticity of his extant works—notably Emperor
Ming of the Liu Song (r. 465–472), Emperor Wu of the Liang (r. 502–
549), and Emperor Yang of the Sui (r. 604–617). In the seventh century,
when Emperor Taizong of the Tang (r. 626–649) sought to reunify
China culturally after his military conquest of the south, he espoused
the calligraphic style of Wang Xizhi as a means of gaining the accep-
tance of the Chinese elite and establishing a cultural standard through-
out his empire. He studied calligraphy with his minister Yu Shinan
(558–638), who had himself studied with the Sui-dynasty (581–618)
monk Zhiyong, a seventh-generation descendant of Wang Xizhi. The
emperor also attempted to gather all the works attributed to Wang
Xizhi into the palace collection. To get them he confiscated the collec-
tions of his political enemies and sent out scouts to appraise and buy
other works. In the notorious case of the Orchid Pavilion Preface (Lan-
tingxu), he resorted to a cruel ruse to obtain it from an elderly monk.
Soon after assuming the throne, Emperor Taizong had amassed an in-
credibly large number of “authentic” pieces, from which various types
of copies were made. One type was the tracing copies produced by the
court calligraphers; another was the freehand copies produced by his
high officials Yu Shinan, Ouyang Xun (557–641), and Chu Suiliang
(596–658). The copies were distributed to court nobles, whose sons
were instructed in calligraphy by Yu Shinan and Ouyang Xun at the
palace school. When the official history of the Jin dynasty (265–420)
was compiled, the emperor himself wrote an imperial postscript to the
biography of Wang Xizhi in which he declared Wang the greatest callig-
rapher of all time.10
Emperor Taizong of the Tang fixed the style of Wang Xizhi as the
imperial signature with such finality that it was maintained through the
Tang dynasty and afterward. While warfare wracked the Central Plains
during the Five Dynasties period (907–960), the classical tradition was
preserved at the courts of the Shu kingdom, the Southern Tang dynasty,
and the kingdom of Wu Yue. As the armies of the Song dynasty con-
CH1 Page 5 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

The Politics of Calligraphy 5

quered these states, their calligraphers and calligraphy collections gravi-

tated to the Song capital. Shu surrended to the Song in 965, and its
famous calligraphers, such as Li Jianzhong (945–1013) and Wang Zhu
(d. 990), went to Kaifeng. When the Southern Tang capitulated in 975,
Su Yijian (957–995), Xu Xuan (916–991), and others moved to the
Song court. The kingdom of Wu Yue yielded in 978, and the palace
calligraphy collection was offered to the Song throne. The Southern
Tang had submitted its collection earlier.
Emperor Taizong of the Song (r. 976–997) also furthered the impe-
rial promotion of the classical tradition as a means to legitimize his
political and cultural status. The emperor instructed the calligraphers of
the Hanlin Academy to practice the style of Wang Xizhi, and he had the
scattered works attributed to Wang Xizhi brought back into the palace.
He welcomed Wang Zhu, who had studied the style of Wang Xizhi and
was said to be a descendant of the same Wang clan of Langye (Shan-
dong). The emperor appointed Wang Zhu to serve as a court calligra-
pher, in which capacity he acted as a personal calligraphy tutor to the
emperor.11 Wang was also granted the authority to buy and borrow
works from among the private collections in the capital. The emperor
then commissioned Wang to select the finest works of calligraphy in the
imperial archives, which contained the scrolls acquired from conquered
courts and through purchase or tribute. Taizong ordered a set of engrav-
ings made of Wang Zhu’s selection, which was known as the “Model
Letters in the Imperial Archives in the Chunhua Era [990–995]” (Chun-
hua ge tie). Five of its ten volumes were composed of 233 letters attrib-
uted to Wang Xizhi and his son, Wang Xianzhi (344–388). Ink rubbings
from the engravings were given to the nobility and to officials on the
occasion of their promotions.
The Song-dynasty emphasis on education and the arts, at the expense
of military capability, was due largely to the character and influence of
the founder of the Song, Zhao Kuangyin (927–976). Zhao had been a
general under the Later Zhou (951–960), one of the short-lived dynas-
ties of the Five Dynasties period, when he deposed the child emperor of
the Zhou and initiated his own dynasty. Though Zhao was a military
man, his plans for a long-lived dynasty did not include a prominent role
for the military. After his conquest was complete, he recalled his gen-
erals to Kaifeng and hosted a banquet for them, at which he exchanged
their military ranks for civilian office. He then reduced the size of the
army to half what it had been during the Tang.
To institutionalize stability for his newly established rule, Zhao in-
augurated a more inclusive examination system to staff a bureaucracy
that would replace the military commissioners who had destroyed the
Tang. Under the rule of his successor, Emperor Taizong, the number of
degrees awarded through the examinations was increased dramatically
CH1 Page 6 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

6 The Politics of Calligraphy

—from an annual average of around sixty degrees conferred in the High

Tang period to over two hundred conferred between 976 and 1057.12 In
addition, following the precedent set by Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690–
705), scholars from areas outside the capital were recruited to take the
examinations and enter government service.13 The tests themselves were
restructured for greater impartiality in grading, and the names of the
examinees were concealed. The Song practice of recruitment through
examination expanded to the extent that, by 1050, it has been esti-
mated, roughly half the men required to staff the whole civil service
were recruited through the palace examinations.
Increasingly, high government positions were available only to those
who had performed well in the examinations. This clear correlation
between intellectual endeavor and profit, prestige, and power caused an
enormous surge in the numbers of men seeking an education. In the
early Northern Song period (960–1127), government sponsorship of
schools was at a relatively low level, consisting mainly of gifts to private
academies that were already established.14 These academies and private
schools were responsible for the education of nearly all the scholars
who took office in the early years of the dynasty. Around 1034, how-
ever, the first comprehensive governmental education program took
shape, in the reign of Emperor Renzong (r. 1022–1063), when the prac-
tice of random funding of private schools was replaced with the promo-
tion of greater educational opportunity throughout the realm. Educa-
tion was further assisted by the rapid expansion of printing that took
place in the Northern Song. The printing of books, including the Con-
fucian Classics and the dynastic histories, was carried out by govern-
ment agencies in the capital and by officials stationed in the prefectures.
Sales were brisk for private printers also, who turned a good profit
from those who sought advancement through education.
The proliferation of the Confucian canon not only encouraged seri-
ous efforts to understand the real meaning of the classics but also
prompted rejection of the government-approved version of the classics
and their annotations and commentaries.15 Philological and philosophi-
cal inquiry into the words of Confucius (551–479 b.c.e.) and Mencius
(372–289 b.c.e.) became the focus of Confucian scholarship. As the
leading Confucian scholars began to be appointed to prestigious lec-
tureships at the National University in the mid-eleventh century, they
replaced the discredited official commentaries and annotations with
their own interpretations of the classics.
This resurgence of Confucian ideals in the Song dynasty resulted in
the revival of certain fundamental concepts about the roles of emperor
and official and the appropriate relationship between the two. One of
these concepts was that the links between governor and governed were
cast in the mold of family relationships. As the emperor was the Son of
CH1 Page 7 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

The Politics of Calligraphy 7

Heaven, he was the parent and guardian of his people. The official was
to regard the people as the younger generation in his family, but his
relation to the emperor was more complex. As the servant of the em-
peror, the official owed him the assistance and honest criticism that a
son owes a father. This view of their relationship characterized the atti-
tude of the Song emperors toward scholar-officials’ participation in
government. The view taken by the scholar-official class, however, was
somewhat different. Quoting Mencius, they argued that not only could
an official rank equally with the ruler in personal cultivation, but he
should actually be considered superior to the ruler in his abilities at
statecraft. As the ruler had been tutored by scholar-officials before he
ascended the throne, he should continue to receive instruction during
his reign.16 The scholar-officials encouraged the emperor to entrust the
planning and implementation of government policy to them on the
basis of their proven merits.
The Confucian scholar-officials got the chance to put their beliefs
into action in 1043–1044, during the Qingli era (1041–1049), in what
came to be known as the Qingli reform, or the minor reform (in con-
trast to the major reform of 1069–1085). The years preceding the
Qingli reform witnessed a struggle for political control between the
ministers in power, such as Grand Councillor Lü Yijian (979–1044),
mainly aristocratic northerners who were hereditary bureaucrats, and
the southern faction, the young, idealistic Confucian scholar-officials
who had risen on their native talent through the examination system.
These reformers included Fan Zhongyan (989–1052), Han Qi (1008–
1075), Cai Xiang (1012–1067), and Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072).17 In
1036, Fan was demoted for criticizing the policies of Lü Yijian and
Emperor Renzong, criticism intended to gain attention for the ideas of
the southern faction. To protest Fan’s demotion—and gain still further
notice—Ouyang Xiu wrote a letter to Gao Ruonuo (997–1055), a
policy-criticism adviser and supporter of Lü Yijian’s, reprimanding him
for not objecting to Fan’s demotion. As a result, Ouyang was demoted
as well. Cai Xiang wrote a poem, which was widely circulated, entitled
“Four Virtuous Men and One Unworthy,” in which he made a scathing
attack on the character of Gao Ruonuo and praised the courage and
independence of Fan Zhongyan, Ouyang Xiu, Yin Shu (1001–1046),
and Yu Jing (1000–1064), all scholar-officials of the southern faction
who had been dismissed at the same time.
In 1040, Fan Zhongyan and Ouyang Xiu were returned to active ser-
vice due to Renzong’s anxiety over the invasion of China’s northwestern
border by the Xi Xia (1032–1227). Although he found Fan and Ouyang
politically troublesome, he also believed they were the most capable
men in a military crisis. In 1043, Lü Yijian retired from office but re-
tained the unusual privilege of “consultation on important state and
CH1 Page 8 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

8 The Politics of Calligraphy

military affairs.” First Cai Xiang and then Ouyang Xiu protested Lü’s
role, so the emperor revoked the privilege. Ouyang and two other mem-
bers of the southern faction, Yu Jing and Wang Su (1007–1073), were
made policy-criticism advisers, and upon their recommendation Cai
Xiang soon joined their ranks. In the summer of 1043, the zealous
young policy-criticism advisers were permitted to make a daily appear-
ance at court to discuss government policy. They recommended that
Fan Zhongyan and Han Qi be put at the head of the government. When
the emperor then invited those two to set out their goals for government
policy, they produced a manifesto called the “Ten-Point Memorial” that
served as the ideological blueprint for the Qingli reform. The first five
points proposed the reform of the bureaucracy: strict evaluations of
performance in office; reduction of apppointments for an official’s sons
and relatives; reform of the examination standards, stressing discussion
of statecraft problems; careful selection of regional officials, who would
sponsor their own subordinates; and, to reduce bribery and extortion,
an increase in the land attached to regional posts. The last five points of
the memorial dealt with the problems of the peasantry: the improve-
ment of land reclamation and the grain transport system, the creation of
local peasant militias, strict and egalitarian law enforcement, and reduc-
tion of the corvée.
Opposition to these reforms was immediate and vehement. Three
measures in particular aroused the greatest ire in the entrenched offi-
cials: the limits on appointments for sons and relatives; the change in
the examination standards, which disadvantaged those officials and
their sons who had emphasized poetry in their examination prepara-
tions; and the expansion of the sponsorship system, which they believed
would result in widespread sycophancy and corruption. In truth, the
antagonism toward the reforms was caused as much by the self-righ-
teousness and intolerance of the reformers as by their radical proposals
and haste in implementing them. Their opponents soon set about amass-
ing enough argument and slander to persuade the emperor to reconsider
his support for the reformers. By 1044, the threat of the Xi Xia invasion
had abated. Accused of factionalism by Censor-in-Chief Wang Gong-
chen (1012–1085) and the censors under him, the reformers were dis-
missed from their positions. One of the damning pieces of evidence for
the charge of factionalism was Cai Xiang’s caustic poem of 1036, which
was offered to Renzong as proof that the southern faction had engaged
in conspiracy for nearly a decade.
Far from discrediting the Confucian scholars, however, the Qingli
reform, though unsuccessful, consolidated acceptance of the role of
scholar-officials in government. Following the minor reform, Confucian
scholars began to gain control of the directorate of education, where
they changed the examination standards to emphasize prose essays on
CH1 Page 9 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

The Politics of Calligraphy 9

the classics. So thoroughly had the scholar-officials permeated the gov-

ernment bureaucracy that in the major reform begun by Wang Anshi
(1021–1086) in 1069, though the factional positions were as polarized
as in the minor reform, the parties did not constitute a minority scholar-
official faction versus an entrenched career bureaucrat faction, but were
both composed of scholar-officials.
The Qingli reform also made the reformers’ reputations as scholars
and policymakers. The tremendous prestige they earned by putting their
careers on the line gave them the authority to be arbiters and models in
the cultural sphere, as well. This phenomenon was accidentally noticed
by the great connoisseur and calligrapher Mi Fu (1052–1107), who was
devoted to the study of the Jin masters, especially Wang Xianzhi. In his
History of Calligraphy (Shu shi), Mi Fu complained that the aping of
contemporary political leaders was the reason why ancient methods of
calligraphy had been lost:

When Song Shou [991–1040] was in charge of the government, the

whole court studied his style, which was called the “court style.” Han
Qi loved the calligraphy of Yan [Zhenqing], so scholars and common-
folk all studied Yan’s calligraphy. And when Cai Xiang was honored,
scholars and commoners then all studied him. Then Wang Anshi was
made chief minister, and scholars and commonfolk alike all studied
his style.18

Mi Fu was two generations removed from the reformers and evidently

had no particular sympathy for their political goals, so his complaint
serves as unintentional testimony to the cultural authority granted the
Qingli reformers.
The reformer who made the greatest impact on scholar-official cul-
ture was Ouyang Xiu. As a young man, Ouyang discovered the literary
works of the Tang-dynasty scholar-official Han Yu (768–824). Han Yu
advocated the use of a plainspoken literary style in imitation of the
writers of the Warring States (480–221 b.c.e.) and Han periods, a style
called guwen, or “ancient-style prose.” Han Yu was also a bold pro-
moter of Confucian values and virulently anti-Buddhist; in one famous
episode in his career as an official, he was degraded for submitting a
memorial arguing against allowing a relic of the Buddha to enter the
imperial palace.19 Because Ouyang identified profoundly with Han Yu’s
ideals, he joined with other scholars of the day in the revival of ancient-
style prose. They waged a campaign to replace the palace-sponsored use
of parallel prose (shiwen, or “current-style prose”) in government
examinations and memorials, which they criticized for stifling expres-
sion of the writer’s values in artificial language and rigid rules of com-
position. When Ouyang was put in charge of the national examinations
in 1057, he instituted ancient-style prose as the required style. Ouyang
CH1 Page 10 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

10 The Politics of Calligraphy

also promoted a move away from the style of poetry sponsored at

court. The “Xikun style,” named after the influential Xikun chouchang
ji collection of poems written by seventeen imperial archivists in the
early eleventh century, was also “characterized by the use of ornate and
allusive language with much parallelism.”20 Though Ouyang admired
poets who could work in this constricting idiom, he believed it fostered
imitation, not expression. In all forms of writing, Ouyang opposed
empty aestheticism and advocated clear and simple expression of Con-
fucian values. For this same reason, he rewrote the official dynastic his-
tories of the Tang and Five Dynasties periods.
Ouyang’s contributions to the changes in taste in literature and histo-
riography have been ably examined by James T. C. Liu, Ronald Egan,
and Lien-sheng Yang.21 Ouyang’s taste in calligraphy also came to pre-
vail in scholar-official circles down to the present day. Three features
were decisively settled by him and his circle of friends: the amateur aes-
thetic, the equation of style and personality in the choice of models, and
the study of epigraphy. Certainly Ouyang was not the first scholar to
promote these features. But after his day there were few scholars who
did not accept the notion of the moral superiority of the amateur artist,
consider carefully their choice of calligraphic models, or see the merit in
ancient inscriptions.
According to Ouyang Xiu’s concept of the amateur aesthetic, the
scholar should not devote an inordinate amount of time to making him-
self a virtuoso at calligraphy, nor should he slavishly copy a calligraphic
model.22 These two dicta may sound like restatements of earlier pro-
nouncements against gentlemen practicing as professionals, but the im-
plication within the context of Ouyang’s campaign against court styles
in all the arts was to condemn the current, degraded “Wang style” used
for official writing and to demand its replacement. The Chunhua ge tie,
the imperial showcase for the classical tradition, originally included a
substantial number of fakes and had been reengraved several times. By
the mid-eleventh century, the main vehicle of propaganda for the impe-
rial style was seen as a collection of poorly reproduced fakes. Even in its
degraded condition, however, the Chunhua ge tie was the most presti-
gious model available, so that Ouyang’s counsel against slavish copying
of a single model became perforce a warning against the imperially
sponsored Wang style. His proscription against making oneself a vir-
tuoso at calligraphy was also a condemnation of the Wang style—for
the chief reason to be highly skilled at calligraphy was to find employ-
ment as a calligrapher at court, and of course the style required at court
was that of Wang Xizhi.
Why should a Confucian literatus not serve as a calligrapher at
court? Because then one became a mere scribe, a “utensil” for the use of
others, not a man of thought and action. This attitude is revealed in an
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The Politics of Calligraphy 11

episode that Ouyang’s close friend Cai Xiang related to him in a letter.
Emperor Renzong had composed a memorial inscription for a deceased
relative and asked Cai to transcribe it. Cai complied, but when he was
then asked to transcribe another such text that had been written by an
official of the court, he refused:
Recently I was ordered by imperial edict to write out a stele text com-
posed by the emperor. Those who make a living doing inscribed tab-
lets for palaces and temples have a shallow understanding of calli-
graphy, so an emperor’s orders particularly should be requested of
very meritorious and virtuous masters. But when the court issued this
order for my calligraphy, I said: “In recent times, the transcribing of
stele inscriptions has customarily been done for a fee. There is an
officer retained for just this kind of order by the court; this is a task
for an editorial assistant.” Now, is it possible that I would compete
for fees with an editorial assistant? I have already forcefully refused
this request. I did not make my name by calligraphy!23
This episode was distilled and retold in virtually every subsequent bio-
graphical treatment of Cai Xiang—not only because of what it says
about Cai but also because it is such an essential illustration of the lit-
erati amateur aesthetic. Its message is that the literati should practice
the arts only as an emotional release and a means of communication
between members of the scholar class.
Ouyang’s promotion of the equation of style and personality repre-
sents the culmination of the tradition of characterology. As Stephen
Owen writes of him: “Characteristically, the Sung writer takes what
had previously been an implicit truth and raises it to the level of an
explicit question, calling for reflection and investigation.”24 Ouyang
made explicit that one’s models in the arts should be chosen on the basis
of their character. For example, he praised the calligraphy of Yan Zhen-
qing for what it revealed of Yan’s character:
This man’s loyalty and righteousness emanated from his heaven-sent
nature. Thus his brush strokes are firm, strong, and individual, and
do not follow in earlier footsteps. Outstanding, unusual, and impos-
ing, they resemble his personality.25
In another example, Ouyang condemned the “personality” and the cal-
ligraphic style of the entire era of Wang Xizhi:
The mores of scholars of the Southern Dynasties [317–589] were
lowly and unmanly. Those who were skilled at calligraphy all thought
the finest style was one of slender intensity and unblemished graceful-
ness. None of them wrote with such imposing, thick brushstrokes as
seen here.26
The equation of style and personality afforded Ouyang Xiu yet another
opportunity to denigrate the imperially sponsored calligraphic style.
CH1 Page 12 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

12 The Politics of Calligraphy

The study of epigraphy in China is generally considered to have

begun with Ouyang Xiu. This reputation, though not undeserved, may
be overplayed due to the fact that contributions by other eleventh-
century students of epigraphy have disappeared. Song Shou, the high
government official and historian, was responsible for what was evi-
dently the first privately engraved calligraphy compendium. His “Model
Letters of the Hall of Inherited Books” (Cishutang tie) included inscrip-
tions from ancient bronze ritual vessels and Qin-dynasty (221–206
b.c.e.) stone steles.27 These were undoubtedly copied from objects or
ink rubbings in Song Shou’s personal collection. His Cishutang tie had
to have been compiled before his death in 1040—years before Ouyang
began collecting epigraphical material—but it does not survive, nor did
Song Shou publish studies of his collection, as far as we know. Around
1056–1063, Ouyang’s younger friend and fellow epigraphy enthusiast
Liu Chang (1019–1068) compiled a work called Record of Antique
Vessels of Pre-Qin Times (Xian Qin guqi ji). It was a reproduction of
the designs and inscriptions on eleven bronze vessels that Liu owned,
engraved into stones, now lost.28
Around 1045, Ouyang began to collect ink rubbings of inscriptions
on bronzes and stone steles. His contemporaries were collectors of

Figure 1. Ouyang Xiu, Colophon to the Han Inscription for the Temple on the
Western Peak of Mount Hua, detail, 1064, ink on paper. Collection of the
National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China.
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The Politics of Calligraphy 13

inscriptions, as well, and many of his friends sent him ink rubbings
taken from bronzes they had acquired or stone inscriptions they encoun-
tered in the areas where they were posted. Among those who sent him
ink rubbings were Liu Chang, Yin Shu, the poet Mei Yaochen (1002–
1060), and Ouyang’s protégé, Su Shi (1037–1101). By 1062 he had
acquired a thousand ink rubbings. He then began to write colophons
for them, of which some four hundred are recorded and a handful extant
(Figure 1).29
Ouyang’s collection of ink rubbings and the colophons he wrote for
them was called Collected Records of Antiquity (Jigulu). It was pro-
foundly influential. During his lifetime the colophons circulated widely
among connoisseurs of antiquities. Ouyang’s opinions were quoted by
independent scholars far from court—such as Zhu Changwen (1039–
1098) in his Sequel to Calligraphy Judgments (Xu Shu duan) of 1074—
and in the heart of the palace in the Calligraphy Catalog of the Xuanhe
Era (Xuanhe shupu), the catalog of the imperial calligraphy collection,
written around 1120. The factual information and the subjective anal-
yses in Collected Records of Antiquity have been quoted in virtually
every catalog and survey of epigraphy written from Ouyang’s time to
ours, beginning with Zhao Mingcheng’s (1081–1129) early twelfth-
century work, Record of Inscriptions on Bronze and Stone (Jinshilu).
The influence of Han Yu may be seen here too. Ouyang’s interest in
epigraphy may have stemmed in part from reading Han Yu’s famous
poem “The Song of the Stone Drums” (Shiguge). The “Stone Drums”
are ten drum-shaped boulders inscribed with poems in the archaic seal
script describing the hunting expeditions of the King of Qin during the
middle or late Spring and Autumn period (770–481 b.c.e.). They are
now in the Beijing Palace Museum. Han Yu’s poem extols the ancient
seal-script writing of the “Stone Drums,” but one line in particular
granted permission to promote epigraphy over the calligraphy of the
classical tradition. In praising the ancient seal script, Han Yu contrasted
it to the style of Wang Xizhi. He dismissed Wang’s style with a line that
became widely quoted by Song-dynasty critics: “[Wang] Xizhi’s vulgar
calligraphy took advantage of its seductive beauty.”30
What exactly did Han Yu mean by “seductive beauty?” No auto-
graph works by Wang Xizhi are extant, but we can examine the handful
of Tang-dynasty tracing copies of some of his letters, which are the clos-
est we have to originals. Looking at the copy of Wang Xizhi’s Ping’an
Letter (Figure 2), the most striking quality is the dramatic modulation
in the thickness of the brush strokes, fluctuating from the trace of just
one hair of the brush tip to the full width of the brush within one stroke
alone. The organic, swelling quality of the brushwork is strengthened
by the dynamic movement of the brush strokes, which bend and sweep
and spring like leaves of bamboo. This variety and opulence is not
CH1 Page 14 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

14 The Politics of Calligraphy

Figure 2. Copy after Wang Xizhi, Ping’an Letter, detail, undated, ink
on paper. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic
of China.

created by accident, however. It is quite consciously and painstakingly

achieved—rather like the effect of beauty that elaborate hairstyles and
makeup produce: stunning, but artificial. Though the term for “seduc-
tive beauty,” zimei, is etymologically feminine, Han Yu did not intend
to criticize feminine beauty in its natural state, but rather the laborious
and self-conscious use of artifice and embellishment to achieve glamour.
The qualities that Han Yu attributed to the calligraphic style of
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The Politics of Calligraphy 15

Wang Xizhi are the same criticized by Ouyang Xiu in the styles of
poetry and prose sponsored by the court. Ouyang never criticized the
Wang style as overtly as Han Yu did, but his attitude toward the ama-
teur aesthetic shows he believed that, as with parallel prose and “Xikun
style” poetry, slavishly following the Wang style could foster artifi-
ciality, imitativeness, and a striving for effect—with the same result that
natural self-expression and serious content are lost.
Another important idea the Confucian reformers absorbed from Han
Yu was his concept of “the succession of the Way,” with which he had
bolstered his lonely revival of Confucianism in the late Tang dynasty.
This “succession” referred to the transmission of the tenets of Confu-
cian thought from one sage to the next, a succession that was modeled
on the contemporary Chan Buddhist notion of the direct transmission
of teaching from one patriarch to the next.31 Han Yu did not insist on
direct transmission, however, but allowed for a transmission, through
writings, between men separated by great stretches of time. Thus Han
Yu’s “succession of the Way” established a lineage connecting the leg-
endary sage-kings Yao and Shun to Confucius, Mencius, and himself.
As they took up Han Yu’s campaign to establish cultural standards
based on Confucian thought, Ouyang Xiu and his confederates ex-
panded Han’s concept of a succession of Confucian patriarchs beyond
literature and philosophy into the other polite arts practiced by the lit-
erati. The most important of these, due to the age-old belief in the
moral and political significance of personal handwriting, was calligra-
phy. As a consequence, they were eager to put their own patriarch of
calligraphy into competition with the imperial choice. Wang Xizhi had
been a hereditary aristocrat and a practicing Daoist; his calligraphic
style did not have the Confucian virtues of simplicity and gravity but
was highly articulated and inventive, quite consciously so. And it had
been promoted by a succession of Buddhist emperors. It was impossible
for the reformers to make any political use of a style with such attri-
butes. Their candidate for patriarch had to be a man who rose in the
world through talent and education, who spent his life upholding the
Confucian tradition of thought and action, and who had gained fame in
his own day with a calligraphic style that was forceful and severe. The
man they chose was Yan Zhenqing.
CH2 Page 16 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s
Illustrious Background
and Early Career
In the final years of the Heavenly Treasure era of the Tang dynasty
(742–756), tensions grew between the most influential minister at
court, Grand Councillor Yang Guozhong (d. 756), and An Lushan
(703–757), the military commissioner of the Fanyang, Pinglu, and
Hedong frontier commands, which spanned the northeastern borders of
China. Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756) supported them both, blind to
their mutual antagonism, due to their connections with his “Precious
Consort,” Yang Guifei (d. 756): Yang Guozhong was her second cousin;
An Lushan was a favorite she had adopted as her son. As An Lushan
consolidated his military power in the northeast, Yang Guozhong sys-
tematically eliminated all competitors at court for control of the heart
of China.

Yan’s Appointment to Pingyuan

In the spring of the twelfth year of the Heavenly Treasure era (753),
Emperor Xuanzong decreed that several vacant commandery governor
posts were to be filled by officials currently serving as ministers in the
capital. Those appointed were feted by the emperor that summer in the
Penglai Front Palace, where he composed poetry in their honor and
blessed their departure with gifts of silk.1 In retaliation for Yan’s having
refused to join his clique, Yang Guozhong recommended Yan Zhenqing
for appointment as commandery governor of Pingyuan, a walled city
close by the Yellow River in Dezhou prefecture, Hebei circuit (Shan-
dong).2 He thereby rid himself of this outspoken critic in an apparently
gracious manner. Indeed, Yan seems to have been flattered by the ap-
pointment. After his arrival, he wrote out a stele inscription celebrating
the fact that two of his ancestors had served in the past as governor of
Pingyuan: Yan Pei for the Wei kingdom (220–265) and Yan Zhitui (531–
591) for the Northern Qi (550–577).3
That civil war was the probable, even intended, result of Yang Guo-

16
CH2 Page 17 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 17

zhong pressuring the emperor to break the military power of An

Lushan had long been apparent to all but the emperor himself. Soon
after Yan Zhenqing arrived in Pingyuan, he began preparations against
a siege. He had the city walls repaired and the moats dredged. He
secretly stored up matériel and recruited soldiers. Pingyuan lay within
An Lushan’s jurisdiction as military commissioner, just three hundred
kilometers south of his headquarters in Youzhou (modern Beijing). One
of his subordinate officials, Ping Lie, had served at court with Yan
Zhenqing and knew of his reputation for rectitude. In order to gauge
Yan’s likely response to rebellion, An Lushan sent Ping Lie and a party
of his officials on an investigation tour to Pingyuan in the winter of
753. Yan distracted them by taking them on idle excursions into
the countryside, insulated by a band of his friends and relatives, while
behind the walls of Pingyuan preparations for the expected siege con-
tinued. There were boating parties, with wine drinking and poetry
composition, and outings to local sites, such as the temple of Dongfang
Shuo.
Notorious for his clever tongue and legendary Daoist supernatural
powers, Dongfang Shuo (159–93 b.c.e.) was an intimate adviser to Em-
peror Wu of the Han dynasty (r. 140–86 b.c.e.). A temple dedicated to
his worship stood near his tomb, not far from the ruins of the city of
Yanci, which was traditionally held to have been his birthplace. During
the third century, the literatus Xiahou Zhan (243–291) visited the locale
while his father was serving as governor there, and prompted by seeing
a portrait of Dongfang Shuo at the temple, he composed an essay called
“Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo.”4 In 720, this well-known
essay was engraved on a stele set up on the grounds of the temple by the
prefect of Dezhou, a man named Han Si. In Yan’s record of the outing
to the temple, which was engraved on the reverse of the stele that he set
up with his version of the Encomium on it, Yan described the scene on
the day his traveling party visited Dongfang Shuo’s temple:

We wandered up the entrance path to the temple and found that Han
Si’s engraved stone was still there. All sighed, for the characters of the
text were so fine and worn and the encroaching moss so flourishing.
In forty years’ time it had already been rendered illegible. I therefore
had the text engraved into another stone, choosing this time to make
the characters large, that they might endure. Though I could not rem-
edy my awkward skill, I did not shirk the task, but took up the brush
and wrote.5

Ping Lie and the other spies were convinced that Yan was an ineffectual
literatus whose notions of government administration were limited to
the refurbishment of local landmarks. An Lushan had no cause for
worry from that quarter.
CH2 Page 18 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

18 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

Wang Xizhi’s Encomium

Yan Zhenqing’s is not the only famous transcription of Xiahou
Zhan’s “Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo.” Wang Xizhi, the
most celebrated calligrapher in the Chinese tradition, once copied it out
for a younger friend named Wang Xiu (334–357). The traditional anec-
dote has it that Wang Xiu had been so fond of this piece of calligraphy
that when he died his mother had it put into the coffin with him, and so
the masterpiece departed from the face of the earth.6 References to it
later in the Six Dynasties period (317–589) seemed to corroborate the
story. The learned connoisseur Tao Hongjing (456–536) once told
Emperor Wu of Liang that “of all the famous pieces by Wang Xizhi,
there are only a few remaining. One cannot determine if some of these
works, such as the Encomium, are extant any longer.”7 Curiously, how-
ever, the calligraphy experts of the Tang dynasty dealt with the work as
if it had never left the mortal realm. Chu Suiliang cited it in his list of
the regular-script works by Wang Xizhi held in the Tang imperial collec-
tion. Sun Guoting, too, must have seen a version of the Encomium, for
in his essay on calligraphy (Shupu, dated to 687), he described its style,
calling it “extraordinary and unconventional.”8 Yan Zhenqing may
have seen the Encomium in the imperial collection also, perhaps during
the Opened Prime era (713–742), when his uncle by marriage, Wei Shu
(d. 757), compiled a list of works by the two Wangs in the imperial col-
lection.9 He could also have been invited to view the imperial collection
when he took the emperor’s special examination in 742 or when Xuan-
zong favored him with a gift of his own calligraphy in 750.10 If Yan did
see the Encomium, did he shape his verson to respond to Wang’s?
One opinion has been offered by Su Shi:

After [I had seen Yan Zhenqing’s Encomium], I saw the version by

Wang Xizhi, and I realized that, character for character, the Duke of
Lu’s [Yan Zhenqing’s] was a copy of this calligraphy. Although the
sizes of the two are very different, the spirit resonance is very similar.11

Let us examine this assertion through the material available to us. The
earliest extant copy of the Wang Xizhi Encomium is found in the
engraved calligraphy compendium known as the Jiang tie, or “Model
Calligraphies of Jiang Prefecture,” which was compiled in 1049–1064
(Figure 3).12 The ink rubbing of Yan’s Encomium reproduced here is
considered to have been taken during the Song or Yuan dynasties (tenth–
fourteenth centuries) (Figure 4).13 Unhappily, this rough date allows for
the possibility that this ink rubbing could have been taken from the
reengraving said to have been made during the Jin dynasty (1115–
1234). In embarking on a comparison between the two, we should keep
in mind that one and probably both are reengravings whose fidelity to
CH2 Page 19 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 19

Figure 3. Copy after Wang Xizhi, Encomium on a Por-

trait of Dongfang Shuo, detail, 356, ink rubbing, from
the Jiang tie. Collection of the National Palace
Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China.

the original is hard to gauge. Even with this caveat, the two versions
still seem to differ markedly both in content and style.
There are a substantial number of textual variations between the
Wang and Yan versions. In each instance where they differ, Yan Zhen-
qing’s text is in exact agreement with the text of the “Encomium” as it
appears in the standard sixth-century anthology of literature, the Wen
xuan. During the eighth century, at the time Yan Zhenqing studied for
the Presented Scholar degree, the principal text memorized for the exam-
ination was the Wen xuan, so unquestionably he knew the text by heart
from that source.14 The differences in the version attributed to Wang
CH2 Page 20 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

20 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

Figure 4. Yan Zhenqing, Encomium on a Portrait

of Dongfang Shuo, detail, 754, ink rubbing. Bei-
jing Palace Museum.

Xizhi suggest it may preserve a fourth-century textual variation of the

“Encomium,” different from the one codified in the sixth century. Al-
though this variation bolsters the connection between the eleventh-
century engraved version and the ink-written original, it also shows that
Yan did not copy Wang’s version “character for character.”
In terms of style, the Wang rendition shows the hallmark of the
Wang style that has been described with the phrase “left tight, right
loose”—meaning that in each character the strokes are clustered more
densely on the left-hand side, while the right-hand strokes fan out,
creating an open, dynamic structure. The characters in Yan Zhenqing’s
version show much less inclination to movement; they are quite four-
square and solidly placed on the ground line, with only a slight rising
right-hand tilt to the horizontal strokes and no clustering of strokes on
the left side. Yan Zhenqing’s characters describe self-contained squares
and rectangles, whereas the Wang characters are less ruled by core
gravity and more as if by a centrifugal force that throws off the outer
strokes. Compare, for example, the character “xian” in both pieces (the
CH2 Page 21 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 21

eleventh character in the third column of the Wang piece and the fourth
character of the second column in the Yan version). With Su Shi’s repu-
tation as a connoisseur in mind, I can only think that his real motive
was to praise Yan by claiming he had achieved the same exquisite qual-
ity of “spirit resonance” found in the art of the Sage of Calligraphy. In
short, based on the admittedly problematic visual evidence available
today, I cannot accept the idea that Yan’s version of the “Encomium”
followed that of Wang Xizhi. One last argument can be cited against Su
Shi’s view. This argument was made by the Qing-dynasty connoisseur
Liang Zhangju (1775–1849), who observed that Yan very clearly stated
his motive in writing out the “Encomium” essay in his record of the
event.15 Yan said: “I therefore had the text engraved into another stone,
choosing this time to make the characters large, that they might endure.
Though I could not remedy my awkward skill, I did not shirk the task,
but took up the brush and wrote.” This, of course, would have been the
moment to announce that he was writing out the piece in the style of
Wang Xizhi. Since he did not, we may accept that he was not.
The modern Japanese scholar Toyama Gunji looked at the obvious
differences in style of the two and proposed the possibility that Yan
Zhenqing wrote out his Encomium in his own style “in conscious oppo-
sition to Wang Xizhi.”16 I find this proposal anachronistic. My argument
in this volume is that the concept of opposition to the style of Wang
Xizhi and the advocacy for the style of Yan Zhenqing as an alternative
crystalized as part of a program of political propaganda in the eleventh
century. This point of view did not exist before the Song dynasty and
certainly not in the mind of Yan Zhenqing. Although considerable
chauvinism about a “Tang style” can be readily discerned in Tang texts
about calligraphy, particularly in those by Dou Ji (died ca. 769) and Xu
Hao (703–782), Yan himself never expressed anything but admiration
for the style of Wang Xizhi.17 In fact, he went to some lengths to
become affiliated with that tradition in the practice of cursive script.

Study with Zhang Xu

As a young man, Yan studied with the famous eccentric cursive-
script master Zhang Xu (675–759). Zhang was known to Yan through
family connections; Zhang’s friend and relative He Zhizhang (659–744)
was a member of the social circle that included Yan Zhenqing’s father
Yan Weizhen (670–712), his uncle Yin Jianyou (674–721), and his wife’s
uncle Wei Shu.18 In his Cursive and Seal Script Letter, Yan referred to
his study with Zhang:

Since the time of the Southern Dynasties, many of my ancestors have

been famous in their own day for their cursive, clerical, small seal,
CH2 Page 22 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

22 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

and large seal scripts, but in their descendants that path has fallen
into disrepair. Yet I once met with Administrator Zhang Xu and dem-
onstrated my youthful lack of expertise to him. But since he was loath
to part with his method, I could not gain any skill at calligraphy.19

We may brush aside his conventionally modest assertion that he gained

nothing from Zhang Xu. Any testimony to personal contact with the
glamorous figure of the great cursive-script master would suffice to
establish the truth of the transmission of calligraphic style in the mind
of the traditional reader.
Zhang Xu was depicted by his contemporaries in the conventional
role of the artist whose genius is released by wine. In the poem by Du
Fu (712–770) called “The Eight Immortals in Drink,” the lines describ-
ing Zhang read:
In Zhang Xu, three cups summon forth the Cursive Script Sage:
he strips off his cap and bares his head before princes and lords,
wielding his brush over the paper like clouds and mist.20

Another poet of the time, Li Qi (Presented Scholar, 735), wrote a “char-

acter sketch” poem about Zhang Xu, which begins with the lines:
Master Zhang has an inborn craving for wine,
Free and easy, no care for the world’s business.
Snow-white hair, total master of cursive and clerical scripts,
Named by the age “Genius of Great Lake.”21

Zhang Xu was a great celebrity of the High Tang period, and his leg-
end throve posthumously. The following is the ninth-century account of
his creative process from which the standard dynastic histories were
later to draw:
Zhang Xu’s cursive script had its own brush method, which was
handed down to Cui Miao and Yan Zhenqing. Xu said, “First I wit-
nessed a noblewoman’s porters racing each other down the road and
from that I obtained my concept of a brush method. Later I witnessed
Lady Gongsun dancing the Jianqi and from that [my cursive script]
gained its spirit.”
Xu would drink wine and then execute his cursive script, wielding
the brush and shouting, or dip his head into the ink and write with it,
so that the whole world referred to him as Crazy Zhang. After he had
sobered up, he would look at what he had done. He pronounced it
demonic and prodigious, and he was never able to reproduce it.22

The wild and ragged cursive script produced by these unorthodox

methods is called “mad cursive.” The term “mad cursive” (kuang cao)
was derived from “Mad Monk” (Kuangseng), a reference to another of
its early practitioners, the Buddhist monk Huaisu (ca. 735–ca. 800). It
CH2 Page 23 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 23

is characterized by radically simplified (sometimes illegible) character

forms that often vary extremely in size and tend to be linked in a con-
tinuous movement. Its desired aesthetic effect is one of eccentricity and
expressiveness. Even though he was one of the first to perform what
came to be known as mad cursive, Zhang Xu’s calligraphic pedigree
was orthodox. He is said to have studied calligraphy with his uncle Lu
Yanyuan, the son of Lu Jianzhi (585–638), who was a nephew and stu-
dent of Yu Shinan, the high official and connoisseur of calligraphy for
Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty.23 Yu Shinan had studied calli-
graphy with the Buddhist monk Zhiyong (fl. ca. 557–617), a seventh-
generation descendant of Wang Xizhi. Thus Zhang Xu may be said to
be affiliated with the classical tradition.
Whether Yan Zhenqing sought out Zhang Xu because of his eccen-
tric cursive style or because of his connection to the classical tradition is
difficult to say, but he does seem to have considered Zhang a part of the
Wang tradition. In his preface to a set of poems on the cursive script of
his younger contemporary, the Buddhist monk Huaisu, Yan described
himself as the latest generation in a genealogy of the cursive-script tradi-
tion of Wang Xizhi:
The writing of cursive drafts arose in the Han dynasty. Du Du [first
century] and Cui Yuan [77–142] were the first to gain fame by their
marvelous ability. It then came to Boying [Zhang Zhi (died ca. 192)],
who was particularly adept at its beauties. Then it descended to Wang
Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi, after which Yu [Shinan] and Lu [ Jianzhi]
together inherited it. The oral formula was manually received, until it
got to the administrator of Wu commandery, Zhang Xu . . . When I
was young, I once went to stay with him and many times met with
him to implore and urge him to teach me his brush method.24
This documentary material needs to be examined carefully for its
veracity because the contact between Yan and Zhang is traditionally
proved with the famous text called The Twelve Concepts of the Brush
Method of Administrator Zhang, which purports to be Yan’s record of
his Socratic dialogue with Zhang on the subject of calligraphic tech-
nique.25 This text is a fabrication of the Song dynasty.26 Yan’s letters dis-
cussing his study with Zhang are authentic, however, as far as I know,
and they convince me that the meeting between Yan Zhenqing and
Zhang Xu was not an invention of later writers. One further corrobora-
tion of their contact is this letter by Huaisu:
When in my later years I took to roaming across China, what I regret-
ted most was never having known Crazy Zhang the Administrator.
Recently in Luoyang I accidentally encountered Minister Yan Zhen-
qing, who said that he had received the administrator’s brush method.
Hearing this method from Yan Zhenqing was like having had the
chance to hear it from Zhang Xu.27
CH2 Page 24 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

24 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

Our other resource to demonstrate a connection between the two is

the extant visual material, which is admittedly problematic. No auto-
graph work in cursive script by Zhang Xu survives. Of those few works
commonly attributed to him, the stone-engraved “Broken Stele” Thou-
sand Character Classic in the Forest of Steles in Xi’an is in fragmentary
condition, as is another version called the Cursive-Script Thousand
Character Classic.28 There is also an engraved cursive-script Heart Sutra
with a questionable attribution.29 The unsigned Stomachache Letter, also
in the Forest of Steles, is a reengraving of Ming date. The ink-written
Four Ancient-Style Poems scroll in the Liaoning Provincial Museum is
the subject of much disagreement: major connoisseurs of the past and
present, such as Dong Qichang (1555–1636) and Yang Renkai, consider
it a genuine work by Zhang Xu, but the compilers of the Shiqu baoji
catalog of the Qing imperial collection (1745), for example, declared
it fake.30 The Ziyan Letter, now in Japan, is considered too tame in
style and too poor in quality to be reliable.31 I myself find the calli-
graphy in both the Four Ancient-Style Poems and the Ziyan Letter

Figure 5. Zhang Xu, Stomachache Letter, detail,

undated, ink rubbing. Shaanxi Provincial Mu-
seum. From Shaanxi lidai beishi xuanji, p. 130.
CH2 Page 25 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 25

Figure 6. Yan Zhenqing, Manjusri Letter, detail, undated, ink rub-

bing, from the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium.
Zhejiang Provincial Museum.

stilted and wooden. The “Broken Stele” Thousand Character Classic

and the Stomachache Letter are more complex and varied in terms of
composition and line.
Let us compare the Stomachache Letter to the ink rubbing of the
Manjusri Letter by Yan Zhenqing (Figures 5 and 6). In both we see large,
CH2 Page 26 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

26 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

loosely organized characters spread openly across the paper, with sev-
eral characters expanding beyond the borders of their column into the
one adjacent. Many characters display looping, circular forms that
impart a sense of entropy; many individual characters have composi-
tions that would seem unbalanced were they taken out of context, but
which are actually fully integrated into the structure of their respective
columns. Interesting contrasts are created in the juxtaposition of straight
lines and curving lines, giving the writing a feeling of being at once
organic and geometric. While this comparison cannot offer definitive
proof that Yan Zhenqing was a student of Zhang Xu, Yan’s running-
script style does seem much closer to Zhang’s cursive script than to
extant examples of Wang Xizhi’s running script (Figure 2). Combined
with the reliable documentary evidence, it convinces me that the trans-
mission of style between the old eccentric and his self-appointed appren-
tice did take place.

Development of Regular-Script Style

In terms of his cursive-script manner, Yan Zhenqing believed himself
a part of the classical tradition. His regular script seems to have fol-
lowed a different development, however. During his years as an exami-
nation student and government official in Chang’an, he learned the
Wang style of regular script taught at the imperial academy, mastery of
which was necessary for the imperial examinations. This training pro-
duced the sort of calligraphy expected at the court of Emperor Xuan-
zong: characters are tightly composed, strokes are vibrantly modulated,
and stroke ends are crisply pointed. Yan’s contemporary Xu Hao, for
example, was famous for his rendition of the court style (Figure 7).
The only extant inscription by Yan that shows his proficiency is the
earliest, the Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele of 752, which was written in
Chang’an (Figure 8). Soon after that, with the Encomium on a Portrait
of Dongfang Shuo of 754, he began to slough the piquancy associated
with that style. The manner of the Encomium is noticeably different
from the Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele: much less modulation in stroke
thickness is evident and the sharp stroke ends have been blunted. What
was once a highly articulated manner became plainer and more severe.
Here I would like to explore several possible explanations for this
change in manner just two years after his departure from Chang’an into
the provinces.
I have found no statement in which Yan affiliated himself with any
particular tradition in terms of regular script. What we do know about
his early training is that he was taught to write by family members, who
would have used the writing of their illustrious ancestors as a model.
The concept of clan identification in calligraphic style is rarely articu-
CH2 Page 27 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 27

Figure 7. Xu Hao, Epitaph for Amoghavajra, detail, 781,

ink rubbing. Shaanxi Provincial Museum. From Shodò zen-
shû, 3rd ed., vol. 10, pl. 10.

lated in the traditional critical literature, perhaps because it was so

obvious as to require no comment. One person who did remark on it
was the Qing-dynasty critic Ruan Yuan (1764–1849). He wrote: “Yin
Zhongrong and Yan Zhenqing of the Tang dynasty both employed the
family style handed down from generation to generation in their steles
in clerical and regular script.”32 Yin Zhongrong was Yan Zhenqing’s
great-uncle. Noted for his clerical script, he was one of the two out-
CH2 Page 28 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

28 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

standing calligraphers at the courts of Emperor Gaozong and Empress

Wu (r. 649–705). He served in a number of important government posts
and was responsible for some of the epitaphs written for the high offi-
cials buried at the Zhaoling mausoleum of Emperor Taizong.33 When
his brother-in-law Yan Zhaofu died, Yin Zhongrong took over the edu-
cation of his sons, Yan Yuansun (668–732) and Yan Weizhen, thereby
transmitting his calligraphic style to Yan Zhenqing’s uncle and father.34
Yan Yuansun’s style was said to be indistinguishable from Yin Zhong-
rong’s, and it was Yuansun whom Yan Zhenqing credited with person-
ally educating him.35 Thus the foundation of Yan Zhenqing’s style must
have been the style of Yin Zhongrong.
If the manner seen in the Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele resulted from

Figure 8. Yan Zhenqing, Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele, Figure 9. Yin Zhongrong, Stele for Li
detail, 752, ink rubbing. Shaanxi Provincial Museum. Shenfu, detail, 651, ink rubbing. Zhaoling,
From Zhongguo shufa quanji, vol. 25: Sui Tang Wudai Shaanxi. From Shodò zenshû, 3rd ed.,
bian, Yan Zhenqing 1, p. 40. vol. 8, p. 187.
CH2 Page 29 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 29

his synthesis of the Yan and Yin clan styles taught to him in childhood
and the Wang-style regular script taught in the Tang imperial academy,
then one possible explanation for the change in manner evinced by the
Encomium is that Yan elected for some reason to allow the influence of
Yin Zhongrong’s style to come to the fore. His four-square, open com-
positions seem to have more in common with Yin Zhongrong’s clerical-
script Stele for Li Shenfu (Figure 9) than with Wang Xizhi’s Encomium.
I see this not as a conscious rejection of the Wang style, however, but as
a conscious affirmation of clan ties. Ancient clan connections were
brought into Yan’s consciousness by his posting at Pingyuan. His pride
in family achievements is embodied in the inscription he wrote celebrat-
ing the three Yans who governed Pingyuan in the third, sixth, and
eighth centuries—and, too, Pingyuan was close to Linyi, the ancestral
family place in ancient Langye (modern Shandong).
Another theory to explain the stylistic differences between the Pra-
bhutaratna Pagoda Stele and the Encomium was broached by the
seventeenth-century connoisseur Sun Chengze (1592–1676) and em-
broidered further by the modern scholar Zhu Guantian. Concerning the
Encomium, Sun Chengze wrote: “This calligraphy, compared to his
other engraved works, is severe and ordered. I think that since Man-
qing’s [Dongfang Shuo’s] life was one of such extreme craftiness, later
generations had to use extreme measures to rectify him.”36 In other
words, Yan Zhenqing felt compelled to use an open and forthright
manner in his calligraphy to counteract all the Daoist cleverness and
trickery described in the biography of Dongfang Shuo. Yan’s “upright”
calligraphic manner would visually “rectify” Dongfang Shuo’s crooked
character. Zhu Guantian further contrasts the “severe and ordered”
manner of the Encomium with the manner used for the Prabhutaratna
Pagoda Stele.37 He observes that since the literary style of the Prabhu-
taratna Pagoda Stele text is overwrought and the religious “miracles”
described would not bear close examination, it was only appropriate
for Yan to employ the ornate and mannered court style for this metro-
politan inscription. The explanation advanced by these two historians is
that Yan Zhenqing modified his style to reflect the content of the liter-
ary works he transcribed. I might extend their idea to the notion that
since Yan was not the author of either text, speaking in his own voice,
he was not compelled to represent himself in his calligraphic manner.
Rather, it was appropriate to use his calligraphic manner to respond to
the content of the text, either to conform to it or contradict it.
Another explanation for the change seen in the Encomium stele is
that it reflects the influence of another format—that of cliff engravings,
or moya. “Moya” literally means “smoothed cliff,” so named from the
common practice of planing a smooth surface on the face of a natural
stone formation to engrave characters on it. Seeking another artistic
CH2 Page 30 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

30 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

source for the open character structure and rounded strokes of the
Encomium stele, Zhu Guantian and other contemporary historians of
art in China have fastened on its stylistic similiarities to the Buddhist
sutras engraved into the living rock at “Sutra Valley,” on Mount Tai, in
Shandong province.38 Most often mentioned is the anonymous Dia-
mond Sutra (Figure 10)—generally considered to have been written
around 570.39 Engraved into a dry creek bed, the characters are quite
large (45 × 50 cm) and have expansive structures and blunt-ended,
unmodulated brushwork. What makes this comparison particularly
tantalizing is that Mount Tai is only about 110 kilometers south of
Pingyuan.

Figure 10. Diamond Sutra, detail, ca. 570, ink rub-

bing. Mount Tai, Shandong. From Shodò zenshû,
3rd ed., vol. 6, pl. 93.
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Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 31

Yet we have absolutely no evidence that Yan ever visited Sutra Valley
or saw ink rubbings taken from the inscriptions. The connection cannot
be substantiated through documentary evidence, nor is the visual evi-
dence compelling. The critical practice of locating the stylistic sources
for the writing of well-known calligraphers in certain exceptional anon-
ymous engraved stele inscriptions from the Northern Dynasties period
(386–581) arose during the resurgence of epigraphic study that began
during the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1735–1796). Chinese scholars
are still wedded to this questionable practice today, as are some Western
historians of calligraphy.40 As I have argued elsewhere, the notion that
anonymous calligraphy would have any place in the development of
one’s personal style ran counter to the class and clan consciousness of
the traditional scholar-official.41 They were freed from this bias only
under the changed historical circumstances that led to the rise of the
epigraphy studies movement in the eighteenth century.
The explanations we have looked at so far include a reassertion of
clan style, a response to the content of the text, and the influence of an
earlier monument. The move away from court, out into the provinces,
for some reason caused Yan to abandon his metropolitan style. Could
he have adopted a self-consciously “provincial” style? If a metropolitan
style is crisp and mannered, would a provincial style be rustic, archaic?
If he had indeed embraced such an aesthetic, it would bind together two
of the proposed explanations for his change of manner. Moya such as
the Sutra Valley engravings are not produced in metropolitan areas;
they are found in mountain wilderness, where they are viewed as part of
the natural scene, as if emanating organically from the fissured depths
of the rock. Their character structures are loose and their strokes blunt,
not artificially sharp and refined like a court production. Archaic quali-
ties, too, would be instantly conveyed by echoes of the style of Yin
Zhongrong, who was a master of the even, square forms of the antique
clerical script.
Another missing piece of the puzzle is Han Si’s stele of 720 that Yan
replaced. In his record of the event, Yan never mentions Yin Zhong-
rong, Wang Xizhi, or Mount Tai, but he does speak sadly of the corro-
sion of Han Si’s inscription. Did Yan’s version respond to Han’s in some
way? This question must remain unanswered. Though three broken
pieces of the Jin-dynasty reengraving of Yan’s stele remain in Dezhou,
Han’s stele, as far as I know, is lost entirely. Yan’s Encomium was not so
much about Wang Xizhi’s as it was about Han’s stele, whose worn and
mossy face he confronted during a period of personal and national inse-
curity. His reaction in such a case would not be to assert his individual-
ism and mount an aesthetic challenge to Wang Xizhi, but to reaffirm
tradition and attach himself to the stable weight of the centuries. Given
the evidence at hand, I conclude that the style of Yin Zhongrong was
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32 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

the strongest influence in Yan Zhenqing’s development away from the

manner of the court of Emperor Xuanzong.
Although I maintain that Yan Zhenqing’s transcription of the “Enco-
mium” was neither a copy of the work by Wang Xizhi nor a challenge
to it, the words of his predecessor may have resonated in his mind as he
looked on the stele that had been all but obliterated in less than forty
years. At the end of his famous “Preface to the Poems Written at the
Orchid Pavilion Preface” (Lantingxu), Wang Xizhi wrote:
Whether long or short our lives follow fate and at last must end. The
ancients said, “Great indeed are life and death.” Is this not painful?
Whenever I ponder the men of old their sources of feeling agree with
ours.42
This poignant awareness of the brevity of life is expressed in Yan Zhen-
qing’s description of the discovery of the stele of 720 on the temple
grounds:
We wandered up the entrance path to the temple and found that Han
Si’s engraved stone was still there. All sighed, for the characters of the
text were so fine and worn and the encroaching moss so flourishing.
In forty years’ time it had already been rendered illegible.
The “Orchid Pavilion Preface” continues:
Men in after time will look back upon us as we look back upon those
who have gone before us, alas! . . . Though times and happenings
alter and differ, may men in what moves them be brought together.
They who regard us from the future will also be touched by these
writings.
Wang Xizhi gained immortality through the words and calligraphy of
the “Orchid Pavilion Preface.” Han Si, too, participated in the endless
flow of Chinese cultural history by putting his name to his Encomium,
but his bid for immortality was on the brink of extinction when Yan
Zhenqing and his party came upon it. Yan saved his name, but Han’s
brush with oblivion made a sobering warning. Yan described his
response in the record on the Encomium stele reverse:
I therefore had the text engraved into another stone, choosing this
time to make the characters large, that they might endure.
As Han Si had done, Yan Zhenqing would connect himself with the cul-
tural immortality of Dongfang Shuo, Xiahou Zhan, and Wang Xizhi
and thereby fix for the future his name and his confrontation with time.

Yan Zhenqing’s Antebellum Career

Yan Zhenqing’s appointment to Pingyuan represented the first check
to an official career in which he had progressed steadily upward
CH2 Page 33 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 33

through the ranks of official positions and prestige titles. The Yan
family had lived in Chang’an and served in official positions for five
generations since Yan Zhitui moved there in the sixth century. Though
Zhenqing’s ancestors Yan Zhitui and Yan Shigu (581–645) were quite
illustrious, his grandfather Yan Zhaofu never held a policymaking posi-
tion but served as reader-in-waiting to the Princes of Jin and Cao. His
father, Yan Weizhen, rose only to the midlevel post of companion to Li
Longye (ca. 687–734), the Prince of Xue. Thus Yan Zhenqing’s older
brothers had to begin their more distinguished careers with degrees
earned through the examination system. His brother Yunnan (694–762)
was particularly successful, and it seems he was able to help the
younger brothers Zhenqing and Yunzang (710–768) in their careers.
Following the untimely death of Yan Weizhen in 712, Lady Yin and her
children moved to the home of her brother Yin Jianyou in another ward
of Chang’an. After Yin Jianyou’s death in 721, the family went to live in
Wu (modern Suzhou, Jiangsu) with Lady Yin’s father, Yin Zijing, where
he served as district magistrate. Later the family moved to Luoyang,
where Zhenqing’s paternal uncle Yan Yuansun continued Zhenqing’s
education. Luoyang is where Yan apprenticed himself to Zhang Xu.
Yan Zhenqing was taught to read by his mother and instructed in
poetry and pronunciation by his aunt, Yan Zhending (654–737). It
might seem unusual that Yan would have such close contact with his
father’s married sister, but Yan Zhending was married to Yin Lüzhi, his
mother’s brother. The clans of Yin and Yan had become enmeshed over
the years, as Yan sons had married Yin daughters six times in five gener-
ations. The extent of pedigree collapse was considerable: not only was
Yan Zhending married to Yin Lüzhi, and Yan Weizhen to Yin Zijing’s
daughter, but in Zhenqing’s own generation two of his brothers married
their cousins from the Yin clan.43
His older brother Yunnan also had a great influence on him. The
didactic tenor of the relationship between the two brothers comes out
in an episode from his childhood that Yan Zhenqing recounted in the
epitaph he wrote for Yunnan:

Our family had a crane with a broken leg. When I was small, I would
play by writing on its back. Yunnan rebuked me severely, saying,
“Even though it cannot fly away, is it not terribly inhumane to have
no consideration for its wings and feathers?” I have remembered that
all my life.44

In 734, Yan passed the examination for the Presented Scholar degree.
That year the chief examiner was Vice Director of the Bureau of Evalu-
ations Sun Di (696–761), the man responsible for granting the degrees
of many of the other eminent men of the age, including Du Hongjian
(709–769), Li Hua (ca. 710–767), and Xiao Yingshi (706–758).45 Some
thirty years later, Yan Zhenqing wrote the preface to Sun Di’s collected
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34 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

literary works.46 Yan Zhenqing was also married that year to a daughter
of Wei Di. Wei Di was the brother of Wei Shu, the great historiographer
and genealogist who was a close friend of Sun Di and of Yan Zhen-
qing’s uncles, Yan Yuansun and Yin Jianyou.47
For the early part of Yan Zhenqing’s career as an official, he served
mostly in coveted positions in and around Chang’an. In 736 he was rec-
ommended for the Examination for Selecting the Preeminent, a test of
ability in rhymed prose and poetry composition. After an evaluation by
the Ministry of Personnel, he was given the prestige title of Gentleman
for Closing Court and an appointment as an editor in the Palace Library,
a post given only to men of unusual literary promise. When his mother
died in 738, he and his brothers left their official posts for the pre-
scribed three years of mourning. In 741 he resumed his offices in
Chang’an. Following his service as editor in the Palace Library, Yan
Zhenqing was recommended in 742 for the Examination for Erudites of
Outstanding and Extraordinary Literary Expression. This special exam-
ination was held in the Hall of Diligent Administration and supervised
by Emperor Xuanzong himself, who passed Yan in the first rank. As a
result, early that winter he was rewarded with an appointment as dis-
trict defender of Liquan, near the summer pleasure palaces of the Tang
emperors and the imperial mausoleums.
By this time he counted among his friends several young men who
would become the leading literary personalities of their day, including
Xiao Yingshi, Li Hua, and Yuan Jie (719–772). These men were the
dominant members of a group of Confucian intellectuals who were
opposed to the excessive ornamentation of language and obfuscation of
meaning found in court poetry. In its stead they promoted a return to
the expression of Confucian moral and social values expressed through
classical prose.48 That Yan was associated with a group of scholars ad-
vocating fugu, “a return to antiquity,” made him a particularly attrac-
tive candidate for promotion by Han Yu and Ouyang Xiu, both later
proponents of “antique” Confucian values.
Based on the recommendation earned by his capable administration
of Liquan, Yan Zhenqing was granted the higher prestige title of Court
Gentleman for Comprehensive Duty in 746 and an appointment as dis-
trict defender of Chang’an, a post his uncle Yan Yuansun had once
filled. Chang’an district comprised all wards of the city west of the Gate
of the Vermilion Bird Street, so that half of the Western Capital came
under Yan Zhenqing’s administration. Then, from 747 to 749, he served
as an investigating censor and filled two military supervisory positions:
first as probationary army commissioner of state farms and tributary
trade for the Hedong and Shuofang Armies, then the following year in
the same post for the Hexi and Longyou Armies, and the year after that
in the former position again.
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Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 35

In the autumn of 749, Yan Zhenqing returned to the capital, where

he was appointed a palace censor. Quite soon he offended his superiors
with a forthright criticism, as he was to do afterward, again and again,
for the rest of his life. In this particular case, Vice Censor-in-Chief Ji
Wen had the son of the late revered statesman Song Jing (663–737) sent
out into the provinces in disgrace because of some private grievance.
“Why endanger the progeny of Song Jing in a moment of anger?” Yan
protested—which earned him the enmity not only of Ji Wen but of Yang
Guozhong, as well, who recognized the danger to himself in an honest,
outspoken official. Yang Guozhong had Yan Zhenqing sent to Luoyang
as an investigating censor and administrative assistant, but he was soon
transferred back to Chang’an as a palace censor late in 750.
Yan Zhenqing served as a palace censor for two years and was then
transferred in 752 to the post of vice director in the Ministry of War.
The demand for his services as a calligrapher appears to have begun
around this time. As a high-ranking minister serving in the capital who
was the descendant of illustrious statesmen and renowned calligraphers,
he was asked to write out the texts of important inscriptions to be
engraved for public monuments. He composed and transcribed epitaph
steles for the minister of works, Guo Xuji, and the administrator of
Henanfu, Guo Kui (no longer extant). Sometime around 754, Yan
wrote out the epitaph for the eminent Confucian teacher Yuan Dexiu
(696–754), a cousin of Yuan Jie. Though no longer extant, the stele
inscription was famous enough to be noted in Li Hua’s biography in the
Tang History. The text was composed by Li Hua and written out by
Yan Zhenqing, with a heading in seal script by Li Yangbing (ca. 722–ca.
785), who was known not only as the preeminent master of seal script
in the Tang but as a poetry scholar, official, and friend of the great poet
Li Bai (701–763).
The earliest surviving work of Yan’s is dated to 752: the Pra-
bhutaratna Pagoda Stele discussed earlier (Figure 8). This stele was
erected for the Dharma Master Chujin at the Prabhutaratna Pagoda on
the grounds of the Thousand Blessings Monastery (Qianfusi) in the
Anding ward, in the northwestern sector of Chang’an. The text, called
“Gratitude for Prayers Answered,” was written by Cen Xun, tran-
scribed in regular script by Yan Zhenqing, and given a heading in cleri-
cal script by Xu Hao. Known familiarly as the Prabhutaratna Pagoda
Stele (Duobaota bei), it stands today in the Forest of Steles of the
Shaanxi Provincial Museum in modern Xi’an. Yan Zhenqing was also
asked to transcribe the text for a Confucian monument during this time
—a stele for the Temple of Confucius in Fufeng (Shaanxi), one hundred
kilometers west of Chang’an. The text was composed by Cheng Hao,
and it too had a heading written out by Xu Hao. This stele was exca-
vated late in the sixteenth century in a ruinous state, with only some
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36 Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

Figure 11. Yan Zhenqing, Stele for the Temple of Confucius in Fufeng, detail,
ca. 742–756, ink rubbing. Beijing Library.

eight lines of the text still legible. Only ink rubbings are extant now
(Figure 11).
By 754, then, Yan been exposed to the styles of the greatest names in
calligraphy of his day—Xu Hao, Li Yangbing, Emperor Xuanzong, and
Zhang Xu—not to mention his own relatives who were famous for
their calligraphy: Yan Yuansun and Yin Zhongrong. The forces that
shaped Yan’s early style to fit the court style of Xu Hao and Emperor
Xuanzong we have already seen, and I have argued for the importance
of his family’s traditions. The profound influence of Li Yangbing’s seal
script on Yan’s regular script will be treated later.
When the emperor issued his proclamation of 753 ordering dozens
of ministers out of the capital to fill commandery governor positions,
Yan Zhenqing’s post as vice director in the Ministry of War qualified
him for selection for this unenviable honor. His brother-in-law Cen
Shen (715–770) composed a poem for him on the occasion of his depar-
ture for Pingyuan. The closing couplet reads: “The people already yearn
for you, but a Huang Ba will never remain for long!”49 Huang Ba (d. 51
b.c.e.) was a Han-dynasty official who was elevated to high national
CH2 Page 37 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career 37

office on the basis of his excellent record as a local administrator.

Although Cen Shen proved remarkably prescient in forecasting that Yan
Zhenqing’s service at Pingyuan would gain him a national reputation,
he surely must have envisioned it being earned in the calm routine of
provincial life, not in the chaos of war.
CH3 Page 38 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

“The Nest Tipped and

the Eggs Overturned”:
The An Lushan Rebellion
The armies of An Lushan sacked Luoyang just thirty-three days after
they rose against the Tang from Youzhou. The rebels had encountered
virtually no resistance from the officials and populace in the command-
ery cities of Hebei through which they marched southward. Their route
took them west of Pingyuan, leaving Yan Zhenqing’s siege preparations
untested, and through Changshan, where his cousin Yan Gaoqing (692–
756) was serving as governor.1 Since there were no forces with which to
resist him, when the rebel general passed through the city, Yan Gaoqing
and his deputy, Yuan Lüqian, made their obeisances to him on the road.
An Lushan confirmed their allegiance by presenting them with official
robes and securing several Yan clansmen as hostages. He further ordered
them to provide assistance to the forces of his generals Li Qincou, Gao
Miao, and He Qiannian in guarding Tumen Pass near Changshan, a
critical gateway into Hebei.

Yan Zhenqing at War

An Lushan sent a dispatch to Yan Zhenqing ordering him to com-
bine the troops stationed at Pingyuan and Boping to defend the river
ford at Bozhou against the imperial armies. Instead Yan Zhenqing re-
cruited local men to supplement the Pingyuan garrison and made gen-
erals of other local officials. Within a week, he had assembled ten thou-
sand troops. Outside the western gate of the city, he held a great
banquet for the officers, at which he made an impassioned call for
loyalty and then reviewed the troops personally. This show of force in-
spired the governors of Raoyang and Jinan to return their garrisons to
the loyalist cause.
At this time, early in 756, Yan Gaoqing conceived a plan to destroy
the rebel defense of Tumen Pass, which would then permit the imperial
armies to enter Hebei from the west and cut the rebels’ supply line
to the north. He issued a false order in An Lushan’s name calling Li

38
CH3 Page 39 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 39

Qincou to Changshan. Li was killed outside the city walls, and the rest
of his party was seized and executed the following day, causing the rebel
troops at Tumen to scatter. Gao Miao and He Qiannian were captured
alive on their return and transported, along with the head of Li Qincou,
to the capital by Gaoqing’s son Quanming. On the way, however, Quan-
ming was detained by Wang Chengye, the governor of Taiyuan (Shanxi),
who substituted Gaoqing’s memorial to the throne with one of his own
claiming the capture of the generals and the opening of Tumen Pass as
his own achievement. Deceived by Wang Chengye’s memorial, the em-
peror promoted him. But soon the truth came to light and Yan Gaoqing
was rewarded with the exalted positions of chief minister of the Court
of Imperial Regalia and vice censor-in-chief, positions he was never to fill.
When Yan Gaoqing opened Tumen Pass, seventeen Hebei command-
eries came back to the throne in one day, declaring Yan Zhenqing their
leader. The Hebei loyalists now had a total force of two hundred thou-
sand troops and had cut the rebels off from their supply base in the
north. An Lushan had already marched his forces westward out of
Luoyang toward Chang’an when news reached him that Hebei had
risen in resistance. He returned to Luoyang and ordered a combined
assault on Changshan: the rebel forces under Shi Siming (d. 761) were
to drive southward to attack Changshan while Cai Xide led another
army north to join in the siege. Changshan was not heavily garrisoned
or prepared for a siege. After six days of constant battle, its wells and
stores of grain were exhausted, and it was compelled to surrender. Gao-
qing’s son Jiming and grandson Lu Di were beheaded there, but Gao-
qing and Yuan Lüqian were taken alive to Luoyang and brought before
An Lushan.
“I secured your appointment as governor!” An Lushan raged at Gao-
qing. “Why did you revolt when I trusted you?”
“I received the favor of the state,” Gaoqing replied. “Official posi-
tions are all granted by the Son of Heaven. You received that favor and
now you dare to rebel. You would trust me, but you cannot be trusted
by your own dynasty! Stinking barbarian dog, why not kill me quickly?”2
An Lushan’s soldiers bound Gaoqing to the pillar of a bridge, displayed
before the brother of He Qiannian and a crowd of spectators, and as he
continued to rail at his captors, his tongue was cut out. He was then
executed by dismemberment.
As surprising as the behavior of Gaoqing proved to An Lushan, so
that of Zhenqing seemed to the throne, even though early in 755 he had
sent one of Yang Guozhong’s own spies to court with a memorial
reporting An Lushan’s preparations for revolt.3 When Emperor Xuan-
zong was first informed of An Lushan’s initial success, it is said that he
cried in despair, “In all twenty-four commanderies of Hebei is there not
one loyal official?” But Yan Zhenqing sent his military administrator
CH3 Page 40 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

40 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

flying to Chang’an to register his loyalty. When he arrived, the emperor

sent several imperial commissioners out to welcome him, and he was
instructed to gallop straight through the Forbidden City to the gates of
the inner palace. After Yan Zhenqing’s memorial was read, the emperor
declared to his courtiers: “We never knew what kind of man Zhenqing
was, that he could be such as this!”
The dreadful news of the sack of Luoyang reached Hebei with an
envoy from the rebels. Duan Ziguang had been instructed to display to
the loyalists the heads of three high officials of Luoyang, and he trav-
eled from one commandery to the next with his intimidating exhibition.
According to Yin Liang, Yan’s biographer nephew, when Duan Ziguang
came through the city gate of Pingyuan, dragging the heads in the dust
behind him, he shouted: “The vice director [An Lushan] entered the
Eastern Capital on the thirteenth. All areas near and far have surren-
dered. Now he hears that the commanderies of Hebei have not con-
ceded, so he orders me to make this report. Do not harm me or your
day of regret will soon come!” Then he pointed to each head in turn
and announced its identity. Yan Zhenqing did indeed recognize the mur-
dered officials, but to prevent panic he told his officers that Duan
Ziguang was lying and had him cut in half. Secretly, however, he saved
the three heads. On a later day they were washed and dressed, bodies of
straw were fashioned for them, and they were buried with full sacrifi-
cial rites outside the city. Yan Zhenqing mourned three days for them.
On the winter day Duan Ziguang was executed, the rebel army
under Shi Siming commenced the fatal attack on Changshan and several
Hebei commanderies reverted to the rebel side. For his success in hold-
ing his city, Yan Zhenqing was appointed vice minister of revenue as a
show of appreciation, but he was ordered to remain as governor and
defense commissioner of Pingyuan. Soon after, he was also made Hebei
Bandit Suppression and Investigation Commissioner, a position that
until recently had been An Lushan’s post. Following the sack of Chang-
shan, Shi Siming’s rebel forces moved east and laid siege to Raoyang.
Early in the spring, however, the imperial army under Li Guangbi (708–
764) came through Tumen Pass and returned Changshan to the Tang.
Shi Siming attacked Changshan once again, but he suffered a defeat and
was forced to regroup.
Yan Zhenqing then devised a plan to open the pass at Guokou, in the
southwest corner of Hebei, to allow the entry of imperial forces. He dis-
patched the Pingyuan troops, who joined forces with the Qinghe garri-
son and volunteers from Boping, to take Wei commandery and expel its
rebel governor. The rebels fielded an army of twenty thousand against
the smaller force from the three loyalist commanderies, but after a full
day of bitter fighting, the rebels were routed and the governor fled.
To prevent any rescue of Raoyang by the victorious loyalist volun-
CH3 Page 41 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 41

teers, Shi Siming sent an expeditionary force to surround Pingyuan.

Fearing his men outnumbered, Yan Zhenqing called upon Helan Jin-
ming, the governor of Beihai (Shandong), to lead his cavalry and infan-
try north across the Yellow River to aid them. Yan Zhenqing arrayed
his troops on the riverbank to welcome them, and the two leaders
exchanged their bows and ritual expressions of mourning on horse-
back. Gradually, Yan Zhenqing transferred the management of military
affairs to Helan and ceded credit for the victory at Wei commandery to
him. As a result, Yan Zhenqing’s post as commissioner of bandit sup-
pression in Hebei was given to Helan by imperial decree.
During this time, the Tang general Guo Ziyi (697–781) and his forces
had come through Tumen Pass to join Li Guangbi in battle against the
rebel armies under Shi Siming and Cai Xide. They split the rebels and
regained the areas south of Changshan. In a second, massive engage-
ment, the armies of Shi Siming and Cai Xide, reinforced by troops sent
by An Lushan from Luoyang and Youzhou, hurled themselves against
the imperial armies at Jiashan and were decimated. In their flight, the
siege of Pingyuan was lifted.
The loyalist forces promptly took Jizhou and consolidated their
hold on the center swath of Hebei. Heartened by the loyalists’ success,
the Pinglu military commissioner Liu Zhengchen brought the area
under his control, immediately northeast of the rebel base at Youzhou,
back to the Tang. To solidify his commitment, Yan Zhenqing sent a
contingent from Pingyuan over the Bohai Sea to present Liu Zhengchen
with a good faith guarantee: a shipment of matériel and a ten-year-
old boy named Yan Po, Yan Zhenqing’s only son. The forces loyal
to the Tang were now in a position to undertake a final march on
Youzhou.
That summer, however, Grand Councillor Yang Guozhong ordered
the imperial army under Qosu Khan (Geshu Han, d. 756) out of its
defensive position at Tong Pass and into a rebel ambush. The Tang
army was destroyed, and An Lushan’s troops came through the pass to
take Chang’an. When Li Guangbi and Guo Ziyi heard of the disaster at
Tong Pass and the flight of Emperor Xuanzong to Sichuan, they marched
their troops out of Hebei through Tumen Pass and set out for the capi-
tal. Soon they learned the heir apparent had escaped to Lingwu (Ning-
xia) in the northwest and proclaimed himself emperor there, and so
they marched westward to his defense.
With the retreat of the imperial armies, the loyalist commanderies of
Hebei stood alone against the rebels. Supplies and munitions were vir-
tually exhausted, so Yan Zhenqing resorted to unorthodox methods to
raise money, including the seizure of the salt in the Jingcheng depot,
which he then sold among the other commanderies. High honors con-
tinued to flow from the throne. Emperor Suzong granted Yan Zhenqing
CH3 Page 42 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

42 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

the positions of minister of works and censor-in-chief and reappointed

him Hebei commissioner of bandit suppression and investigation.
Early that autumn, An Lushan dispatched Shi Siming and Yin Ziqi to
subdue the commanderies of Hebei. Over the next three months, their
city gates opened to the rebels one by one. At last only Pingyuan,
Boping, and Qinghe remained, bereft of soldiers, the loyalty of their
terrified citizens wavering. Knowing that surrender would bring him
only a senseless death or a treasonous acceptance of office under the
rebels, Yan Zhenqing led a small cavalry force out of Pingyuan and
across the river. He traveled westward through the winter, dodging
rebel forces, until he came to a safe haven at Wudang (Hubei).
Emperor Suzong returned from Lingwu to set up a temporary im-
perial court at Fengxiang (Shaanxi) in the second month of 757. Partly
to acknowledge Yan’s heroic performance and partly to increase the
slender ranks of officials at the temporary court, the emperor honored
Yan Zhenqing as a paragon of loyalty and sent an announcement of
office to Wudang, granting him the exalted post of minister of justice.
Two months later, Yan presented himself at the temporary court with a
memorial arguing that a better service to justice would be punishment
for having deserted his commission. His memorial of refusal concludes:

Then the rebels Shi Siming and Yin Ziqi took advantage of Liu Zheng-
chen not yet having arrived and attacked us with all their might. No
aid came to the commanderies, and so they were overwhelmed one
after the other. All because I was inadequate and weak, without device,
I caused this disaster. Integrity would demand that I risk death amid
danger and defend the orphaned city to the last, but I believed that
returning to indict myself at the imperial court would be better than
being seized by rebel hands. Therefore, I escaped with my life and
crossed the river. . . .
I received repeated imperial edicts permitting me to come to court,
which arrived at Wudang commandery. Then I received this gracious
mandate appointing me minister of justice and director of the censor-
ate, and the announcement of office was sent to me. Though to take
up these posts would be extremely selfish, refusal to serve is fearful. . . .
Furthermore, though my reputation is negligible, these positions
are very important. The corpus of government must be composed of
exemplary men. The imperial grace is what first reaches subordinates,
but punishment, too, should come from on high. If one man is in-
dicted, then thousands will know fear. If I presume on favored status,
then how will the empire remain in awe? My humble desire is for
Your Majesty to censure heavily this one official, myself, in order to
demonstrate the justice of heaven and to let the subcelestial realm
know there are laws that must be followed and commands that must
be appreciated. Favor and honor far surpass the post of minister. Not
to take office would be the most earnest and sincere course.4
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“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 43

The emperor rejected his argument for refusal to serve:

Though you did not hold Pingyuan, your efficacy was great. From
afar you returned to court, profoundly aiding Our aspirations.

We grant you receipt of a mandate to serve on winged feet,

but your request to indict yourself We cannot meet.5

Yan Zhenqing had always been an outspoken advocate of traditional

Confucian values at court, ever conscious of his clan connections to the
eight disciples of Confucius surnamed Yan, but after his return from
Pingyuan his criticisms of the conduct of other court officials became
more frequent.6 Issues of ritual nomenclature and proper behavior at
court assumed great importance as symbols of the restoration of normal
political life. The court to which Yan returned was hardly the brilliant
assembly that had flourished under Emperor Xuanzong just two years
before. Emperor Suzong now held court, not in Chang’an or Luoyang,
but in Fengxiang, the headquarters of a military commission up the Wei
River from Chang’an, supported by a tiny remnant of the armies and
official ranks of the Tang government. While Retired Emperor Xuan-
zong still lived, the possible accusation of usurpation threatened Suzong
and rumors of factional intrigue loomed. This unorthodox, provisional
situation seemed to provoke a heightened vigilance in Yan Zhenqing. In
the eight months he remained at court, he lodged several charges against
his fellow officials, impeaching one for drunkenness at court, another
for disrespectfulness in the court ranks, and he complained to the em-
peror that a third had mounted his horse prior to the heir apparent. He
also criticized the actions of the throne. In one case, he objected to the
use of a certain ritual epithet for the emperor; in another, he argued that
the emperor should mourn for three days before rebuilding the imperial
ancestral temple in Chang’an, which had been destroyed by An Lushan.
Yan’s fame from resisting the rebels and the high positions of his
brothers (Yunzang served as a palace censor and Yunnan served in the
Ministry of Personnel) made him a threat to the Grand Councillors Cui
Yuan, Li Lin, and Miao Jinqing. At the end of 757, after the two capi-
tals had been retaken and the retired emperor had been summoned
back to Chang’an, Yan was sent out to Tongzhou (Shaanxi), one hun-
dred kilometers northeast of Chang’an, to serve as prefect there. The
standard histories of the Tang assert that he was degraded “because of
the enmity of the grand councillors,” but in the account of his life writ-
ten by his nephew Yin Liang, the cause is given as having “opposed the
imperial will.”7 Evidently, both statements were true.
Why did Yan Zhenqing embrace the role of the prickly Confucianist
upon his return? Why did he refuse the appointment as minister of
justice with a self-indictment and alienate his supporters by criticizing
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44 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

every lapse in behavior that he perceived at court? In the Confucian

ideal, a gentleman should know when to serve and when to retire.
Surely to have stayed in Pingyuan would have been suicide. But by tak-
ing the sensible course, Yan Zhenqing failed to sustain a perfect expres-
sion of loyalty to the throne. Mencius said: “I desire life, but I also
desire righteousness. If I cannot have both, I will let life go and choose
righteousness.”8 Yan Zhenqing chose life, but he knew one who had
died with integrity intact. In his epitaph for his cousin Yan Gaoqing, he
wrote:
Gaoqing and I were both defeated on rebel soil, but we are separated
now by a thousand leagues. Although his natural endowment of righ-
teousness was without compare, heaven was not trustworthy, for Gao-
qing died, while I did not. How bitter, indeed!9
That he was not martyred at Pingyuan distressed him the remainder of
his life. And when he did meet his end at the hands of another rebel
some thirty years later, he told his captors that he would die with
loyalty unwavering, just as his cousin Gaoqing had done.10
In the spring of 758, Yan Zhenqing was transferred from Tongzhou
to serve as prefect of Puzhou (Shanxi), some forty kilometers to the
east, and he was enfeoffed as Dynasty-Founding Marquis of Danyang
District (near modern Nanjing, Jiangsu). The Tang armies had regained
both capitals, An Lushan was dead, and Shi Siming had, for the time
being, shifted his allegiance back to the throne. One surviving son of
Yan Gaoqing, Yan Quanming, was released from the rebels’ prison.
Quanming returned to Luoyang to retrieve his father’s corpse for burial
at the family cemetery in Chang’an. Yan Zhenqing asked him also to
gather the subordinate officials, wives, children, and servants of Yan
Gaoqing and Yuan Lüqian who had spent the last two years at Chang-
shan and the members of the Yan clan who had been held hostage by
the rebel forces. Quanming returned more than three hundred people to
Puzhou, and Yan Zhenqing had them all generously supplied and
escorted to their chosen destinations.

The Draft Eulogy for Nephew Jiming

Quanming also brought to Puzhou the head of his brother Jiming,
who had been decapitated by the rebels after the fall of Changshan in
the winter of 756. Before Jiming’s head was returned to Chang’an for
burial, Yan Zhenqing drafted a haunting eulogy for his nephew:
On the third, a renshen day, of the ninth month, in which the first was
a gengwu day, of a xuwu year, the inaugural year of the reign period
Supernal Prime [9 October 758], his thirteenth uncle, Grand Master
of Imperial Entertainments with Silver Seal and Blue Ribbon, Com-
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“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 45

missioner with Extraordinary Powers Over All Military Affairs in

Puzhou, Prefect of Puzhou, Senior Commandant of Light Chariots, and
Dynasty-Founding Marquis of Danyang District, Yan Zhenqing, with
pure wine and a complement of delicacies, sacrifices to the spirit of
Jiming, his late nephew, who was granted the posthumous title of
Grand Master Admonisher:
From your birth, you showed your youthful virtue early. Like sac-
rificial vessels in the ancestral temple and fragrant plants in the court-
yard, you were a comfort to our hearts. In those days, you were
blessed and happy. How could we have imagined that rebel traitors
would commence our misfortune? But they took up arms and violated
their submission [to the throne].
Your father [Yan Gaoqing] expended his integrity as commandery
governor of Changshan, while I, too, had received a mandate at that
time, in Pingyuan. My selfless older brother so loved me that he em-
ployed you to send word to me. You had already returned home when
Tumen Pass was opened, but with the opening of Tumen Pass, the vil-
lains feared they would be pressed on all sides. A traitorous official
[Wang Chengye] failed the rescue and so the orphaned city was
besieged and compelled to submit. The father was taken and the son
killed, the nest tipped and the eggs overturned. Heaven has no regret
for this calamity, but who else could cause such suffering? I remember
how you met with your cruel death, but how could we ransom all
those people? Alas, how I grieve!
Since that time, I have been graced with the Beneficence of Heaven
and transferred to shepherd the flock on the He-Guan border [ Pu-
zhou]. After Quanming found me and Changshan was retaken, he re-
trieved your encoffined head and has now returned together with it.
The memory of your destruction is revived in me and the shock of
grief in my heart and my face is just as it was on that distant day. I
send this announcement to your abode in the nether world, that your
spirit may have knowledge of it. Do not weep there long. Alas, how I
grieve! May you accept this offering.11

The Eulogy as Art Object

The Draft of the Eulogy for Nephew Jiming is now in the collection of
the National Palace Museum in Taipei, mounted in brocade covers and
embellished with the inscriptions and seal impressions of centuries of
collectors (Figure 12).12 There are nine colophons on the scroll of the
Eulogy, ranging in date from the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) through
the eighteenth century. Xianyu Shu (1257?–1302), who acquired the
scroll in 1283, stated that traces of a small Xuanhe imperial seal and
Emperor Huizong’s (r. 1100–1126) round Tianshui seal could still be
seen. Zhang Yan, who obtained the scroll from the Xianyu family in
1301, wrote that a clumsy mounter had cut off the Xuanhe imperial
seals and inscriptions; all that remained was a partial impression of the
CH3 Page 46 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

Figure 12. Yan Zhenqing, Draft of the Eulogy for Nephew Jiming, 758, ink on
paper. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China.
CH3 Page 47 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 47

round Tianshui seal. If this testimony about the seals is correct, then the
scroll was once part of the imperial collection during the Xuanhe era
(1119–1125), which is corroborated by its listing in the Calligraphy
Catalog of the Xuanhe Era. There are also two seals still visible on the
scroll that can be linked to female connoisseurs at the court of Emperor
Gaozong (r. 1127–1162) of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279):
Empress Wu (1115–1197) and the concubine Liu Niangzi. The scroll
probably remained in the imperial collection until the Mongol con-
quest. During the Yuan dynasty, the scroll was passed around in the
circle of the artist and high official Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322). One of
his seals appears on it, as well as colophons by his friends Xianyu Shu
and Zhou Mi (1232–1298). Although no colophons of Ming date ap-
pear on the scroll, a number of seals of Ming collectors can be seen, and
the scroll is recorded in several Ming-dynasty catalogs of art. Two colo-
phons dated to 1694 and 1724 describe a succession of private owners
in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The scroll has a
heading written by the Qianlong emperor and is recorded in the impe-
rial catalog Shiqu baoji xubian of 1793, indicating that it entered the
Qing imperial collection during his reign.
To sum up its history, the scroll was probably handed down privately
during the Tang and Five Dynasties periods, perhaps within the Yan
family. The wealthy Chang’an collector An Shiwen owned this scroll
and several other works by Yan in the late eleventh century.13 In the early
twelfth century, it entered the Song imperial collection, only to reemerge
in the public domain after the fall of the Southern Song, where it passed
between private collectors until it was again submitted to the throne
during the Qianlong era. There the scroll remained until a portion of
the old imperial collection was seized by officials of the Nationalist gov-
ernment and ultimately taken to Taiwan in 1948.

Aesthetic Reception of the Eulogy

The enduring appeal of the Eulogy lies in the immediacy inherent in the
draft form, the simplicity of the calligraphic manner, the monumental
yet personal events it describes, and the emotion in Yan Zhenqing’s
voice. At the start of the draft, the characters are written in a calm, legi-
ble running script. But as the draft progresses, the writing grows more
urgent, until the final lines are hastily scribbled in cursive script. The
blotting out of lines and characters also increases toward the end. Yan
Zhenqing’s distress is most evident at the critical point in the narrative
when he comes to describe how Changshan was lost. He first wrote: “A
traitorous official contained his forces and failed the rescue.” Then he
blotted it out and tried again: “A traitorous official contained . . .” But
he could not bring himself to spell out so clearly the terrible thing Wang
Chengye had done, so he blotted out the word “contained” once again
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48 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

and simply wrote: “A traitorous official failed the rescue and so the
orphaned city was besieged and compelled to submit.”
It was not the content of the eulogy alone that earned it fame, but
also the aesthetic effect of the calligraphy. The Northern Song poet,
official, and calligrapher Huang Tingjian (1045–1105) once remarked
on the impact of the Eulogy as both literature and visual art: “The
Duke of Lu’s Eulogy for Nephew Jiming, both as a literary composition
and as calligraphy, is emotionally moving.”14 To understand Huang
Tingjian’s point of view (which is generally accepted today), we must
first admit that the Eulogy is not a conventionally attractive work of
art. One could even argue whether it should be called a work of art at
all, since it is really no more than the rough draft of a funeral speech. In
the eyes of most people who are not versed in the values of traditional
literati art, it would appear to be a piece of paper covered with scrib-
bled characters and ink blots. There is no drama in the shaping of
strokes; there is little structural tension in the forming of characters. In
terms of the literati aesthetic, however, these are the positive features of
a great work of art.
To understand how a bland calligraphic manner can be considered
emotionally meaningful, we can turn to the critical terminology that
Chinese connoisseurs have used to describe the degrees of intentionality
expressed by the artist. One pair of opposed terms that may illuminate
the traditional enthusiasm for the Eulogy is “clever” (qiao) and “clumsy”
(zhuo). The opposition of these two terms dates back at least as early as
the Han dynasty, when the first-century dictionary Shuowen jiezi de-
fined clumsy as “not clever.” Although these terms retained their origi-
nal meanings when applied strictly as judgments of performance—as in
clever or clumsy speech—when applied to a person’s character their
connotations were reversed. Confucius is disparaged in the Zhuangzi as
“clever and false,” for example, meaning crafty and artificial.15 By
contrast, the sixth-century scholar-official Cui Ling’en is praised in the
History of the Southern Dynasties for having a “clumsy and honest
nature.”16 Though the reversal of the normal value of these terms ap-
pears in Daoist texts such as the Zhuangzi, it was not restricted to Dao-
ist thought. In the Confucian view, clumsiness is seen as the physical
manifestation of the virtue of sincerity, or artlessness.
In Tang-dynasty texts on calligraphy, “clever” and “clumsy” were
commonly used as aesthetic terminology for assessing calligraphy. Yu
Shinan, in his Narrative Guide to Calligraphy, said in admiration of
two artists of antiquity that in their writing “clever and clumsy were
both handed down.”17 In the glossary he wrote for his brother’s History
of Calligraphy in Rhapsody Form (775), the critic Dou Meng defined
“clumsy” in calligraphic style as “that which does not depend on being
fine or clever.”18
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“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 49

In psychological terms, “cleverness” in calligraphic style is consid-

ered a result of intention and premeditation in the execution of the indi-
vidual strokes and the composition of the characters. “Clumsiness,” by
contrast, involves letting go of the desire to manipulate the elements of
writing in favor of direct expression. These two creative states are asso-
ciated with two techniques for holding the brush: “cleverness” is
attained with the brush held at an acute angle to the paper and “clumsi-
ness” with the brush held perpendicularly. These two brush grips are
known as “the slanted brush” (ce bi) and “the centered brush” (zhong
bi), or “the upright brush” (zheng bi). The slanted-brush technique was
traditionally used to write clerical script, in which the width of the
strokes fluctuates widely, by varying the angle of the brush on the
paper. The shapes produced by the slanted brush have sharp angles at
the tips of the strokes, the strokes in the characters meet at pronounced
right angles, the composition of characters shows a pronounced left-to-
right movement, and the overall shapes of the individual characters
basically describe long rectangles. The upright brush, which is constantly
maintained in the perpendicular position, is necessary for the unmodu-
lated strokes of seal script. Seal-script characters have rounded stroke
ends and an emphasis on curving stroke forms, the composition of char-
acters tends to be symmetrical, and the overall shape is usually a tall
rectangle or oval. For these reasons, clerical script and the slanted brush
are categorized as “square,” meaning man-made, artificial, and cutting
across the grain of the natural world, whereas seal script and the up-
right brush are categorized as “round,” or natural, organic, and going
with the flow of nature. Since the imperially sponsored Wang style is
produced with the slanted brush, the Song Confucian reformers chose
the style of Yan Zhenqing as the one to promote because, among other
reasons, Yan wrote with a centered brush.
Let us compare a work in the Wang Xizhi tradition, written with the
slanted brush, to the Draft of the Eulogy, which was written with the
centered brush. In the Tang copy of Wang Xizhi’s Ping’an tie (Figure 2),
the tip of the horizontal stroke that runs through the center of the char-
acter “an,” for example (1/4), reveals the use of the slanted brush. (The
notation “1/4” indicates the fourth character in the first column.) The
sharp point of the upper-left corner exposes how the brush was laid
down at an angle to begin the stroke. The body of the stroke itself swells
and recedes along the bottom because the underside of the angled brush
was lowered and raised on the paper. By contrast, the horizontal strokes
in the Eulogy, as in the character “dan,” for example (4/8), have rounded
ends, with no trace of the brush tip visible, and the body of the stroke is
virtually unmodulated.
In terms of technique, the Wang Xizhi piece uses the slanted brush;
within the morally charged realm of Confucian aesthetics, it is “square”
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50 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

and “clever.” Yan Zhenqing’s work uses the upright brush; it is “round”
and “clumsy.” The conclusion, to the mind of the Confucian reformer,
was that the style of Wang Xizhi, though sophisticated and skillful, was
also calculated and exhibitionistic, and therefore vulgar. Thus it is of a
piece with all court-sponsored art in its artificiality of form and empti-
ness of expression. By contrast, Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphic manner,
lacking a superficial appeal to the senses, naturally manifests a sincere
expression of the man’s virtuous character. Thus when Huang Tingjian
declared the style of the calligraphy in the Eulogy “emotionally mov-
ing,” he meant that its “clumsiness” lent a feeling of sincerity to the
work that engaged his sympathy with Yan Zhenqing’s emotions.

The Rebellion through Song-Dynasty Eyes

Famous works such as Yan Zhenqing’s Eulogy or Wang Xizhi’s
Orchid Pavilion Preface have not survived the centuries because they
are idiosyncratic. Terms such as “clever” and “clumsy” are not only ap-
plied descriptively to various styles of calligraphy, they also operate pre-
scriptively toward the preservation of works of calligraphy. Because
calligraphic style has a powerful but limited means of conveying mean-
ing, it must be susceptible to categorization into recognized traditions in
order for its meaning to be understood. Calligraphy that lacks an ap-
propriate aesthetic setting lacks meaning. The calligraphic style of Wang
Xizhi’s Orchid Pavilion Preface, for example, has been perceived as
“clever” in the same way that the preface itself is seen as “clever” in its
depiction of an aristocratic wine-and-poetry outing in nature and its
ruminations on the vanity of pleasure. The horizon of expectation against
which it is seen is the perception of the Eastern Jin dynasty as a “clever”
time—an age populated by skilled strategists, witty conversationalists,
learned alchemists, and ingenious artists. In the same vein, the style of
Yan Zhenqing’s Eulogy is seen as “clumsy” in line with the evident sin-
cerity of expression in the text. This reading fits comfortably with the
later view of the Rebellion era as a time of patriotism, sincerity, and
solemnity, as embodied in the prose of Yuan Jie (719–772) and the
poetry of Du Fu (712–770).
Although Huang’s simple remark about the Eulogy suggests an im-
mediate, personal response, it also reflects his view of the Eulogy as an
expression of a Rebellion-period aesthetic. His focus on Yan’s tragedy
fit the Song-dynasty expectation for the literature and art of the Rebel-
lion period. This is revealed more clearly through another Rebellion-
period work of calligraphy by Yan Zhenqing that Huang admired, one
that had a different author and a rather different content. In the spring
of 1104, on his way south to political exile in Yizhou (Guangxi), Huang
Tingjian traveled up the Xiang River, stopping at Qiyang (Hunan), where
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“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 51

he spent three days visiting the local sites. One of these was Wu Creek,
where a famous poem by Yuan Jie, “The Paean to the Resurgence of the
Great Tang Dynasty,” was inscribed on the cliff above the water.19 This
poem, a euphoric celebration of the recovery of the empire from An
Lushan, was written in 761 and inscribed by Yan Zhenqing in large
regular-script characters in 771.20 The poem, with preface, reads as
follows:
In the fourteenth year of the Heavenly Treasure era [755], An Lushan
sacked Luoyang. The following year, he sacked Chang’an, the Son of
Heaven graced Shu, and the heir apparent ascended the throne at
Lingwu. The year after that, the emperor moved his armies to Feng-
xiang. That year he regained both capitals. The retired emperor re-
turned to the capital. Alas! For the virtuous rule of the emperors of
earlier dynasties, one must look to songs of praise. Now if a song of
praise for [Suzong’s] rule is to be engraved in stone, who would be
suited to write it, if not one who has grown old in literature?
Alas! In the bygone court, perverse ministers,
traitorous and arrogant, caused disorder and weird portents.
Frontier generals galloped their troops and brutally
rebelled against the state, and the populace lost its tranquility.
When the emperor made his southern inspection tour, the court
officials skulked away and offered themselves to the brigands as
ministers.
But heaven shone on Tang and dawned on our emperor,
that solitary steed in the north.
He stood alone with a single cry against the thousand battle flags
and myriad emblazoned banners of the barbarian troops’
vanguard.
Then our armies came from the east, and the heir apparent pacified
the barbarians, destroying and driving out that mob of murderers.
After such terrible suffering, the imperial temples were again secure
and the two emperors were welcomed in the capital once more.
The earth emerged and the heavens opened, all terrestrial and celestial
calamities were relieved, and auspicious blessings arrived in great
number.
The murderers and rebels were saturated with heaven’s blessings, and,
dead or alive, they endured their shame.
Honorable rank was given the meritorious, the names of the loyalist
martyrs were immortalized, and the imperial favor flowed over
their sons and grandsons.
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52 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

The great virtue was in resurgence, like a mountain towering or the

sun ascending, and a myriad blessings were thus received.
The many heroes who might be honored here, though their faces
pass before me, are not found in this poem.
The Xiang River runs round to the east and west; Wu Creek runs
straight into it, and here the stone cliffs align against the sky.
Let the cliff be polished and chiseled, to engrave this song of praise
therein, for the thousands of years to come.
Huang Tingjian composed a poem in response to Yuan Jie’s, which
was later carved into the cliff as well. It is called simply “Written on the
Cliff After the Stele.” The import of his poem is quite different, how-
ever:
Spring winds have blown my boat to Wu Creek,
and leaning on a briar staff, I read the Resurgence Stele.
A middle-aged man, all my life I’ve looked at the ink rubbing;
stroking the stone engraving, the hair at my temples becomes silken
again.
Emperor Minghuang had no strategy to remain strong and endure,
so the empire was overturned by his adopted son Lushan.
The imperial temples were lost when the carriages fled west,
while the myriad officials had already nested in new trees.
To control the armies and oversee the state were the tasks of the heir
apparent,
but how could he hasten to seize the realm?
After terrible suffering, heaven graced him,
and the retired emperor, bent and broken, returned to the capital.
In the inner chambers, Empress Zhang’s behavior invited censure;
in the outer chambers, Li Fuguo’s nod gave orders.
The Southern Inner Palace was desolate, only weeds living there.
Gao Lishi had departed, to serve in terrible danger.
Take Yuan Jie’s “Ballad of Chongling,”
or Du Fu’s poem in which he pays his respects to the cuckoo:
Who could understand how these loyal ministers were anguished to
the marrow,
when the world values these works merely as precious and beautiful
words?
Generations of rustic monks have since come this way,
as well as the scholars who have followed one after the other.
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“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 53

The broken cliff with its gray-green mosses has stood here all this
time,
while storms and rains wash from it the sorrows of dynasties past.21

Where Yuan Jie’s poem praised the heroic heir apparent, who was
the reigning emperor at the time the poem was written, Huang Ting-
jian’s poem focuses on the tragic figure of Xuanzong and the sordid
aspects of Suzong’s treatment of him. Huang devotes only one line to
the heir apparent, in which he hints that Suzong usurped his father’s
throne, while the plot between Empress Zhang and the powerful eunuch
official Li Fuguo (d. 762) to denigrate the retired emperor by moving
him from his Southern Palace away to the Western Palace is given an
entire stanza. The tone of Yuan Jie’s poem is exultant. Huang Tingjian’s
is nostalgic and melancholy, ignoring Yuan Jie’s triumphant testimony
that the dynasty had been saved and was in resurgence. This sense of
melancholy over the loss of Xuanzong’s court comes from the poetry
of Du Fu, who was already considered China’s premier poet by the time
of the Northern Song. In particular, his elegiac eight-poem cycle called
“Autumn Meditations” expresses Du Fu’s mourning for the court under
Xuanzong and a past reclaimable only in memory.22 These well-known
poems, I suspect, had so colored the image of the Rebellion era for later
poets like Huang Tingjian that he was nearly incapable of seeing Yuan
Jie’s point of view.
The calligraphic style of Huang Tingjian’s poem maintains its
distance from its model as well, for by 1104 Huang Tingjian had al-
ready worked through Yan Zhenqing’s style and absorbed what he
could use of it into his own manner. Fu Shen has argued that Huang
Tingjian studied the style of Yan Zhenqing early in his career, and he
points to the “regularity and severity” and the “square and stable
formal structure” in such works as Huang’s Shuitou huoming of 1087
as reflecting this study. But Fu Shen further contends that Huang’s
“later works show that he did not retain the strong Yan Zhenqing influ-
ence of his earlier period.”23 Huang’s poem of 1104 certainly accords
with this assessment (Figure 13). In such superficial aspects as script
type and size, his poem matches Yan Zhenqing’s transcription of
the “Paean,” but the style is simply his usual large regular-running-
script manner. This is not to say that his usual manner owed no debt to
his earlier study of Yan Zhenqing; rather, it already incorporated a
thorough grounding in Yan’s style. Comparing the characters “zhong
xing” in Yan Zhenqing’s Paean (Figure 14) to those in Huang Tingjian’s
poem (2/1–2), we see not only the debt Huang Tingjian’s manner
owes to the solid, spacious structures of Yan Zhenqing’s characters,
but also the dynamic asymmetry of form and the fluctuating brush
CH3 Page 54 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

54 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

Figure 13. Huang Tingjian, Written on the Cliff After the

Stele, detail, 1104. Qiyang, Hunan. From Shodò zenshû, 3rd
ed., vol. 15, fig. 36.

stroke that are Huang Tingjian’s own invention and contribution to

Song calligraphy.
The fact that Huang Tingjian made no special effort to reflect the
style of Yan Zhenqing in his poem responding to the Paean stands in
striking contrast to the generation preceding his. Many of those men
did imitate the style of Yan Zhenqing. Huang’s mentor in poetry, Su Shi,
was especially adept at the game of stylistic quotation and interpreta-
CH3 Page 55 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 55

Figure 14. Yan Zhenqing, Paean to the Resurgence of

the Great Tang Dynasty, detail, 771, ink rubbing.
Qiyang, Hunan. From Shodò zenshû, 3rd ed., vol. 10,
pl. 45.

tion of Yan’s style. In his transcription of Ouyang Xiu’s “Record of En-

joying Rich Harvests Pavilion” (Figure 15), done around 1091, Su Shi
copied out an essay in which Ouyang describes the happiness enjoyed
by the people of Chuzhou while he governed them. Ouyang paints the
classic picture of peaceful village life, ostensibly praising the emperor’s
CH3 Page 56 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

56 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

Figure 15. Su Shi, Record of Enjoying Rich Harvests Pavilion,

detail, ca. 1091, ink rubbing. Chuzhou, Anhui. From Shodò
zenshû, 3rd ed., vol. 15, pl. 43.

enlightened rule, but making clear that this tranquility was also due to
his benevolent administration. Su Shi’s tribute to his sponsor did not
end with simply transcribing the essay. He also chose to execute it in the
style of Yan Zhenqing’s Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu (Figure 16).
In this inscription of 762, Yan portrayed the good government of his
friend Xianyu Zhongtong, a national-level official who also served as a
local governor. Not only did Su Shi make the style of Yan’s Lidui Record
of Mr. Xianyu work cleverly with the content of his Record of Enjoying
Rich Harvests Pavilion to reinforce the notion of Ouyang Xiu as
the same sort of nationally renowned, local “good official” as Xianyu
CH3 Page 57 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 57

Figure 16. Yan Zhenqing, Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu, detail, 762,
ink rubbing. Mount Lidui, Langxian, Sichuan. From Shodò zenshû,
3rd ed., vol. 10, pl. 32.

Zhongtong and Yan Zhenqing, it also conveyed meaning in terms of

politics at court. Yan Zhenqing was renowned as a loyalist martyr. By
contrast, Ouyang Xiu had been charged with partisan activity during
the minor reform of 1043–1044, while Su Shi himself had been jailed in
1079, threatened with death, and finally banished to Huangzhou in
1080, persecuted by the court censors on the basis of antiauthoritarian
passages in his letters and poems. The reputations of both men could
CH3 Page 58 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

58 “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

only profit from association with a famous loyalist. Su Shi may have
deliberately chosen the style of Yan’s Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu to
write out Ouyang’s Record of Enjoying Rich Harvests Pavilion—using
the reputation of the loyal, good officials Yan Zhenqing and Xianyu
Zhongtong to defend Ouyang and Su personally against the charge of
disloyalty, as well as to represent generally the political and cultural
ideals of the conservative reformers.
Although Huang Tingjian was on his way into exile from court when
he encountered Yan Zhenqing’s Paean, he seems not to have needed to
borrow Yan’s reputation or style. I suspect he made no more immediate
response to the style of Yan’s Paean than he did because the question of
Yan Zhenqing’s suitability as a model had already been decided by the
influential men of the generation that preceded him, the most decisive
of whom for him was Su Shi. Yan Zhenqing could not have been his
personal discovery, since he had been discovered already by the heroes
of the minor reform: Han Qi, Cai Xiang, and Ouyang Xiu. Of the gen-
eration following theirs, the artist who most vigorously exploited the
style of Yan Zhenqing was Huang’s mentor, Su Shi. Huang remarked
more than once that he studied Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphy with Su Shi,
that Su Shi studied Yan Zhenqing exhaustively, and that Su Shi was
better than himself at capturing the essence of Yan’s style:
I am really fond of the Duke of Lu’s [Yan Zhenqing’s] calligraphy,
and I often practice his style based on my own conceptions. When I
look at my work, there seems to be some resemblance of style and
spirit, but compared to Zizhan’s [Su Shi’s], I’m left far behind. The
other day, Zizhan copied a dozen sheets of calligraphy for me in the
Duke of Lu’s style. His characters look like the sons and grandsons of
Yan’s characters: even though father and son are not the same, they
both have the spirit and frame of the grandfather.24

Master Dongpo [Su Shi] once made copies for me of several works
[by Yan Zhenqing], including the Letter for Cai Mingyuan, the Eulogy
for Uncle Yan Yuansun, the Draft for Nephew Jiming, and On the
Seating Order of Inspector of the Armies Yu [the Letter on the
Controversy Over Seating Protocol]. . . . All were quite close to the
originals.25

Recently when writing characters I tried to imitate the Duke of Lu’s

brush gestures. But I still cannot achieve the kind of unconscious and
intrinsic match of spirit that Zizhan could. . . . Dongpo and I studied
Yan Pingyuan’s calligraphy together, but my hand was so clumsy that
I never got close.26

Due to the sponsorship of the calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing by the

heroes of the minor reform and its vigorous promotion by Su Shi, the
study of Yan’s style had become an accepted, even de rigueur, cultural
CH3 Page 59 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:53 AM

“The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned” 59

pursuit. By Huang Tingjian’s day, any scholar could, by copying or

advocating the style of Yan Zhenqing, or by merely uttering a phrase
such as “all my life I’ve looked at the ink rubbing of the Resurgence
Stele,” identify himself with the conservative reformers who had chosen
Yan Zhenqing as the patriarch of Song Confucian calligraphy. Huang
Tingjian was too independent and nonpolitical artistically, I think, to
produce the kind of clever interpretations of Yan Zhenqing made by Su
Shi. In his last years, though his visit to Wu Creek shows he was eager
to venerate the cultural patriarchs of his political group, he was not
interested in playing political games with calligraphic quotation as Su
Shi had done. Huang was speaking in his own voice but responding to
the content of Yuan Jie’s poem and the style of Yan’s calligraphy from
the distance of settled Song attitudes about the meaning of the Rebel-
lion era and its aesthetic products. In all ways, his poem is an exercise in
nostalgia.
CH4 Page 60 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

Partisan Politics
at the Postrebellion
Court
While serving as prefect of Puzhou in the autumn of 758, Yan Zhen-
qing was impeached by one of the censors at court and further
degraded to the post of prefect of Raozhou (Jiangxi). Raozhou lay on
the shore of Lake Poyang in the south. The position was not any lower
in rank, but the post was much farther away, nearly a thousand kilome-
ters from Chang’an. Traveling east on his way to Raozhou, Yan Zhen-
qing passed through Luoyang, and there he composed a eulogy and
performed the sacrificial rites at the tomb of his uncle Yan Yuansun.
The eulogy reports to the spirit of his uncle all the achievements of his
descendants and the horrors suffered during the An Lushan Rebellion,
in which more than thirty members of the Yan clan lost their lives. The
draft of the eulogy, which is identical in style and tone to the eulogy for
his nephew Jiming, is extant only as poor reproductions in various
Ming- and Qing-dynasty engraved calligraphy compendia.1 Once in Rao-
zhou, Yan relieved the populace of the scourge of bandits.
In the summer of 759, Yan Zhenqing was appointed prefect of Sheng-
zhou and military commissioner of the Western Zhejiang circuit. When
he arrived in Shengzhou (near modern Nanjing), he discovered that Liu
Zhan, the prefectural aide of Yangzhou, was planning to revolt. As
before, Yan Zhenqing appointed generals, recruited soldiers, and stock-
piled equipment in preparation for battle on land or on the Yangzi
River. But a secret memorial was sent to the throne reporting him. Em-
peror Suzong evidently agreed that Yan’s presentiment of rebellion was
in error, and so he was called back to the capital. (In 761, Liu Zhan did
raise an army against the Tang.) En route he was given an appoint-
ment as vice minister of justice. Back in Chang’an, Yan again offended a
powerful person with his defense of ritual propriety. At this time, the
eunuch Li Fuguo controlled the maintenance of the imperial palaces; his
approval was required for the imperial edicts that passed through his
office to be carried out. In 760, he informed Emperor Suzong that his
father should be moved from the Southern Palace to the Western Palace

60
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 61

to keep him from conspiring to return to the throne. The emperor

simply wept in response. On his own initiative, Li Fuguo moved Retired
Emperor Xuanzong to the Western Palace. Yan immediately led his fellow
officials in submitting memorials of inquiry. In retaliation, Li Fuguo had
Yan impeached by Vice Censor-in-Chief Jing Yu and degraded to serve
as prefectural aide of Pengzhou (Sichuan).
On his journey south to Pengzhou that winter, Yan Zhenqing trav-
eled down the Jialing River. Disembarking at the district seat of Xin-
zheng for the final ten kilometers across land to Pengzhou, Yan Zhen-
qing stopped to visit the famous site of Mount Lidui on the banks of the
Jialing. In response to a request by the son of his old friend Xianyu
Zhongtong, with whom he had served as a palace censor in 747, he
composed and transcribed on a stele the Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu.
The stele was engraved and set up later, in 762, near a stone pavilion
Xianyu Zhongtong had built on the east side of Mount Lidui. In this
record, Yan Zhenqing narrates Xianyu’s honorable career as an official.
He also cites his own clansmen who had served as officials in Sichuan in
the past and describes the political events that led to his own journey
into exile there.2 In Pengzhou, Yan earned the praise of the populace
with his efforts at famine relief.
In the summer of 762, Emperor Daizong (r. 762–779) succeeded to
the throne. Shortly thereafter, the much-feared Li Fuguo was murdered
and Yan Zhenqing was promoted to prefect of Lizhou (Sichuan), some
130 kilometers nearer the capital. Yan Zhenqing traveled to his new
post but was unable to enter the city because it was under siege by Qiang
tribesmen. He was then called to court that winter. Liu Yan (715–780),
the vice minister of revenue, had nominated Yan Zhenqing as his own
replacement, enlisting him as an ally in his struggle against the clique of
his archenemy Yang Yan (727–781), a faction headed by Grand Coun-
cillor Yuan Zai (d. 777). From this point onward (if not earlier), Yan
Zhenqing was allied with the clique of Liu Yan in court politics, which
resulted in persecution by Yuan Zai in the 760s and 770s and by Yang
Yan in 780. Yan Zhenqing served as vice minister of revenue until the
autumn of 763, when he was transferred to act as military, surveillance,
and supervisory commissioner of Jingnan and granted the prestige title
of Grand Master of Imperial Entertainments with Gold Seal and Purple
Ribbon. But he had not yet departed from the capital to fill the post
when he was slandered to the throne and dismissed.
As a result of the retreat of Tang troops and officials to central China
to aid against An Lushan, the northwestern border areas (modern Gansu
and Ningxia) were occupied by the Tibetan armies. In late autumn of
763, they crossed the frontier. Since no intervention was offered by
either the local provincial governors or Pugu Huaien (d. 765), the
Uighur commander of the Shuofang Army, the Tibetans went on to take
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62 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

Chang’an.3 The imperial court fled east to a temporary site in Shanzhou

(Henan), and there Yan Zhenqing was appointed vice director of the
right. Two months later, when the Tibetans had departed and the court
was preparing to return to the capital, Yan Zhenqing suggested to the
emperor that he offer sacrifices at the tombs of his royal ancestors
before reoccupying the palace. Yuan Zai objected to the idea. He said to
Yan in court: “Although what you envision is lovely, is it not rather un-
suited to the occasion?” Yan Zhenqing lost his temper and replied: “To
use or discard my idea lies with the grand councillor, but what harm
was there in my words? The affairs of court can hardly expect to endure
the repetition of such abuse!”4 From the moment of this public humilia-
tion, Yuan Zai waited for the chance to have Yan Zhenqing sent out
into the provinces once more.
Though he was now an open enemy of Yuan Zai and his clique, Yan
reached the height of Emperor Daizong’s favor in 764. He was ap-
pointed acting minister of justice and censor-in-chief and, as Shuofang
Mobile Brigade pacification commissioner, entrusted with making a
personal appeal to Pugu Huaien to demonstrate his allegiance to the
throne after his shocking failure to rescue Chang’an from the Tibetans.
In the end, Yan did not actually confront Pugu Huaien, but he did per-
suade the emperor to replace Pugu with Guo Ziyi. (The replacement
ended Pugu’s loyalty. In the autumn of 764, Pugu led another Tibetan
invasion against the Tang, with limited success. In 765, he gathered a
great army of Tibetan and Uighur troops, but, fortunately for the Tang,
he died suddenly before the campaign could begin, and the army dis-
persed.) Yan was then enfeoffed (in 764) as Dynasty-Founding Duke of
Lu Commandery (Shandong). Later that year he composed the Spirit
Way Stele inscription for the Hezheng Princess, a recently deceased sister
of the emperor.
Throughout the same year, tensions also grew between the outer-
court officials and the most influential eunuch in the ranks of the inner
court, Inspector of the Armies Yu Chaoen (d. 770). Yu Chaoen had
earned his position of prominence in Emperor Daizong’s court by pro-
tecting the emperor in Shanzhou when the court fled from the Tibetans
in 763. After the return to the capital, Yu Chaoen was allowed to retain
his post as commander of the Army of Divine Strategy, which was
incorporated into the palace guards, to provide a ready military force to
the throne. The regular officials were gravely concerned by the unhappy
possibilities offered by a eunuch in such a powerful position, and Yu
Chaoen’s personal behavior, such as his vulgar displays of wealth and
inappropriate meddling in other court institutions, caused considerable
revulsion.5
Not all the regular officials were disgusted by Yu Chaoen, however.
One of those who curried favor with the eunuch commander was Guo
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 63

Yingyi (d. 765), a career military officer who had earned Emperor
Suzong’s gratitude by offering his troops in the desperate early days of
the rebellion. Since then he had moved rapidly up through several im-
portant military posts, including military commissioner of the Army of
Divine Strategy, and when Emperor Daizong took the throne he was
transferred to high civil offices. In 763, he was made vice director of the
right, and he joined the clique of Yuan Zai.6

The Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol

As vice director of the right, Guo Yingyi was charged with making
arrangements for special court functions. His malfeasance in this duty is
the ostensible subject of a lengthy letter, known to posterity as the
Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol, that Yan Zhenqing
wrote to Guo Yingyi in the eleventh month of 764. The tension under-
lying the letter, of course, was the long-standing rivalry between Com-
mander Yu Chaoen and General Guo Ziyi in the military sphere and
between the cliques allied to them in the civil arena, to which Yuan Zai
and Yan Zhenqing belonged. In this letter Yan indicts Guo Yingyi for
allowing allegiance to his clique to lead him astray in the enactment of
proper court ritual. It is a singular display of wrath and righteous indig-
nation in defense of the Confucian norms, spurred by personal offense
and the bitter rivalry between the two cliques. The letter opens with a
flattering résumé of Guo Yingyi’s career:
It is said that “the finest [type of a thing that dies but does not decay]
is an established virtue, while the next best is an established meri-
torious achievement. . . . These are what is meant by ‘that which does
not decay.’ ”7 Further, I have also heard that the grand councillor is
the superintendent of all the officials, while the feudal lords and kings
are examples for their people. Now your eminent and imperishable
meritorious achievements stand as an example to the people. How
but through your talent have you stood out? Your meritorious achieve-
ments crown the age. You drove back Shi Siming’s recalcitrant army
and resisted the Uighurs’ insatiable demands,8 by which you gained
your portrait painted in the Hall of Ascending to the Clouds and
your name reposited in the Imperial Ancestral Temple.9 How awe-
inspiring!
Then the possibility is introduced that Guo Yingyi has gone astray after
such a glorious career:
A career so praiseworthy should be praised, even though the finale
may present the real difficulty. Thus is it said: “To fill but not over-
flow is how long to retain riches; to be lofty but not precipitous is
how long to retain honor.” Can this be but a warning? The Book of
History says: “You do not brag, yet no one contends your merit. You
CH4 Page 64 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

64 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

do not boast, yet no one contends your ability.”10 . . . Therefore, there

is the saying, “To break off a journey of one hundred li at ninety li,”
which refers to the difficulty of the last stretch of the road.
Now, Yan levels the specific charge:
At the earlier incense-burning ceremony in the street before the Bodhi
Monastery,11 you arranged for one row of seats for the grand council-
lor and the consultants-in-ordinary in the Secretariat, the Chancellery,
and the Department of State Affairs together and one row of seats for
Commander Yu and yourself, at the head of all the generals.
Yan accused Guo Yingyi of violating the ritual protocol for the seating
of officials. The problem with Guo’s arrangements is as follows: vice
directors, such as Guo Yingyi, were Rank Two civil officials; generals of
the guards, such as Yu Chaoen, were Rank Three military officials and
in a proper arrangement, would follow the Rank Three civil officials.
Therefore, by placing Yu Chaoen next to him, Guo Yingyi elevated him
above his rank, thereby degrading the Rank Three civil officials, of
whom Yan Zhenqing was one. Worse yet, Guo Yingyi committed this
breach a second time:
Were this even a case of just once acting in an irregular manner to
comply with abnormal circumstances, it would still not be acceptable.
How much the worse when it is a long-standing practice engaged in
repeatedly? Recently the populace rejoiced over Guo Linggong [Guo
Ziyi] and the armies of father and son [Guo Xi] that destroyed the
host of the fierce rebels from the west.12 To crown the occasion, the
Xingdao [ward] banquet was held. But still unaware of your previous
error, you ended by following your own notions and made the arrange-
ments without concern for the relative status of the official ranks and
without regard for the relative position of civil and military officials.
You set your heart solely upon pleasing the inspector of the armies
[Yu Chaoen]. Not once did you heed the sidelong glances of the offi-
cials. How does this differ from knaves who steal money in broad
daylight? It is utterly unheard of. The gentleman’s feelings for others
are expressed through ritual. One never hears of self-indulgence in this.
Do you not have a profound concern for it?
Yan Zhenqing further reminds Guo Yingyi that one man alone has the
right to elevate an official arbitrarily:
The imperial favor is unique. The emperor mandates dispatches and
recalls. The multitude dare not stand next to him, nor may they order
the filling of their own positions. He must discriminate as to who is
honored and respected. None but he is permitted to sit facing south
toward the grand councillors, preceptors, and guardians. A single
throne is fixed on the east-west axis, although a popularly revered
CH4 Page 65 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 65

general-purpose censor from the Censorate may occupy a separate

bench [near the throne], so that all the officials may look up to them
with reverence. Could it be acceptable otherwise?
Moreover, though eunuchs had been elevated by emperors to inappro-
priately high positions in the recent past, these precedents were consid-
ered extremely inauspicious by the regular officials:
In the time of Emperor Xuanzong, when [the eunuch] Commander
Gao Lishi’s receipt of imperial favor was proclaimed, he was also per-
mitted a similar seat on the east-west axis. Any other form of etiquette
has never been heard of. Why must you order others to lose their
places? When [the eunuch] Li Fuguo was entrusted with the imperial
favor, he went directly to a position above the vice directors of the left
and right and the three dukes, which was considered suspicious and
strange throughout the subcelestial realm, was it not?
A man of antiquity [Confucius] said: “There are three friendships
that are advantageous and three that are injurious.”13 I hope that you
and the inspector of the armies have a friendship between “the honest
and the sincere,” not a friendship between “the acquiescent and the
insinuating.”
Yan closes his letter by throwing down the gauntlet:
When a court official first becomes a secretariat director, he hopes for
no confusion or disorder, but makes an effort to follow orders and
never twist his principles. We must all preserve and uphold the laws
and regulations of the court. I blame you for allowing them to fall
into a ruinous state, which I fear has reached you personally as well.
Tomorrow you will suddenly find yourself in a towering rage. If I
condemn you as a man who destroys the social relationships, what
will you have to say in reply?
The answer, if any, has gone unrecorded. The antagonists apparently
remained in a stalemate through the following year. But at the begin-
ning of 766, Yuan Zai instituted a novel policy of having all memorials
to the throne first pass under his review in order to keep criticism of
himself and his policies from the emperor. In protest, Yan Zhenqing
submitted a memorial arguing that all written documents presented at
court should be published.14 Yuan Zai was now avid for an excuse to
force Yan Zhenqing out of the capital. In the second month, Yan Zhen-
qing was entrusted with performing the ceremonies at the imperial
temple. When it was said at court that Yan Zhenqing had not had the
ceremonial implements refurbished, Yuan Zai charged him with deni-
grating the current regime and had him degraded to serve as an admin-
istrative aide in Xiazhou (Hubei), nearly two thousand kilometers
southeast of Chang’an. Not content with this punishment, the follow-
CH4 Page 66 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

66 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

ing month Emperor Daizong had him banished even farther, to fill the
same lowly position in Jizhou (Jiangxi), eighteen hundred kilometers
farther to the southeast.

The Letter as Art Object

We do not know how the Letter on the Controversy over Seating Proto-
col was preserved through the Tang, but in the mid-Northern Song it
was in the possession of a wealthy family from Chang’an surnamed An.
After An Shiwen and his brother came into their inheritance, they
decided to split the family property. In an effort, perhaps, to divide the
family art collection fairly, they also separated the Letter in two and
had it remounted as two scrolls. One scroll contained the first part of
the Letter—through the line “I hope that you and the inspector of the
armies have a friendship between the honest and the sincere”—while
the other scroll consisted of the remainder of the Letter with another
shorter letter by Yan Zhenqing attached.15
The two halves of the Letter were brought together once by Huang
Tingjian sometime between 1086 and 1094. In a colophon written on
an ink rubbing taken from a stone engraving of the Letter, he said:
“During the Yuanyou period, in the capital, for the first time I was able
to borrow the last three sheets [the second half] from An Shiwen and
put [the two halves] together as one.”16 The two halves of the Letter were
apparently soon reunited in the imperial collection of Emperor Hui-
zong. The Calligraphy Catalog of the Xuanhe Era, dated around 1120,
lists a “preceding” and a “succeeding” Letter on the Controversy over
Seating, which must refer to the two halves of the original manuscript.17
The Letter had a busy public life as an object of criticism and study
during the Yuanyou period (1086–1094). The Letter came to Kaifeng in
the collection of An Shiwen, who arrived in the capital as an official in
the government salt monopoly sometime before 1086.18 The officials of
the conservative party, including Su Shi and Huang Tingjian, returned
to high office when Sima Guang (1019–1086) was put in charge of gov-
ernment at the start of the Yuanyou era. Huang Tingjian served in the
capital, in the Institute of Veritable Records, throughout the Yuanyou
period, and Su Shi served as a secretariat drafter from 1086 to 1089. An
Shiwen was apparently quite generous in loaning the Letter to these
men whose criticial opinions, framed mainly in extemporaneous colo-
phons, were collected and published and remain highly influential down
to the present day. Apparently he also had a stone engraving made of
the Letter. Mi Fu must have seen the Letter around this time as well,
because his Record of Searches for Precious Scrolls (Baozhang daifang
lu), in which his earliest remarks about the Letter appear, is dated to
1086. As a result, perhaps, of this exposure, the Letter on the Contro-
versy over Seating Protocol was the work by Yan Zhenqing most fre-
CH4 Page 67 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 67

quently discussed by the Song connoisseurs. Although Huang Tingjian

ranked it second to the eulogy for his uncle Yan Yuansun, still he
praised it as “extraordinary.”19 Mi Fu admired it enormously, as well,
calling it “the premier calligraphy among the running-script works by
Yan Zhenqing in our day.”20 Su Shi concurred: “Compared to my lord’s
other writings, it is quite extraordinary.”21
The original manuscript is no longer extant. It exists now only in the
form of engraved steles and ink rubbings. Of the several versions, the
most familiar is in the Forest of Steles in the Shaanxi Provincial Museum
in Xi’an. Known as the “Xi’an version” or the “Guanzhong version,”
this version is traditionally believed to be the one An Shiwen had en-
graved from the original manuscript during the Yuanyou era.22 Huang
Tingjian, Su Shi, and Mi Fu were all familiar with ink rubbings from the
stone engraving. Su Shi personally made several ink rubbings from the
engraving,23 and from the colophon quoted earlier we know that Huang
Tingjian copied it. Typically Mi Fu turned up his nose at it, since he
believed that only ink-written calligraphy could serve as an acceptable
model. He declared that “the stone engravings preserve only a rough
impression [of the original brushwork].”24

Aesthetic Reception of the Letter

Of these three connoisseurs, Su Shi had the most extensive and pro-
found aesthetic encounter with the Letter. In a colophon that was prob-
ably appended to the original, he wrote:
Yesterday An Shiwen of Chang’an brought out his several pages of
the draft from Yan, Duke of Lu, to the Prince of Dingxiang Com-
mandery [Guo Yingyi], which is in his collection. Compared to my
lord’s other writings, it is quite extraordinary. He entrusted his hand
to write naturally, so that with each movement an attractive appear-
ance was created. From this we see that even for this gentleman, it
was true that “you shoot more skillfully when betting for tiles than
when betting for real gold.”25
“Betting for tiles” is a reference to a parable attributed to Confucius in
the Zhuangzi:
When you’re betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with
skill. When you’re betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about
your aim. And when you’re betting for real gold, you’re a nervous
wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases—but because one prize
means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh
on your mind.26
In other words, Su Shi believed that Yan was expressing himself quite
unselfconsciously, thereby creating great art. The term often used in tra-
ditional Chinese criticism for this manner is “unintentional” (wuyi). Su
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68 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

Shi had an entire philosophy of wuyi, which he used interchangeably

with wuxin (“no mind”). Ronald Egan has explained how Su conceived
of a person with wuyi as being free from prejudice and acting spontane-
ously in accord with things encountered. With the absence of intention
comes the ability to gain insight into the patterns of the world.27 Simi-
larly, “unintentional” calligraphy is writing that does not strive for any
particular visual effect and makes no conscious stylistic references. Mi
Fu said of the Letter: “Each character from the worn brush is intention-
ally connected to the next in a flying movement, yet their fantastic
shapes and strange forms are unpremeditated (de yu yi wai).”28 He also
praised its unlabored, unconstructed quality: “Pauses, checks, and slug-
gish bends—these signs of intention are not in these characters (yi bu
zai zi); complete naturalness dwells in this writing.”29 Huang Tingjian
also commented on Yan’s freedom from artifice:

When I look at [the Tang classical-tradition calligraphers] Ouyang

Xun, Yu Shinan, Chu Suiliang, Xue Ji, Xu Hao, and Shen Chuan-
shi, they were all limited by regulations. How could they compare
with the Duke of Lu, who calmly went beyond the carpenter’s line
marker?30

“Unintentional” writing is believed to communicate directly the person-

ality of the writer and thus to possess genuineness and sincerity. The
great flaw in the Wang style promoted at court, according to this system
of belief, is that it is “intentional,” or youyi. A style based on copying
the Chunhua ge tie, for example, would be seen as premeditated and
striving for effect, with all the negative associations such as cleverness,
mannerism, and disguising the self behind stylistic quotation.
Yan’s Letter on the Controversy, just like the Draft of the Eulogy for
Nephew Jiming, is quite lacking in dramatic visual effects (Figure 17).
No careful shaping or modulating of strokes may be seen, nor do we
find any cleverly designed character compositions or practiced repeti-
tion of canonical motifs or manners. Strokes are blunt; character forms
lack structural tension. Its manner is pingdan, or bland. This very lack
of conventional attractiveness made the Letter attractive to the North-
ern Song critics. The circle of poets and artists around Ouyang Xiu, Cai
Xiang, and Mei Yaochen (1002–1060) prized the qualities of simplicity,
informality, and blandness in literature.31 These qualities were prized
because they were believed to allow for the maximum amount of self-
expression. The following generation applied these same standards of
judgment to their criticism of calligraphy. For Su Shi, Huang Tingjian,
and Mi Fu, simplicity, informality, and blandness were to be achieved
by allowing expression to flow naturally from the brush. Yan Zhen-
qing’s Letter contains these qualities inherently. For indeed it was a
draft, scribbled informally, with no concern for visual effect.
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 69

Su Shi’s Copy of the Letter

Su Shi’s involvement with the Letter outlasted his stay in office at
court. He made numerous copies of the Letter, one of which is still
extant in ink-rubbing form (Figure 18). Dated to 1091, it is followed by
a lengthy colophon (Figure 19). In it he explains the stylistic qualities
that made him claim Yan Zhenqing as his choice of model:

Figure 17. Yan Zhenqing, Letter on the Controversy over Seat-

ing Protocol, detail of opening section, 764, ink rubbing,
“Xi’an version.” Shaanxi Provincial Museum. From Shaanxi
lidai beishi xuanji, p. 102.
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70 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

Figure 18. Su Shi, Copy of the Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol,
detail of opening section, 1091, ink rubbing. Courtesy of Field Museum of Nat-
ural History, Chicago.

I once declared that the apogee in painting was reached by Wu Daozi

[fl. ca. 710–760], in literature by Ouyang Xiu, and in calligraphy by
Yan, Duke of Lu, for they were the most capable practitioners in the
subcelestial realm. Someone said, “This may be so for painting and
literature, but as for calligraphy, in the Han dynasty there were Cui
Yuan [77–142] and Zhang Zhi [fl. ca. 150], and in the Jin there were
Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi, so how can you extol the Duke of
Lu’s skills alone?” I replied that he was wrong. In high antiquity there
was only seal script and no cursive or regular scripts. Once when the
emperor granted me a viewing of calligraphy and paintings in the
palace storeroom, I saw the traces of the brush in extant writings of
high antiquity. They were done with a centered brush tip, applied per-
pendicularly, and were absolutely free of any seductive demeanor.
From the Han and Jin dynasties onward, beauty was attained solely
by means of a slanted brush tip, so that the original intent of the men
of antiquity was largely lost. But then came the Duke of Lu, whose
brush was as centered and upright as that of [the mythical inventor of
writing] Cang Jie himself, like an awl drawing in sand or a seal
stamped in clay. He swept away the seductive habits of the Han and
Jin and established himself as a master.
CH4 Page 71 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

Figure 19. Su Shi, Colophon to the Copy of the Letter on the Controversy over
Seating Protocol, 1091, ink rubbing. Courtesy of Field Museum of Natural
History, Chicago.
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72 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

The centered, or upright, brush is a metaphor for moral probity that

dates back at least to the Tang dynasty. As the well-known anecdote has
it, the ninth-century emperor Muzong once asked his minister, the
calligrapher Liu Gongquan, about the proper method for the brush. Liu
had been trying to direct the emperor’s attention to matters of state, so
he cleverly used the rather more trivial subject of calligraphy to make a
point about statecraft: “The use of the brush lies in the heart. If your
heart is upright, then your brush will be upright.”32 Emperor Muzong
understood Liu’s reply as a remonstration couched in the metaphor of
calligraphy, but this association between centered-brush writing and the
morally upright man was promoted quite literally by the Confucian
critics of the early Northern Song:

Su Shi once commented on this famous episode. He wrote, [Liu Gong-

quan’s] statement that “if the heart is upright, the brush will be up-
right” was not only remonstration but a true principle. Petty men of
this world may have skill in writing characters, but in the end the
spirit and feeling of their calligraphy just appears eager to please and
flatter.33

This “true principle” became one of the central concepts in Song-

dynasty Confucian calligraphy criticism. Witness this complaint by the
Neo-Confucian philosopher-official Zhu Xi about the calligraphy of
Huang Tingjian:

When I look at Huang Tingjian’s calligraphy, it definitely has its good

points. But since he can write so well, why did he fail to learn the
squareness and uprightness in other people’s writing? Why did he
have to write in such a slanted manner?34

This belief dictates that the modesty and sincerity of “upright” calligra-
phy—that is, calligraphy written with a centered brush—makes it the
most appropriate artistic model, just as the “upright” conduct of the
man behind it makes him an appropriate moral and political model.
Conversely, calligraphy written with a slanted brush seduces eye and
mind with its facile charms and so both the style and the man behind it
are no standard to follow. Thus does calligraphic style gain moral im-
port and the artist’s choice of a hand to emulate become a statement of
his moral and political identification.
Su Shi concluded his colophon to his copy of the Letter on the Con-
troversy:
Without discussing his other works, but by looking only at his Letter
on the Controversy over Seating Protocol, you will realize that my
statement [that Yan revolutionized calligraphy] is no exaggeration. In
leisure among my books, whenever I wash my hands, burn incense,
and make a few copies of it in different sizes, although they do not
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 73

resemble the original, my calligraphy has already improved a great

deal over what it was before.35

Indeed, his copies do have a complicated resemblance to the original,

if the ink rubbing from the engraving of the 1091 copy is any indica-
tion. If we compare passages from the copy by Su Shi and an ink rub-
bing from the engraving of Yan Zhenqing’s Letter, it is readily apparent
that Su Shi followed the original in terms of the text itself and the com-
position of the characters (Figure 20 [the tenth character in the fourth
column through the fifth character in the fifth column] and Figure 21).
The only difference with regard to the text is that Su Shi did not repro-
duce the lined-out characters or transposition marks in the original but
made a “clean copy” of it. No doubt Su Shi had memorized the entire
letter. Yet the first thing that strikes us about these two works is how
much the style and expression of the copy by Su Shi are at variance
from its model. Where Yan Zhenqing’s line is blunt and virtually un-
modulated and the composition of his characters is awkward to the
point of homeliness, in Su Shi’s copy the modulation and shaping of the
brush strokes display tremendous variation and the compositions of his
characters exhibit unusual constructions that are unconventional with-
out being bizarre. Still, it was exactly the use of a blunt, unmodulated
line in the Letter that made the Song critics admire this calligraphy,
above all others by Yan Zhenqing, as an expression of the aesthetic ideal
of pingdan, or blandness.
Su Shi had been the protégé of Ouyang Xiu, but he was also an artist
with a lifelong passion for stylistic innovation and self-expression.
Where Ouyang seemed often to speak programmatically for the Qingli
reformers, Su Shi expressed his emotions more as an individual. Yet he
had no intention of refuting the aesthetic models set up by Ouyang or
rejecting his cultural and political identification with the reformers.
Thus a subtle conflict arose between theory and practice. In his critical
writings, Su Shi continued to repeat the same kind of praise for the
same virtues that Ouyang Xiu had declared present in the regular script
of Yan Zhenqing. But in his running-script calligraphy, Su Shi’s own
aesthetic prevailed. Instead of the manner that Yan Zhenqing used in
his running-script drafts, which was admired for its pingdan quality, or
the manner of Yan’s regular script, which was deemed by the Confucian
reformers and others the perfect calligraphic expression of moral recti-
tude, Su Shi chose to rework his copy of the Letter on the Controversy
in the manner of a part of Yan’s oeuvre that was otherwise ignored in
the Northern Song.
This part of the oeuvre of Yan Zhenqing consists of a handful of
works done in an eccentric mix of large, loose-jointed regular, running,
and cursive characters: the Defending Government Letter (Figure 22),
CH4 Page 74 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

Figure 20. Yan Zhenqing, Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol,
detail, 764. Shaanxi Provincial Museum. From Shaanxi lidai beishi xuanji.
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 75

Writing a Letter Letter (Figure 23), Guangping Letter (Figure 24), and
the Poem for General Pei (Figure 25). The three letters are distinct in
manner from Yan Zhenqing’s other cursive-script letters, such as the
Cursive and Seal Script Letter, though not so strongly that they suggest
the style of another hand, and there is a certain uniformity among them.
The Poem for General Pei, however, seems to be of another magnitude
—the most extreme expression of the mode seen in the three letters, un-
equaled in the other works of Yan Zhenqing, unprecedented in any ear-
lier calligrapher. What makes the Poem for General Pei so different from
the rest of Yan Zhenqing’s oeuvre is the unusual variety in type of script
and character size exhibited throughout the piece. Delicate, looping cur-
sive-script characters are startlingly juxtaposed with massive, square,
running-script characters. The arrangement of the characters seems al-
most pictorial in design. The effect is at once contrived yet somehow
natural, deliberate yet unrestrained. Why was such a uniquely expres-
sive and individualistic work not noticed by the calligraphy connoisseurs
of the Northern Song?
The Poem for General Pei was not included in the earliest collection

Figure 21. Su Shi, Copy of the Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol,
detail, 1091. Courtesy of Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.
CH4 Page 76 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:54 AM

Figure 22. Yan Zhenqing, Defending Government Letter, detail,

ca. 767, ink rubbing, from the Hall of Loyalty and Righteous-
ness Compendium. Zhejiang Provincial Museum.
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 77

of Yan Zhenqing’s writings, compiled by Song Minqiu (1019–1079) in

1056–1064. The only Song-dynasty person known to have commented
on it was the high official Lou Yue (1137–1213).36 He admired the
Poem for its “sword-pulling, crossbow-drawing gestures,” with the im-
plication that the calligraphic style nicely matched the subject matter of
the dashing military man, Pei Min. Lou Yue was compelled to note,
however, that the work was not signed and not recorded in Yan’s
collected works. No ink-written original is extant.37 The earliest version
of the Poem as calligraphy is in the engraved Hall of Loyalty and Righ-
teousness Compendium (Zhongyitang tie), and it appears in Yan’s col-

Figure 24. Yan Zhenqing, Guangping Let-

ter, detail, ca. 778, ink rubbing, from the
Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Com-
pendium. Zhejiang Provincial Museum.

Figure 23. Yan Zhenqing, Writing a Letter Letter,

detail, undated, ink rubbing, from the Hall of Loyalty
and Righteousness Compendium. Zhejiang Provincial
Museum.
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78 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

Figure 25. Yan Zhenqing (attrib.), Poem for General Pei, detail, undated, ink
rubbing, from the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium. Courtesy
of Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.

lected works only in the second edition. Both were edited by Liu Yuan-
gang (1180–1268) in 1215. Liu Yuangang was more an enthusiast than
a connoisseur, and his decision to include certain questionable works in
his compilations may have been based more upon their previous lack of
exposure than on any considered judgment of their authenticity. Yet it is
also possible that Liu Yuangang either discovered a work unknown to
the Northern Song champions of Yan Zhenqing or that he was willing
to publish a work that was known to them but which they excluded
from discussion because they judged it unorthodox in style.
Aside from the claim for authenticity based on the similarity in style
between the Poem for General Pei and the three letters (which them-
selves have no pedigree before their appearance in the Hall of Loyalty
and Righteousness Compendium of 1215), we should note that the con-
tent of the poem is perfectly plausible for a person of Yan Zhenqing’s
background. Pei Min was a friend and contemporary of Zhang Xu,
under whom Yan Zhenqing studied cursive script, and other poems cele-
brating the general’s daring exploits were written by Wang Wei (701–
761) and Yan’s brother-in-law Cen Shen.38 It seems quite likely that Yan
also knew Pei Min, as well, so that he too could have written an admir-
ing poem for him. Thus the poem itself could be authentic.
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 79

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Poem for General
Pei was known to Su Shi as a work by Yan Zhenqing. It was not a work
that was collected or discussed, so far as we know, by any other con-
noisseur of the Northern Song, including Ouyang Xiu. And yet it is the
one piece out of Yan Zhenqing’s entire oeuvre in which the brushwork
may be called haofang, or “bold and uninhibited.” His other works,
exemplary as they may be, are either consciously connected to a partic-
ular stylistic lineage (clan tradition in regular script; style of Zhang Xu
in running cursive-script letters) or virtually without conscious stylistic
reference (pingdan running-script drafts). Only the Poem for General
Pei reveals the kind of individualism and stylistic innovation that the
artists and critics of the Song dynasty so admired. Perhaps the artist in
Su Shi asserted his equality with the moralist, and he copied Yan Zhen-
qing’s exemplary pingdan-style Letter on the Controversy in the manner
of the dubious, exciting Poem for General Pei.
Let us compare details from the ink rubbing of Su Shi’s copy of Yan
Zhenqing’s Letter on the Controversy with an ink rubbing after Yan
Zhenqing’s Poem for General Pei (Figures 21 and 25). Several points of
similarity are evident: both are done in large-scale characters, up to ten
centimeters in height, arranged in compositionally dynamic columns of
around three to five characters. Compare this to Yan’s Letter on the
Controversy, which has columns of 14 to 20 two-centimeter-high char-
acters. In both we see striking contrasts in the sizes of characters used
(Yan 3/1–2; Su 1/1–2) and in the variation in line—from heavy, un-
modulated strokes (Yan 3/3; Su 2/1) to delicate ligatures (Yan 4/2–3;
Su 1/3). Both use exaggerated extensions of outer strokes to provide
balance (Yan 1/5; Su 3/2). Yet the differences are equally vivid. Many
of the characters in Yan Zhenqing’s work incorporate strong vertical
and horizontal lines, so that the overall shapes of these characters are
square (4/5) or rectangular (3/2). In Su Shi’s work, all the characters
are made up of curving and diagonal strokes, so that they tend to
describe spirals and ovals (2/2; 2/3). The mixture of curving cursive-
script characters and geometric running-script characters in Yan’s Poem
for General Pei creates a sense of organic forms overlaying a static grid.
In Su Shi’s copy of the Letter, the characters are altogether organic and
dynamic.
From this comparison it is evident that the styles of Su Shi and Yan
Zhenqing are fundamentally different. Yet what model for Su Shi’s hao-
fang-manner copy of the Letter is there but the haofang manner of
Yan’s Poem? Both display characters of strikingly contrasting sizes,
dynamic composition, and highly modulated brushwork that are not
seen in the main body of work left by these two men. The only other
work by Su Shi that comes close to his copy of the Letter is the famous
Huangzhou Cold Food Poems of around 1082 (Figure 26). His other
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80 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

works, exemplified by the Eulogy for Huang Jidao of 1087 (Figure 27),
are generally much less dramatic. In sum, then, Su Shi rendered his copy
of Yan Zhenqing’s Letter on the Controversy in his version of the hao-
fang manner of Yan Zhenqing’s Poem for General Pei. The irony is that
Su Shi reworked one of the most admired monuments of the pingdan
aesthetic in the manner of a work so dramatic and visually arresting
that it has generally been held outside the accepted oeuvre of Yan Zhen-
qing’s calligraphy. In his art, Su Shi employed the unorthodox side of
Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphy, even as he promoted Yan Zhenqing in his
criticism as the orthodox calligraphic model.
Indeed, so opulent and exciting are the brush strokes and the compo-

Figure 26. Su Shi, Huangzhou Cold Food Poems, Figure 27. Su Shi, Eulogy for Huang Jidao, detail, 1087,
detail, 1082, ink on paper. Collection of the ink on paper. Shanghai Museum.
National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of
China.
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Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court 81

sitions that one is tempted to accuse Su Shi of the very thing he deplored
in “petty men”—that their calligraphy “appears eager to please and
flatter.” The modulations in his brush line must have been achieved
through the ignoble means that he condemned in the calligraphers of
the Jin dynasty: the slanted brush tip. Huang Tingjian, Su Shi’s devoted
student and friend, was compelled to acknowledge this criticism of Su
Shi’s brush method, even as he tried to demonstrate how Su Shi’s weak
point did no harm:
Some say that Dongpo’s ge [hooked diagonal] strokes show defective
brushwork and others say that since he rests his wrist on the paper
and lets his brush lean over, the left side of his characters is graceful
but the right side is withered. This is to look at a leopard through a
tube and fail to see the complete form. Don’t they know that when Xi
Shi pounded herself on the breast and scowled, even in her imperfect
condition she was beautiful?39
Although it was a gracious and loyal defense, Huang Tingjian actually
conceded the point. If we understand Su Shi’s background in calligra-
phy study, however, his reliance on the means of the Jin calligraphers
was only to be expected, quite apart from his espousal of the style of
Yan Zhenqing. Huang Tingjian said of Su Shi’s study of calligraphy:
When Dongpo Daoren [Su Shi] was young, he studied the Orchid
Pavilion, so that his calligraphy had the same “seductive beauty” as
that of Xu Jihai [Xu Hao]. . . . In middle age he enjoyed studying the
calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing. . . .40
Naturally, Su Shi’s style was based on the slanted-brush manner of
Wang Xizhi, since his childhood model had been Wang’s Orchid Pavil-
ion Preface. Even extensive study of another calligrapher in middle age
would not significantly alter the habits of his hand.
Su Shi promoted Yan Zhenqing as the patriarch of Song Confucian
literati calligraphy in his criticism and his choice of models in later life,
and he extolled the “centered brush” both as proper calligraphic tech-
nique and as a metaphor for moral rectitude. And yet his own calli-
graphic manner, which unquestionably owes some of its daring use of
awkwardness and bluntness to his study of Yan Zhenqing, does not
emulate the unmodulated blandness seen in Yan Zhenqing’s centered-
brush Letter on the Controversy. It is instead a triumph of the boldness
and drama that can be achieved only through the use of a slanted brush.
This gap between theory and practice is what Huang Tingjian
attempted to bridge with the analogy to Xi Shi. Though flawed, it is still
beautiful. Thus while a great artist such as Su Shi could be excused for
employing the slanted brush in his calligraphy, any acknowledgment in
one’s critical writings that the slanted brush ought to have a place in the
repertoire of the Confucian calligrapher would be apostasy. As a result,
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82 Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

although the styles of the Song calligraphers are varied and individual,
the same judgment of Yan Zhenqing and his followers as the proper
models and the centered brush as the proper method was handed down
unchanged from one generation to the next in their critical writings.
The same accolades for the achievements of the admirers of Yan Zhen-
qing echo down the years, for to recognize a correct choice of calli-
graphic model in someone else is to identify yourself as one of the elect.
For example, Huang Tingjian said of Su Shi what Su Shi had earlier said
of Cai Xiang: “His calligraphy is the best of this dynasty.”41 And Huang
Tingjian claimed for Su Shi what Ouyang Xiu had once said of Yan
Zhenqing: “His loyalty and righteousness shine as brightly as the sun or
moon.”42 Sometimes the comparisons were explicit. Huang Tingjian
wrote:
Master Dongpo once compared himself to Yan, Duke of Lu. I pon-
dered it and concluded that, all things considered, these two gentle-
men were both heroes to a generation.43
Su Shi’s relationship to the style of Yan Zhenqing reveals that the
most important symbol of political identification was not the faithful
reproduction of the ideal style, but the expression of affiliation in one’s
critical writings with the accepted patriarchs of one’s political group.
The calligraphic styles of Cai Xiang, Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi, and Huang
Tingjian are instantly distinguishable and their uses of the calligraphic
style of Yan Zhenqing quite disparate. But their political identification
with moderate conservative reform and the advancement of the political
and cultural power of the scholar-official class was the same, and so,
consequently, was their promotion of Yan Zhenqing and themselves as
his Confucian standard-bearers.
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From Daoist
Inscriptions to
Daoist Immortal
Yan Zhenqing’s tenure in provincial Jizhou lasted two years. Although
he sought diversion in poetry and sight-seeing, his true feelings were
revealed in his inscriptions of 766, in which he wrote “through my care-
lessness and clumsiness, I was degraded to serve in Jizhou” and “as a
result of accusations of wrongdoing, I was made to serve in Jizhou.”1 In
the summer of 768, Yan Zhenqing was transferred to serve as prefect of
Fuzhou (Jiangxi), the prefecture that bordered Jizhou on the east.
Fuzhou had been the home of a number of Daoist personages, both real
and fantastic, from at least the third century.2 As Yan Zhenqing toured
the cities of Fuzhou over the four years he served there, he visited the
sites where these Daoist figures dwelled. There he refurbished their
altars and wrote stele inscriptions to record the histories of the sites and
biographies of the deities.

The Daoist Inscriptions at Fuzhou

The two earliest Daoist inscriptions, dated to 768 and 769, he wrote
to commemorate female Daoists at sites in and around Linchuan, the
prefectural seat of Fuzhou. The first of these was the “Stele Inscription
for the Altar of the Transcendant Lady Wei of the Jin Dynasty, the Lady
of the Southern Peak, Primal Worthy of the Purple Void, Concurrently
Supreme True Mistress of Destiny.”3 This text includes a hagiography
of the noblewoman Wei Huacun (252–334) and an account of several
of her latter-day female followers.4 As an immortal, Lady Wei revealed
a number of the early Shangqing scriptures to Yang Xi (330–ca. 370),
the founder of the Maoshan Daoist tradition.5 One of her Tang-dynasty
adherents, Huang Lingwei (ca. 640–721), who rediscovered and restored
the shrine of Lady Wei at Linchuan, was the subject of the second dated
inscription by Yan Zhenqing, the “Stele Inscription for the Altar of the
Transcendant Miss Flower, of Well Mountain, Linchuan District, Fu-
zhou.”6 Another inscription that concerns historical persons commemo-

83
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84 From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal

rates two Daoists named Wang and Guo. It was engraved on a stele on
Mount Huagai, near the town of Chongren, nearly fifty kilometers south-
west of Linchuan. Although it is undated, it was likely produced while
Yan was prefect of Fuzhou.
His only Daoist inscription extant in calligraphic form is the Record
of the Altar of the Immortal of Mount Magu, Nancheng District, Fu-
zhou, dated to 771, which was erected on Mount Magu, southwest of
the town of Nancheng (Figure 28). The original stone is long since lost,

Figure 28. Yan Zhenqing, Record of the Altar of the Immortal of

Mount Magu, Nancheng District, Fuzhou, detail, 771, ink rubbing.
From Song ta Yan Lugong dazi Magu xiantan ji (Chengdu: Chengdu
guji shudian, 1986), p. 9.
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From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal 85

and the stele that stands on Mount Magu now is a Ming-dynasty reen-
graving sponsored by Prince Yi (Zhu Youbin, born after 1470). Only a
few old ink rubbings taken from the original stone are extant today, such
as the Song-dynasty ink rubbing in the Shanghai Museum.7 The first half
of the text is a transcription of the hagiography of the Daoist divinity
Miss Hemp (Magu), drawn from the Biographies of Divinities and Im-
mortals (Shenxian zhuan) of the Daoist literatus Ge Hong (284–364).8
Miss Hemp was a divine crane-woman. Ge Hong’s narrative is set dur-
ing the second century. It tells how Miss Hemp’s older brother, the Daoist
immortal Wang Fangping, requested that she manifest herself to the
family of his disciple Cai Jing. Miss Hemp appeared as a beautiful young
woman, lavishly coiffed and dressed. Cai Jing was not yet a perfected
immortal, however, and proved to have insufficient spiritual maturity to
deal correctly with the situation. As her hagiography reports:
Miss Hemp had hands like the talons of a bird. Cai Jing thought to
himself that when his back itched, it would be very nice to have these
talons to scratch it with. Wang Fangping knew what Cai Jing was
thinking, so he had Cai Jing lashed with a whip and said to him, “Miss
Hemp is a divinity! How can you thoughtlessly believe her talons are
for scratching your back?” The whip laid on Cai Jing’s back was visi-
ble, but there appeared to be no one holding the whip. Wang Fangping
warned Cai Jing, “My whip does not tolerate such impropriety!”9
In the second half of the Record of the Altar of the Immortal of
Mount Magu, Yan Zhenqing describes the history of Daoist activity at
Mount Magu, including its current residents:
In the third year of the Great Chronometry era [768], I was made gov-
ernor of Fuzhou. According to the Classic of Maps, Mount Magu is in
Nancheng district. At the summit is an ancient altar. Tradition says
this is where Miss Hemp attained to the Way. To the southeast of the
altar is a pool. In the center was a red lotus, which suddenly turned
blue recently. Now it has become white. Below the north end of the
pool, beside the altar, are firs and pines, all bent into a canopy. Occa-
sionally the bell and chime sounds of [Daoist immortals] pacing the
void have been heard.
To the southeast is a waterfall, which cascades more than three hun-
dred feet. To the northeast there is a monastery on a stone outcrop-
ping. There are still mussel and conch shells embedded in the high
rocks, which some believe to be remnants of the transformations of the
mulberry fields [into the Eastern Sea and back again over aeons]. To
the northwest is Mayuan. I think this is the site in Xie Lingyun’s [385–
433] poem, “I Go into the Third Valley of Mayuan Where Huazi Hill
Stands.”10 There is a divinity residing at the mouth of the spring, by
whom prayers for rain are speedily answered.
During the Opened Prime era [713–742], the Daoist Deng Ziyang
practiced the Way at this spot. He received an imperial summons to
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86 From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal

enter the Great Unity Palace, where he exercised his merit and virtue
[as a Daoist fangshi, or doctor] for twenty-seven years.11 One day there
suddenly appeared in the courtyard a dragon chariot drawn by tigers
and two men holding tallies. Deng Ziyang turned and said to his
friend Zhu Wuyou, “They have come to receive me. You may report
to the throne for me that I wish my corpse to be returned for burial
on my mountain.” Then he asked that a temple be set up at the side of
the altar. Emperor Xuanzong complied with this. In the fifth year of
the Heavenly Treasure era [746], a dragon was reported to be in the
stone pool of the waterfall, and a yellow dragon was seen. Emperor
Xuanzong expressed his gratitude for this [symbol of the Tang em-
peror]. Then he ordered that repairs be made to the abode of the Tran-
scendant [Deng Ziyang], the one with the true demeanor of a cloud-
following crane. Alas!
In the past, Miss Hemp left her traces on this ridge [Mount Magu].
The extant altar of “True Immortal of the South Face” [ Lady Wei] is
at Guiyuan. Miss Flower [Huang Lingwei] manifested her unusual
quality at Jingshan. Her present disciple, the female Daoist Li Qiong-
xian, is eighty years old, but her complexion is very youthful. After
Zeng Miaoxing had a dream that Li Qiongxian so instructed her, she
ate only flowers and gave up grain.12 Deng Ziyang’s nephew is named
Decheng. He continues the practices of incense and paper money. His
disciple Tan Xianyan reveres the writings on Daoist arts, and Shi Yuan-
dong, Zuo Tongxuan, and Zou Yuhua are all pure and vacuous in
their service of the Way. If the genius of this locale is no different from
the luminous numina of other regions, then why has there been such a
splendid succession of worthies here? As I have had the pleasure of
knowing the latest of these eminences, I have dared to engrave this
record in stone.13

In this inscription Yan makes no attempt to divide the historical facts

from the miraculous events reported at this site, nor does he make criti-
cal comment on Ge Hong’s fabulous biography of Miss Hemp. Is this
evidence that Yan Zhenqing was a practicing, believing Daoist? Soon
after his death, Daoist hagiographers claimed that Yan had ingested an
elixir of immortality during his life and had become a Daoist immortal
after his martyrdom. Several different accounts appear in late Tang and
early Song texts describing how Yan Zhenqing took youth-preserving
drugs during his life and how, after his death, his corpse was at first
miraculously preserved, only later to disappear, thereby revealing his
status as a Daoist immortal. The biography of Yan Zhenqing in the
Xian li zhuan (Biographies of Immortal Officials), a late Tang Daoist
compilation, tells of Yan Zhenqing being cured of an illness at the age
of eighteen or nineteen by a cinnabar pill given him by a traveling Dao-
ist doctor and relates the miracles associated with his corpse.14 The
same sort of stories are found in the tenth-century Xu xian zhuan (Sequel
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From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal 87

to the Biographies of Immortals), the Taiping guang ji (Extensive Records

of the Grand Tranquility Reign), which is dated to 978, and the Tang yu
lin (Forest of Tang Legends) by Wang Dang (1050?–ca. 1110).15

Yan Zhenqing as Daoist: Biography

Yet another of these accounts, which appears in the early Song-
dynasty Luozhong jiyi (Record of Prodigies in the Luo Region), became
the source for a Daoist hagiography by Mi Fu.16 His Record of the
Immortal Duke of Lu was engraved in 1092 onto the reverse of the
stele inscribed with the Record of the New Temple to Yan, Duke of Lu,
by a contemporary scholar-official named Cao Fu (Presented Scholar
ca. 1098–1100).17 This stele stood on the grounds of the temple to Yan
Zhenqing in Feixian (Shandong), northwest of Linyi, the ancestral
home of the Yan clan.18 In his Record of the New Temple, Cao Fu
described how the old temple to Yan Zhenqing had fallen into disrepair
and how in 1091 the local magistrate and several members of the Yan
clan joined forces to build a new temple for which Cao Fu wrote the
dedicatory stele inscription:

In the sixth year of the Yuanyou era [1091], Yang Yuanyong was in
his second year as district magistrate. He issued a proclamation
throughout the prefecture that read:
“According to the ‘Sacrificial Regulations,’ if there is one who can
prevent a great disaster or can ward off a great calamity, then sacrifice
to him. If through his toil he stabilizes the state, if by his death he ful-
fills his duty, then sacrifice to him. When the Duke of Lu governed
Pingyuan, An Lushan’s plan to revolt was not yet hatched. But my
lord was able to detect the clues, and so when the revolt came and all
of the northeast had fallen, Pingyuan alone stood prepared. Together
with his cousin Gaoqing, the governor of Changshan, he led a great
following, and all the commanderies of Hebei relied on Pingyuan for
its impregnable walls. This indeed may be called ‘warding off a great
calamity.’ Later, when he was oppressed by a venal minister, he faced
the ultimate sacrifice unmoved and unbowed, and in the end he met
his death at the hands of the rebel [ Li Xilie]. This indeed may be
called ‘fulfilling his duty by his death.’ ”
The stele for the new temple was going to be erected without a text
engraved on it. I was afraid it would fail to manifest [Yan Zhenqing’s]
loyalty and righteousness or to encourage future officials if there were
no words upon it.19

Here Cao Fu repeats the standard Confucian version of the life and
death of Yan Zhenqing, condensed to the two events upon which his
reputation as a Confucian martyr rested: his loyal resistance to the
rebels An Lushan and Li Xilie. Mi Fu’s inscription was originally en-
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88 From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal

Figure 29. Mi Fu, Record of the Immortal Duke of Lu, detail, 1092,
ink rubbing. Feixian, Shandong. From Shodò zenshû, vol. 18, pl. 205.

graved on a stele at the temple to Yan Zhenqing in Huzhou around

1088, but in 1092 it was engraved again onto the reverse of the Feixian
stele (Figure 29).20
Mi Fu’s inscription is both literally and figuratively “the other side of
the record.” For while Cao Fu’s essay praised Yan Zhenqing as a Con-
fucian exemplar exclusively, Mi Fu offered a standard Daoist version of
Yan’s life:
The Duke of Lu was hated by [the grand councillor] Lu Qi, so when
Li Xilie revolted, Lu Qi was the first to argue for sending Yan [to
negotiate with Li Xilie]. Many officials remonstrated against this. Em-
peror Dezong asked Lu Qi why. He replied: “Zhenqing is an impor-
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From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal 89

tant minister at court. His loyalty and righteousness are known

throughout the subcelestial realm. Who would not submit in awe?
Now if an envoy is sent who cannot strike fear into the rebels, it will
be a national disgrace. Pay no heed to this babble of opinions. Your
Majesty ought to decide the matter himself, without being swayed by
the sentiments of the crowd.” But Dezong could not decide, and so he
was sent.
Everyone knew that Yan Zhenqing would never return. His rela-
tives and clansmen held a banquet for him at Changlepo [on the west-
ern bank of the Chan River, just east of Chang’an]. After Yan had
something to drink, he leapt up onto the bridge, where he danced
about. He said to the banqueters: “Once when I was in the south, I
met the Daoist, Tao Eighty-Eight. He gave me a pinch of Azure Mist,
which I took. Since then I have not aged. He once told me that I
would face a great danger after the age of seventy and that he would
meet me in the Luofu Mountains. Isn’t this journey what he was talk-
ing about?”
Later Yan Zhenqing died at the hands of the rebels. When the
rebels were pacified, his family members opened his grave. His color-
ing was as fresh and his nails and hair were as long as if he had been
living. They returned the body for burial in the ancestral tomb in the
hills north of the Yanshi district seat. Later there was a trader who
went to the Luofu Mountains, where he encountered two Daoists.
When they saw him they asked him, “Where do you come from?”
The trader replied, “Luoyang.” The first one smiled and said, “Would
you be so good as to carry a note back to my family?” The trader
agreed, so the Daoist wrote a letter to send with him. The address
read, “To the Yan family in the hills north of the Yanshi district seat,
Luoyang.” But when the trader got there, the place turned out to be a
family cemetery. The gray-haired cemetery keeper recognized the
calligraphy of the note as Yan Zhenqing’s. He was very startled and
asked the trader for a description of the man who had written it; the
trader described Yan Zhenqing completely. So the cemetery keeper
brought the trader to Yan’s family, who all wept to hear him. Then
they divined the proper day to unseal the tomb and open the coffin. It
was already empty!
Alas! Although Lu Qi wanted to destroy Yan Zhenqing as a person,
he could not destroy him as an immortal. Li Xilie and Lu Qi were
merely murderers, and they received the standard punishment for mur-
der. Though Yan Zhenqing died, his reputation did not decay, all the
more so when he became an immortal [and his physical body did not
decay].
In the third year of the Yuanyou era [1088], I came to see the new
temple to Yan Zhenqing put up by the people of this commandery,
and I paid my respects before the image of Yan Zhenqing. So stern
and imposing were the heroic spirit and immortal frame of the image
that it seemed to be alive. I once read the Record of Prodigies in the
Luo Region, which records the events of Yan Zhenqing’s life. As
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90 From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal

recorded in the dynastic histories, Lu Qi’s obeisance to Yan Zhenqing

in the Secretariat and his speech before Emperor Dezong showed him
to be a consummate villain, but as for Yan Zhenqing’s immortality,
how can it be doubted?
Yan Zhenqing’s tremendous virtue has been chronicled a great many
times, and in discussions of ranking in the groves of learning he has
been deemed accomplished in every sphere of culture. This is undoubt-
edly what has encouraged this misguided obsession with “loyalty and
righteousness.” To prevent being haunted by a wronged ghost, this true
record of Yan Zhenqing becoming an immortal I have had engraved
onto the reverse of this stele, to be handed down along with the
account in the Sequel to the Biographies of Immortals.21

Mi Fu did not intend to contest Yan Zhenqing’s reputation for

loyalty and righteousness, for it was that reputation which made Yan
Zhenqing’s name such a valuable object of contention. Mi Fu himself
praised Yan’s “loyalty and righteousness” in his colophon on the Letter
on the Controversy over Seating Protocol.22 His writing of the Daoist
record was intended to contest the Confucian appropriation of Yan
Zhenqing as one of their own with their narrow characterization of him
solely as an exemplar of the Confucian values of loyalty and righteous-
ness. Mi Fu and the Daoist hagiographers believed that a life of Confu-
cian virtue was an excellent qualification for metamorphosis into a
Daoist immortal, and they were pleased to describe Yan’s bravery and
loyalty in the face of persecution as well as his transcendence over
death. His Confucian biographers, however, not only avoided any dis-
cussion of the belief that Yan had metamorphosed into an immortal at
his death, they also deplored any evidence of thought or action on his
part associated with Daoism. In his famous record for the temple dedi-
cated to Yan Zhenqing in Fuzhou, for example, the Confucian essayist
Zeng Gong (1019–1083) lamented that “my lord’s scholarship and writ-
ings were frequently tainted with the theories of immortality [Daoism]
and Buddhism and consequently not always rational.”23 Ouyang Xiu
complained that Yan “could not avoid being affected by the theories of
immortality. Buddhism and Daoism are truly the people’s sorrow!”24
Thus the aim of Mi Fu’s inscription was to enter a record of Yan Zhen-
qing’s life as a Daoist in a public place in connection with a clan-spon-
sored, Confucian temple dedicated to the worship of Yan Zhenqing.
This contest of hagiographies makes clear how serious were the claims
on the posthumous reputation of Yan Zhenqing in the eleventh century.

Yan Zhenqing as Daoist: Calligraphy

In the calligraphy of his Record of the Immortal Duke of Lu, Mi Fu
mimicked the squared forms and indented final hooks of Yan’s regular
script (Figure 29). His reproduction of the hallmarks of Yan’s style is
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From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal 91

somewhat surprising, given Mi Fu’s often-quoted disparagements of

Yan’s regular script. Mi Fu criticized Yan Zhenqing’s regular script for
lacking the Song-dynasty ideals of “blandness” (pingdan) and “natural
perfection” (tiancheng). He particularly disliked the use of what he called
tiao and ti:
Since he became famous as a master for his tiao and ti, he used that
mannerism too much, so his work lacks the flavor of blandness and
natural perfection. . . . On the whole, the tiao and ti of Yan Zhenqing
and Liu [Gongquan] were the progenitors of all the strange and bad
writing of later generations. Following them, the methods of antiquity
dissipated and were no longer handed down. But the style of [Yan’s]
Dried Deer Meat Letter, which belongs to Mr. An, and Sick Horse
Letter, which belongs to Mr. Su, is generous and purely antique, with-
out any of those tiao and ti. These were done while he was minister of
justice. These letters on paper are exquisitely realized in both intention
and spirit, which is why I say they were done then. The brush spirit is
dense and tightly structured, not leggy and overgrown.25
Mi Fu’s use of the terms “tiao” and “ti” (or possibly “tiaoti”) is prob-
lematic—both to translate into English and to relate to the features of
Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphy. Lothar Ledderose has translated “tiaoti”
together as “stumbling,” which he believes refers to the indentations
Yan Zhenqing created in the underside of his na (upper-left-to-lower-
right diagonal) and hooked shu (vertical) strokes by lifting the brush
just before the end of the stroke (as in Figure 28, 2/3 and 1/2).26 Wen
Fong translated “tiao” and “ti” as “flicking and kicking.”27 I agree with
Ledderose’s identification of the mannerism that Mi Fu criticized, but I
also agree with Fong that “tiao” and “ti” refer to two kinds of strokes.
I wonder if tiao (“flicking”) is not a reference to the leftward flick of the
brush that creates the hook at the end of the shu stroke and ti (“kick-
ing”) is not a reference to the movement of the na stroke, which bends,
or “kicks,” at the midpoint of the stroke. In the end, whichever transla-
tion we choose does not affect Mi Fu’s complaint: that Yan’s regular
script contains distracting brush mannerisms. Why he reproduced them
to write out Yan’s Daoist biography is not clear. It seems to fly in the
face of his strongly stated aesthetic convictions, but perhaps it was done
to indicate genuine reverence for the person of Yan Zhenqing.
Although Mi Fu disparaged Yan Zhenqing’s regular script, he found
much to admire in Yan’s running script. While he considered Yan’s reg-
ular script mannered and artificial (“intentional”), he admired his run-
ning script as organic and natural (“unintentional”). Mi Fu promoted
Yan Zhenqing’s running-script letters because he felt that they mani-
fested his own aesthetic standard, which was based on his extensive
study of the calligraphy of Wang Xianzhi, the finest calligrapher in Mi
Fu’s estimation. I contend that Mi Fu’s aesthetic standard was essen-
tially Daoist—not only because the calligraphic style of Wang Xianzhi
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92 From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal

was influenced by the practice of Daoism, but also because Mi Fu’s own
political identification was with the Song court and court Daoism. One
aspect of this affiliation, in line with his view of Yan as a Daoist immor-
tal, was the promotion of Yan’s running-script calligraphy as Daoist.
The nature of this Daoist aesthetic is revealed in Mi Fu’s admiring
description of Yan Zhenqing’s Letter on the Controversy over Seating
Protocol:
Each character from the worn brush is intentionally connected to the
next in a flying movement, yet their fantastic shapes and strange
forms are unpremeditated.28

There are two key concepts in this passage. The first is that the charac-
ters are connected to one another. The second is that the calligraphy
itself is unpremeditated, or unconscious. Both characteristics were
admired by Mi Fu because they are found in the “single-stroke calli-
graphy” of Wang Xianzhi. Mi Fu was unusual in admiring the calli-
graphy of Wang Xianzhi over that of his father, Wang Xizhi. Mi once
wrote: “Zijing’s [Wang Xianzhi’s] natural perfection is transcendent
and untrammeled. How can his father compare?”29 Mi Fu described
Wang Xianzhi’s writing in the same terms he had used for Yan Zhen-
qing’s running script:
[ The characters] are continuous and connected, with no beginning or
end, as if there were no willful intent. This is what is known as
“single-stroke calligraphy.”30

The source for Wang Xianzhi’s “single-stroke calligraphy,” which

was considered the novel style of its day, has been discussed in detail by
Lothar Ledderose.31 Ledderose has reported on modern-day sessions of
planchette writing, in which a Daoist priest in a trance state “receives”
divinely inspired texts, writing out the characters in a tray of sand with
a wooden stick. This Daoist practice can be documented back to at least
the Tang dynasty. The style of this planchette writing, which is done
with great speed and abandon, involves connected characters and unpre-
meditated forms. From this Ledderose argues that the novelty in Wang
Xianzhi’s style was borrowed from the unpremeditated, continuous line
of Daoist planchette writing.
If the distinguishing feature of Wang Xianzhi’s calligraphy lies in
what it borrowed from Daoist religious practice—and that feature is the
one that Mi Fu considered its paramount virtue—then I would argue
that Mi Fu promoted a Daoist aesthetic in calligraphy. One of the few
works by Yan Zhenqing that Mi Fu found acceptable stylistically, the
Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol, he praised for having
the Daoist aesthetic qualities of “single-stroke calligraphy.” Was he not
promoting the idea of Yan’s running script as “natural” and “Daoist”
over his regular script, which he saw as “constructed” and “Confucian”?
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From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal 93

Mi Fu was not a self-made man of literature like the Confucian

reformers, and he never met Ouyang Xiu. His mother had been a lady-
in-waiting to the later empress of Emperor Yingzong (r. 1063–1067),
and he had grown up in the imperial palace. He became an artist, col-
lector, and critic who made his way among the court nobility through
artistic talent and eccentric charm. In 1105, he served as doctor of
calligraphy and painting during the reign of the great patron of Daoism,
Emperor Huizong.32 He was a protégé of Huizong’s Grand Councillor
Cai Jing (1046–1126), and several anecdotes concerning his whimsical
behavior are preserved in Tieweishan congtan, the collection of jottings
by Cai Jing’s youngest son Cai Tao (died after 1147). Among the art
collectors and connoisseurs in his circle of friends were several members
of the Song imperial family, such as Wang Shen (ca. 1051–ca. 1103), Li
Wei, Zhao Zhongyuan (1054–1123), and Zhao Lingkun.33 Mi Fu has
not, to my knowledge, been identified as a practicing Daoist. But it
would appear that he was more closely allied to the group of men who
promoted Daoism at the imperial court than to the scholar-officials
such as Ouyang Xiu and Cai Xiang who opposed Daoism and Buddhism.
Mi Fu’s promotion of the “Daoist” qualities in the calligraphy of
Yan Zhenqing was of a piece with his recording of the Daoist legends
concerning Yan Zhenqing’s corpse. He seems to have shared the goal of
the promoters of Daoism at the court of Huizong: to enlist the name
and reputation of Yan Zhenqing on the Daoist register. Another protégé
of Cai Jing, Ye Mengde (1077–1148), once wrote: “The men of the
Tang dynasty often said that Yan Zhenqing was a divine immortal.”34
He then added: “In recent times, tradition has it that Ouyang Xiu and
Han Qi were both immortals. How can this be doubted?” This is
propaganda at its most brazen—since Ouyang Xiu was a staunch Con-
fucianist and Han Qi a pious Buddhist—and serves only to weaken the
claim for Daoist activity by Yan Zhenqing.

Was Yan Zhenqing a Daoist?

Leaving aside the question of immortality, certain circumstances in
the history of the Yan clan suggest involvement with Daoism long before
Yan Zhenqing wrote his Daoist stele inscriptions. During the Western
Jin dynasty (265–316), the Wang clan, of which Wang Xizhi and Wang
Xianzhi were descendants, lived in the Langye region of Shandong
province, where the school of Daoism known as the “Way of the Celes-
tial Master” (Tianshi Dao) had its origins. The Wangs were adherents
of this school of Daoism in Langye, and they continued their Daoist
practices in the south under the Eastern Jin (317–420). Many of the
Wangs had personal names ending in the character “zhi,” which was
often a sign of a follower of the Way of the Celestial Master.35 The Yan
clan too had resided in Langye, and when the Western Jin dynasty fell,
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94 From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal

Yan Zhenqing’s thirteenth-generation ancestor Yan Han (265–357)

followed the future Emperor Yuan of the Eastern Jin dynasty south to
Nanjing.36 Not only were the members of the Yan clan followers of the
former Langye aristocracy, but many of them had names ending in the
character “zhi,” such as Jingzhi, Tengzhi, Bingzhi, and Yanzhi.37 Yan
Zhenqing’s sixth-generation ancestor, Yan Xie (498–539), once wrote a
book entitled Biographies of Jin Dynasty Immortals. The Yan clan had
intermarried for generations with the Shen clan of Wuxing (modern
Huzhou), during the Six Dynasties period, and with the Yin clan of
Chen commandery (modern Shenqiu, Henan), during the Tang dynasty.
These two clans were “Celestial Master” Daoist families. Yan Zhenqing
himself was related by marriage to the Wang clan: his mother-in-law
was the daughter of one Wang Qiu of Langye.38 Thus it seems likely
that the Yan clan, too, had a tradition of participation in the Way of the
Celestial Master.
On the counter side, I have found no evidence that Yan Zhenqing
himself was a practicing Daoist. His inscriptions for the Daoist sites in
Fuzhou are similar in form to those for other famous sites—such as the
one for the temple of Dongfang Shuo, in which he quotes a biography
of the figure in question from a well-known literary source and then
appends an account of the current circumstances of his career as an offi-
cial and the names and occupations of the people he encountered at his
post. Although Yan Zhenqing stated in the Magu inscription that he
was personally acquainted with some of the Daoist priests on Mount
Magu, the writing of this and the other stele inscriptions for local sites
seems to have been simply another official duty. The religious establish-
ment on Mount Magu had been patronized by Emperor Xuanzong, and
the cult of Miss Hemp continued to receive imperial attention at least
through the Northern Song dynasty.39 As the emperor’s local represen-
tative, Yan Zhenqing may have been expected to make a tour of inspec-
tion to all local Daoist sites in Fuzhou. Though they seem credulous,
there is nothing zealous about the contents of these stele inscriptions. A
failure to distinguish between the mythical Miss Hemp and the actual
Huang Lingwei is evidence merely of an encyclopedic cast of mind,
typical of the syncretic world of the Tang dynasty.40
Certainly Yan had Daoist friends, such as the renowned Maoshan
master Li Hanguang (683–769), with whom he traveled in 759 and for
whom he wrote an epitaph in 777.41 But no mention is made of adher-
ence to Daoism in any of Yan Zhenqing’s many stele inscriptions for his
ancestors. His nephew and biographer Yin Liang never suggested that
he participated in Daoist activities, nor do we read of it in the anecdotes
written about him by his contemporaries, such as those in Feng Yan’s
Mr. Feng’s Record of Experience.42 Nowhere in his own writings does he
confess a belief in Daoism or describe participation in Daoist activities.
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From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal 95

And yet the year 768, when Yan Zhenqing first arrived in Fuzhou,
was in some respects conducive to thoughts of immortality. In the elev-
enth month, Yan Zhenqing’s younger brother Yunzang died at his post
in Jiangling. Zhenqing was now the only surviving member of his gen-
eration. Furthermore, in 768 he reached the age of sixty sui, completing
the calendrical cycle. Perhaps the local cults of the immortals Miss
Hemp and Miss Flower held a special appeal under the circumstances.
CH6 Page 96 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Buddhist Companions
and Commemoration

Yan Zhenqing’s more mundane activities as prefect of Fuzhou in-

cluded having the embankments repaired for better irrigation. The
people of Fuzhou later erected a shrine in his honor, for which the Song-
dynasty writer Zeng Gong composed his famous essay, “The Record of
the Shrine of Yan, Duke of Lu, at Fuzhou.”1 His replacement as prefect
arrived early in 771, and Yan was free of duties. Sailing across Lake
Poyang and down the Yangzi River, he arrived home in Shangyuan dis-
trict (near modern Nanjing) four months later, where he was reunited
with his large household. His family had been evacuated from Chang’an
during the An Lushan Rebellion to find refuge in this peaceful southern
city, just as Yan Zhenqing’s thirteenth-generation ancestor Yan Han had
done at the fall of the Western Jin dynasty. Late in 771, Yan Zhenqing
made his obeisances at the ancestral tombs in the hills outside the city,
where Yan Han and the members of seven succeeding generations were
buried, and there he erected a stele inscribed with an exhaustive recita-
tive of the achievements of the Yan clan to date.2
Yan Zhenqing remained at home for the better part of a year, until
the following autumn, when he traveled to Luoyang. There he was
informed of his appointment as prefect of Huzhou (Zhejiang). He left
Luoyang to return his mother’s coffin for burial in the ancestral tomb
outside Chang’an, then traveled to Huzhou. Yan’s arrival in Huzhou in
773 was also a homecoming of sorts. As a child, he lived for some years
in Wu district, which lies to the east across the Great Lake from
Huzhou, where Lady Yin had taken her children to live with her father
after the deaths of her husband and brother. At that time Yin Zijing was
serving as district magistrate in Wu.

Cultural Activities in Huzhou: 773–777

As prefect of Huzhou, Yan Zhenqing enjoyed considerable social and
scholarly activity. Only a year after his arrival, in the spring of 774, he
composed an inscription for the site of much of this activity:

96
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Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 97

On the southern slope of Mount Zhu, southwest of the prefectural

seat, there lies Profound Joy Monastery [Miaoxisi]. It was established
by Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty. . . .
In the seventh year of the Great Chronometry era [772], I was ap-
pointed prefect to this region. At that time, Assistant Surveillance
Commissioner and Palace Censor Yuan Gao [b. 727] reached this
prefecture on his tour of inspection, so I met with him on this hill.
Subsequently, I had a pavilion built to the southeast. Because it was
built on a guihai day, the twenty-first, in the tenth month, of which
the first day was a guimao day, during the winter of a guichou year,
Retired Scholar Lu [Yu] named it the Three Gui Pavilion.
To the northwest, in a stand of cassia trees, I created a cassia
canopy. All around for several hundred paces were fragrant groves
and luxuriant trees. There were three types of cassia there, which pro-
duced red, blue, and purple blossoms. Each had a different type of
flower and leaf. Beneath the cassias was a branching path for my lord
Yuan to walk among them. For this reason it was called “The
Censor’s Path.”3

The name of the Three Gui (san gui) Pavilion is a pun twice over,
playing on the three types of cassia (san gui) on Mount Zhu, a term also
used as a metaphor for three high dignitaries. This kind of jest was
typical of Lu Yu (733–804). As a young man he fled the Buddhist mon-
astery where he was raised because the abbot beat him for disobeying
his prohibition against writing. He joined a troupe of actors and wrote
his first work, On Jokes.4 As the leader of the troupe, he was patronized
by local officials, who noticed and encouraged his literary talent. When
he arrived as a refugee in Huzhou during the An Lushan Rebellion, he
went to live at Profound Joy Monastery, where he formed a close bond
with the famous poet and Buddhist monk Jiaoran (ca. 724–ca. 799).
By the time Yan Zhenqing arrived in Huzhou, Lu Yu was already a
national celebrity called the “Genius of Tea” for his book Canon of Tea
(Chajing). Lu Yu had a great range of interests as an author. In addition
to his writings with titles such as Monograph on People and Things of
the North and South and Prognostications and Dreams, he also wrote a
work called Sources Explained, which was probably a dictionary, and
two works on local officials entitled Record of Successive Officials in
Wuxing and Record of Prefects of Huzhou. He was eminently qualified
to collaborate with Yan Zhenqing in his long-standing lexicographical
project.
In the Profound Joy Monastery inscription, Yan Zhenqing gave a
thorough history of his dictionary, which survives today only as recol-
lected fragments.5 As he explains, it was called Sea of Rhymes, Mirror
of Sources (Yunhai jingyuan):

Since the time I served as an editor in the Palace Library [734], I have
presumed to analyze and annotate the Qieyun written by Lu Fayan
CH6 Page 98 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

98 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

and my fifth-generation ancestor Yan Zhitui, using such etymological

works as Shuowen and Cangya.6 [ The words in the Qieyun] were
taken from the classics, histories, philosophers, and collectanea and
are arranged with the two characters [for pronunciation] at the top
and complete phrases [of explanation and quotations] below. I have
expanded and edited it. Thus my work is called Yunhai [Sea of
Rhymes]. And because it illuminates the original roots of the words,
with nothing left unrevealed, my work is further called jingyuan
[Mirror of Sources].
At the end of the Heavenly Treasure era, when I was sent out to
govern Pingyuan, I worked on revising it with some of the local
scholars, including Feng Shao of Bohai, Gao Yun, and his younger
clansman, the present secretarial receptionist to the heir apparent, Gao
Hun. We had put together two hundred chapters, but when An Lushan
rebelled, the work stopped when it was only one-quarter done. When
I served as prefect of Fuzhou, some of the local scholars there, such as
Zuo Fuyuan and Jiang Rubi, helped restore and expand it to five hun-
dred chapters, but it was still quite immature and riddled with prob-
lems, and I had not the leisure to edit it.
In the renzi year of the Great Chronometry era [772], I was ap-
pointed prefect of Huzhou. In leisure from public service, during the
summer [of 773] I met daily with the Buddhist monk Fahai from Jin-
ling; the former palace censor, Li E; Lu Yu; the instructor in the School
for the Sons of the State, Chu Chong, a native of this prefecture; the
case reviewer, Tang Qinghe; the great supplicator, Liu Cha; the vice
magistrate of Changcheng, Pan Shu;7 the district defender, Pei Xun;
the assistant magistrate of Changshu, Xiao Cun;8 the district defender
of Jiaxing, Lu Shixiu; and Yang Suichu, Cui Hong, Yang Deyuan, Hu
Zhong, Tang She of Nanyang, Yan Ji,9 Wei Jie, Zuo Xingzong, and
Yan Ce to discuss the work, at the prefectural school and at the pond
for the release of living creatures. When winter came, we traveled out
to the eastern slope of this hill. Then in the spring of the following
year [774], the work was completed.
At that time, a virtuous monk lived on Mount Zhu whose name
was Jiaoran and who was skilled at literary composition. . . .

The Chan monk Jiaoran was probably the most renowned poet in
the southeast in the years following the rebellion, and when Yan Zhen-
qing arrived in Huzhou, a coterie of scholars and poets gathered around
them.10 Eclectic in their literary and philosophical interests, the mem-
bers with Buddhist backgrounds, such as Jiaoran and Lu Yu, were also
well versed in Lao-Zhuang philosophy and the Confucian Classics,
while those with Confucian educations, such as Yan Zhenqing, were
knowledgeable about Buddhist and Daoist traditions. The cultural
achievements for which this group is known were the compilation of
the Yunhai jingyuan and the composition of linked verse.
In linked verse, a series of lines or couplets on a given topic, each
CH6 Page 99 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 99

composed by a different person, together form a portrait of their sub-

ject. Linked verse was a significant genre in the Six Dynasties period,
but it had fallen out of popularity until revived by Yan Zhenqing and
Jiaoran.11 Perhaps one reason they chose to employ this antique form
was that Jiaoran was a tenth-generation descendant of Xie Lingyun
(385–433), while Yan Zhenqing was a tenth-generation descendant of
Yan Yanzhi (384–456). These two poets were twin stars of the Six
Dynasties period.12 Only a small percentage of these linked verses still
remain, divided between the collected works of Jiaoran and Yan Zhen-
qing. They were done in various lengths of line, ranging from three-
character to seven, and in various humors, from the jocular to the som-
ber. Some are in the old three-character Yuefu form called “Five Mixed
Dishes”:
Yan Zhenqing:
Five mixed dishes: Sweet, salt, sour.
Departs and returns: Raven and hare.
You never regain: Springtimes past.
Jiaoran:
Five mixed dishes: Five colors of thread.
Departs and returns: A round of poems.
You never regain: Happy occasions missed.13
Others are yongwu poems in which a material object is taken as the
subject, as in these five-character couplets on lanterns:
Yan Zhenqing:
Shattering the darkness, their brilliance at first white;
then, floating like clouds, colors convey their clarity.
Jiaoran:
Garlands of flowers hang frozen in the trees;
like torches, they split the courtyard.14
And there are the humorous rounds, condemned by later Confucianists
as too vulgar to have been written by a man so virtuous and upright,
such as the seven-character “Big Talk”:15
Jiaoran:
Loudly I sing on Langfeng, then step across to Yingzhou.
Yan Zhenqing:
Broiled roc and fried leviathan, and still my meal goes on.
Li E:
I travel the four quadrants, up and down, to where nothing lies
beyond.
Zhang Jian:
One sip and suddenly I have drained the ocean wide.16
In 756, before Yan abandoned Pingyuan, he sent his only son, Yan
Po, as a guarantee of good faith to the Pinglu military commissioner,
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100 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

Liu Zhengchen. Liu’s troops did set out for Pingyuan, but they failed to
arrive before the city surrendered. Liu then engaged the rebel Shi Siming
at Youzhou, but he was routed and fled back to Yingzhou (Liaoning)
where he was soon murdered by poison.17 The ten-year-old boy was left
without a protector, and when Yan Zhenqing returned to Emperor
Suzong’s provisional court, Yan Po was awarded posthumous honors
(though in fact he was still alive). But twenty years later, in Huzhou,
Jiaoran wrote the following poem for Yan Zhenqing:
Offering congratulations to My Lord Yan Zhenqing on the return of
his long-lost son from faraway Hebei:
Once you lost a thing of value in the vapors and mists,
now you find in your hand those long ago years.
After so long a separation, how startling to find him grown,
after so many hardships, how joyful to find him whole.
To faith, the minister gave weight,
with fear, the governor felt sympathy.
In the teeming courtyard, you see the tree of jade,
and once again, you possess the connecting branch.18

The Ponds Steles

Another dream realized in Huzhou was Yan Zhenqing’s project of
erecting a stele inscribed with his “Ponds for the Release of Living Crea-
tures Throughout the Subcelestial Realm.” This essay was written to
commemorate Emperor Suzong’s decision to build eighty-one ponds
throughout China to be used for the pious Buddhist practice of releas-
ing captive fish and other aquatic creatures. Although the “Ponds”
essay was written originally in 759, Yan was only able to erect a stele
inscribed with it in Huzhou in 773. The following year, he set up a com-
panion stele next to it that carried three additional inscriptions. On the
obverse was Yan’s request to Emperor Suzong for a heading for the
Ponds stele and the emperor’s reply, both done in 760. On the reverse
was a complete history of the project from 759 to 773.
Yan Zhenqing’s request to the emperor reads as follows:
Your subject has heard that in emperors and kings there is no virtue
greater than assisting living creatures, while the central concern of
ministers of state is to venture to lose themselves in words of praise.
In winter of last year [759], while your subject was serving as gover-
nor of Shengzhou, together with Left Courageous Guard Vice Com-
mandant of the Left Shi Yuancong, Imperial Commissioner Zhang
Tingyu, and others, I received the proclamation of the imperial com-
mand that ponds for the release of living creatures be constructed in
suburban areas near rivers in each of the prefectures and districts in
the subcelestial realm. From Xingdao district in Yangzhou to the Tai-
CH6 Page 101 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 101

ping Bridge over the Qin Huai River near Shengzhou and Jiangning,
there are to be eighty-one in all.
The imperial grace saturates the flora and fauna. The imperial
favor extends even to the multitude of insects. Emanating from your
august heart, they travel throughout the subcelestial realm. In the
entire succession of emperors, such has never been heard of before.
Who does not rejoice at it, even to the peoples on the shores of the sea?
At that time, your subject, in his ungoverned folly, hastily com-
posed a draft of a “Ponds for the Release of Living Creatures Through-
out the Subcelestial Realm Stele Inscription.” Further, he used his offi-
cial salary to select a stone in that prefecture [Shengzhou] and ex-
pended his awkward skills to write it out. Because our desire is to
let the populace of the subcelestial realm know the virtue of Your
Majesty’s love for living things and make your petty officials grasp the
significance of the ancient worthies’ skill at praise, I subsequently
transcribed a copy on silk, which I entrusted to Shi Yuancong to
present to the throne, together with this request to the emperor to
write a heading for it, in order to make it known and imperishable.
As the dots and strokes of my earlier calligraphy [inscribed on the
stele in Shengzhou] were rather too fine, I feared it would not endure,
and so your subject has now respectfully engraved a stone with a
“hollow-thumb” large-script copy, which I submit to the throne in the
company of this memorial.19 Thus does this petty official exhaust his
respectful sincerity in a special plea for Your Sage Grace to deign to
comply with his prior request. Then the subcelestial realm would be
fortunate indeed!
Is this but a whim of your ignorant official? In antiquity, the First
August Emperor of Qin [r. 221–210 b.c.e.] was a cruel and tyrannical
ruler and Li Si [d. 208 b.c.e.] an evil and fawning minister, yet the
bronzes and stones they had engraved have been handed down to later
generations. Emperor Wen of Wei [r. 220–226] was a lord who was
ceded his throne by another clan and Zhong You [151–230] an offi-
cial who was partial to one clique, yet they also set up a stele at Fan-
chang extolling [the emperor’s] virtue. How much worse that Your
Majesty’s towering meritorious achievement should go unrecorded.
Thus your subject presumes to bring shame on himself and respect-
fully risk death in order to make it known. . . .20
In his reply Emperor Suzong assented to Yan Zhenqing’s request:
We extend “Inner Truth” to all living creatures and take their nurture
as our central concern. All that exists between the canopy of heaven
and the carriage of earth, we must raise to the realm of virtue and lon-
gevity.
Cultivate the creatures of the four directions,
in the single pneuma they harmoniously unite.
Establish the ponds by the rivers Jiang and Han,
that fishes and turtles may together requite.
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102 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

Our minister has been careful in the minutest particulars with the
imperial favor, polishing Our Great Plan, and engraving his admira-
ble text in excellent stone. Its style soars and excites, its rhymes ring
like bells. It realizes the “imperishable” of the establishment of wise
words and records the ultimate virtue of the love for living things.
Such a song must become a duet. Since antiquity it has been so, that
the proper sentiments emanate from the center. We commend your
idea, and with that which you have requested We shall comply.21

On the reverse of the companion stele, Yan told of the years inter-
vening between the genesis of the stele project and its realization:

The August Emperor Suzong graciously gave his assent [to the request
that he write a heading] and thus there is this reply. This imperial mis-
sive had already been handed down when, through my carelessness
and clumsiness, I received a reprimand [from Emperor Suzong]. Then
came the first day of the eighth month [of 760] and my dismissal with
an appointment as prefectural aide in Pengzhou.
The present emperor [ Daizong] ascended the throne in summer,
during the fifth month of the inaugural year of the Treasure Response
era [762]. I accepted the post of governor of Lizhou, but Qiang ban-
dits were besieging the city and I could not gain entry. By gracious im-
perial order I returned to the capital. My lord Liu Yan, Duke of Peng-
cheng, present minister and former grand councillor, ceded his post to
me and I became vice minister of revenue in the Department of State
Affairs [twelfth month, 762]. In spring, during the third month of the
second year [763], I was transferred to the Ministry of Personnel. In
the autumn of the inaugural year of the Ample Virtue era [763], dur-
ing the eighth month, I accepted the post of governor of Jiangling,
concurrent with that of censor-in-chief and acting military, surveil-
lance, and supervisory commissioner of Jingnan. I had not departed
when a replacement was found. I was transferred to right assistant
director of the Department of State Affairs. In spring of the next year
[764], during the first month, I was appointed acting minister of
justice and concurrent censor-in-chief, to act as Shuofang Mobile
Brigade pacification commissioner for six prefectures, including Jin
and Fen, to proclaim the imperial will to Grand Preceptor and Secre-
tariat Director Pugu Huaien [who had rebelled against the throne]. I
did not depart, but subsequently fulfilled my duties in the central
government.
In the spring of the second year of the Eternal Majesty era [766],
during the second month, I was dismissed to the post of administra-
tive aide of Xiazhou. Not twenty days later, I was further degraded to
[a similar post in] Jizhou. In summer of the third year of the Great
Chronometry era [ 768], during the fifth month, I came to be ap-
pointed governor of Fuzhou. In the intercalary third month of the
sixth year [771], my replacement arrived. In autumn, during the
eighth month, I arrived in Shangyuan [modern Nanjing]. And so for
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Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 103

sixteen years I suffered for my carelessness and stupidity, while I accu-

mulated dismissals and disgrace.
As for the selection of a stele stone, until now I had only been en-
trusted with places in the foothills and had not had the leisure to erect
one on a lofty site. In autumn of the seventh year [772], during the
ninth month, I returned to the Eastern Capital, where my fortunes were
raised when I was appointed governor of Huzhou. In the spring of the
next year [773], during the first month, I arrived at my post.
To the east of the prefectural seat are the two streams Tiao and
Zha. South of these streams is one of the Ponds for the Release of Liv-
ing Creatures established by our Treasure Response Prime Sage Cul-
tured and Martial August Emperor [Daizong]. To the west of the pre-
fectural seat is White Crane Mountain. As the mountain has plenty of
excellent stone, I selected some and had it quarried. I ordered my clerks
to have it slabbed and polished and my servants to have it engraved.
It was set up to the east of Camel Bridge in Huzhou. Now, through
this manifestation of my sincerity in commemorating the deceased,
will the virtue of the late emperor [Suzong] in assisting living crea-
tures be displayed.
Since the heading had not been set and no one could remember it,
some of my retainers suggested that the characters in the reply the late
emperor wrote granting permission be edited and then engraved. I
complied with this. Restraining my desire to stop with that, since that
would not show sufficient respect, I then had this record inscribed on
the reverse of the stele. How like was [the late emperor] to the glori-
ous brilliance of the heavenly bodies in their complete course of the
universe and the luminous radiance of the constellations in their re-
splendency equal to the sun and moon!22

Why did Yan Zhenqing involve himself in this imperial Buddhist

project? The original inscription for the ponds that Yan Zhenqing wrote
in 759 is curious in that although its purpose is manifestly Buddhist, its
language is mainly Confucian.23 After opening with a salutation to
Emperor Suzong, it then describes how the two capitals were heroically
regained from the rebels and how Suzong filially welcomed Retired
Emperor Xuanzong back from Shu. It notes that even with all his
worries, the emperor still had concern left for all other living creatures.
Thus in 759 he charged Shi Yuancong and Zhang Tingyu with writing
an edict declaring that eighty-one ponds would be built throughout the
realm. Next Yan Zhenqing quotes from the Confucian Classics, Yijing
and Shujing, on the subject of the humaneness of the ruler extending to
all forms of life. In the emperor’s reply, these quotations are echoed in
the reference to “Inner Truth” [hexagram 61 in the Yijing] and in the
quotation “fishes and turtles may together requite” from the Shujing.)
Yan Zhenqing then cites some examples of earlier benevolent rulers,
none of them Buddhist, and congratulates the emperor on his attempt
CH6 Page 104 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

104 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

to emulate the past. In short, except for one or two Buddhist terms, the
inscription is thoroughly Confucian.
One theory on Yan’s motivation was formed by Su Shi:

In Huzhou stands the Ponds for the Release of Living Creatures Stele,
by Yan, Duke of Lu. It records the memorial that he offered Suzong,
in which he wrote: “Three audiences [with his parents] every day will
greatly illuminate the filial piety of the Son of Heaven. Ask after [your
parents’] comfort and watch over their diet, and make no change in
the ritual of the family members.” The Duke of Lu knew that Suzong
was conscience-stricken over this [taking his father’s throne] and there-
fore used this opportunity to remonstrate with him. Who could believe
that the Duke of Lu had any real interest in releasing living creatures!24

Su Shi believed that Yan Zhenqing had seized on this project as an

opportunity to state his views on Suzong’s treatment of his father.
Suzong had taken the throne when Xuanzong fled Chang’an at the
beginning of the An Lushan Rebellion, but he failed to return it to his
father when the old man returned two years later. In 760, Yan’s feelings
about Suzong’s behavior were shown when Suzong allowed the eunuch
Li Fuguo to move the retired emperor unceremoniously out of his
former living quarters. Yan led the court officials in memorializing the
emperor in protest of this breach of filial piety. Thus Su Shi argued that
Confucian morality was the real issue in the Ponds inscription, not Bud-
dhist piety.
Su Shi’s theory may explain the impetus behind the original Ponds
inscription, but not the zeal with which Yan Zhenqing completed the
project. Why would Yan set up a stele engraved with an admonitory
memorial when the emperor to whom it was addressed had been dead
for eleven years? Why set up a companion stele engraved with the
correspondence between himself and the emperor and a record of all
the hardships he had endured in the years since Suzong had dismissed
him? Their parting seems to have been acrimonious. Yan wrote in his
Ponds record: “I received a reprimand from the emperor.” This repri-
mand may have been over the very subject that Su Shi identified—that
is, Yan’s objection to Suzong’s treatment of his father. That Yan was
banished to Pengzhou immediately after he led the court officials in
protest over the improper relocation of the retired emperor suggests this
was so. Emperor Suzong died in 762 while Yan was still in Pengzhou, so
there was no reconciliation. Therefore, I suggest that only with the
passing of the years was Yan able to distance himself from those events
and finally undertake his own monument to the late emperor.
The other motivation for the Ponds stele and its companion may
have been to offer an expression of gratitude to the current emperor,
Daizong, for having brought Yan Zhenqing back out of the wilderness
CH6 Page 105 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 105

of exile to his childhood home in the south. Perhaps Yan Zhenqing

wished to thank the emperor for his personal renascence in Huzhou, for
the good company of Jiaoran and Lu Yu, for the return of his son, for
the success of his literary projects. Both Emperors Suzong and Daizong
were in thrall to the Tantric Buddhist master Amoghavajra (705–774),
and both sponsored a considerable number of Buddhist projects and
observances. No doubt it seemed appropriate to Yan Zhenqing to repay
the two emperors in a coin they would value. The pond for the release
of living creatures in Huzhou was a public construction, conceived by
Emperor Suzong and realized by Emperor Daizong, that allowed Yan
Zhenqing the opportunity to honor both emperors by publishing a
record of his dedication to their project.

Yan Zhenqing in Song-Dynasty Compendia

Though the stone steles disappeared long ago, Yan Zhenqing’s
request to the emperor and the record on the reverse, both from the
companion stele, may still be seen (Figure 30). They are preserved in the
Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium, a set of stone engrav-
ings of some thirty-eight calligraphic works. The Compendium was com-
piled by the scholar-official Liu Yuangang in 1215—the first engraved
compendium devoted to the calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing. Though its
stone tablets are no longer extant, a unique surviving Song-dynasty ink
rubbing of the Compendium is now held by the Zhejiang Provincial
Museum in Hangzhou.25
To understand the place of the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness
Compendium in the history of engraved calligraphic compendia, we
should look at their development from their beginnings in the tenth cen-
tury. Engraved collections of calligraphy are known as fatie, or “model
letters.” The choice of works to be included in these publications is well
worth examining, since fatie served simultaneously as copybooks,
records of important collections, and illustrated histories of calligraphy.
Because of these functions, fatie became propaganda tools in the contest
between imperial and literati choices of calligraphic models. The inclu-
sion or exclusion of Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphy in imperial and scholar-
sponsored fatie of the Song dynasty was one of the most obvious points
of contention. Although works by Yan Zhenqing were kept in the
palace collection, none of his calligraphy appeared in any imperially
sponsored fatie until the relatively late date of 1185.
In 992, Song Taizong commissioned the Chunhua ge tie (Model
Letters in the Imperial Archives in the Chunhua Era [990–995]), the
first of the Song fatie, which has been the most famous and influential
ever since.26 The court calligrapher Wang Zhu was instructed to select
the finest calligraphies from the imperial storehouses, which were then
CH6 Page 106 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Figure 30. Yan Zhenqing,

Request to the Emperor to
Write a Heading for the
Ponds for the Release of
Living Creatures Through-
out the Subcelestial Realm
Stele, detail, 760, ink rub-
bing, from the Hall of
Loyalty and Righteousness
Compendium. Zhejiang Pro-
vincial Museum.

Figure 31. Yan Zhenqing, Letter for Cai Mingyuan, detail, ca. 759, ink
rubbing, from the Jiang tie. Collection of Liaoning Provincial Museum,
Shenyang.
CH6 Page 107 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 107

engraved into wooden plates, in a collection of ten volumes. The first

five volumes represented the calligraphy of nearly one hundred emper-
ors, officials, and scholars from legendary antiquity through the Tang
dynasty, while the last five volumes were devoted exclusively to the
calligraphy of Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi. No works by Yan Zhen-
qing were included. Nor was any of his calligraphy chosen for the
supplement, known as the Yuanyou bige xutie (Supplementary Model
Letters in the Imperial Archives in the Yuanyou Era [1086–1094]), a
further selection of calligraphy from the imperial collection that was
engraved between 1090 and 1101.27 Only in 1185 was calligraphy by
Yan Zhenqing included in an imperially sponsored engraved compen-
dium, the Chunxi bige xutie (Supplementary Model Letters in the Impe-
rial Archives in the Chunxi Era [1174–1190]). This was a ten-volume
supplement to the Chunxi bige tie (Model Letters in the Imperial
Archives in the Chunxi Era), which was itself a reengraving of the orig-
inal Chunhua ge tie.28 Two running-script works—his Draft Eulogy for
Uncle Yuansun and Letter for Liu Taichong—appear in the third
volume, which was dedicated to the calligraphy of “seven worthies” of
the Tang dynasty.
By contrast, the engraved compendia sponsored privately by scholars
and officials from the 1040s onward contained works by Yan Zhen-
qing. Pan Shidan’s twenty-volume Jiang tie was created between 1049
and 1064 in Jiangzhou (Shanxi). It was essentially a reengraving of the
Chunhua ge tie with minor additions and deletions.29 The Jiang tie added
four letters by Yan Zhenqing: the Letter for Cai Mingyuan (Figure 31),
the Zouyou Letter, the Cold Food Letter (Figure 32), and the Fengci
Letter. The ten-volume Tan tie was created by the Buddhist monk-calli-
grapher Xibai in Tanzhou (Changsha, Hunan) in 1042–1043. It con-
tains letters by Jin and Tang masters, including two works by Yan
Zhenqing, the Draft Eulogy for Nephew Jiming and Dried Deer Meat
Letter, though it should be noted that they are rather unfaithful
copies.30 Not surprisingly, works by Yan Zhenqing also appeared in the
privately sponsored fatie that rejected the preponderance of classical-
tradition letters in the Chunhua ge tie in search of a more balanced and
complete history of calligraphy. The Ru tie, compiled by Wang Cai as
governor of Ruzhou (Henan) in 1109, reproduced some letters from the
Chunhua ge tie but also included a large amount of epigraphic material
(such as inscriptions on stone steles and bronze vessels) and writing by
northerners and other calligraphers not represented there. It included
one letter by Yan Zhenqing, the previously unrecorded Jiang Huai
Letter (or Yihang Letter).
The Northern Song engraved compendia were all surveys, however,
in which Yan was simply one among dozens of calligraphers. The first
monographic compendia, those that published the work of a single
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108 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

calligrapher only, appeared in the Southern Song. A compendium dedi-

cated solely to the calligraphy of Mi Fu was commissioned by Emperor
Gaozong in 1141. In 1186, a compendium of Su Shi’s writings was
published by a private scholar in Chengdu (Sichuan). In the late twelfth
century, monographic compendia were also published of writings by
Ouyang Xiu, Cai Xiang, and Huang Tingjian. The decision to publicize
Ouyang’s unbeautiful handwriting demonstrates that the motivation

Figure 32. Yan Zhenqing, Cold Food Letter, detail, undated, ink
rubbing, from the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compen-
dium. Zhejiang Provincial Museum.
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Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 109

behind the production of these compendia was as much political as

aesthetic. With individual compendia devoted to each of the Confucian
reformers, it seems almost logical that the next calligrapher to be
canonized in a monographic compendium would have been their Tang-
dynasty touchstone, Yan Zhenqing.
Liu Yuangang, the compiler of the Hall of Loyalty and Righteous-
ness Compendium, was a grandson of the grand councillor Liu Zheng
(1129–1206), who served Emperors Xiaozong and Guangzong during
the years 1189–1194 and was a patron of the controversial Neo-Con-
fucian philosopher Zhu Xi. Liu Yuangang passed the Erudite Literatus
examination in 1205 and subsequently served in the capital in a number
of prestigious posts: palace library proofreader, drafter for the heir ap-
parent, imperial diarist, and auxiliary Hanlin academician.31 Around
1215, he was appointed to serve as governor in Wenzhou (Zhejiang),
where he had a momentous personal encounter with the descendants of
Yan Zhenqing. In a postface to the edition of Yan’s collected works that
he also sponsored, Liu Yuangang wrote:
I was born three hundred and ninety-four years after the death of my
lord [Yan Zhenqing]. Another thirty-five years after that, I was ap-
pointed governor of Yongjia [ Wenzhou]. I searched out his descen-
dants, who had moved their residence here during the Five Dynasties
period. Six of his descendants are on record as having served as offi-
cials between the Huangyou and Shaoxing eras of this dynasty [1049–
1162], showing how long the influence of his loyalty and righteous-
ness has continued to filter down.
Liu then determined to have Yan’s collected works reprinted:
I asked after my lord’s writings so that I could publish them, in order
to encourage scholars and commoners, but his family did not own a
copy. [ Elsewhere] I was able to obtain the twelve-chapter edition with
the preface by Liu Yuanfu [Chang], which is the one compiled by Song
Cidao [Minqiu] during the Jiayou era. His engraved writings had
been abridged [through ink rubbings cut and pasted into albums?] and
the characters [on the stone] had become illegible, so that their mean-
ings became degraded and false.32
Liu Chang and Song Minqiu (1019–1079), the son of Song Shou, were
both friends of Ouyang Xiu and served in high posts at court. Ouyang
Xiu shared an interest in epigraphy with Liu Chang and the study of
Tang history with Song Minqiu.33 During the Jiayou era (1056–1063),
Song Minqiu compiled the first collection of the writings of Yan Zhen-
qing, the preface for which was written by Liu Chang.34 Liu Yuangang
compiled a new edition of Yan’s collected works in sixteen chapters,
called Wenzhong ji after Yan’s posthumous epithet, Wenzhong (“Cul-
tured and Loyal”). Next he edited a chronology of Yan’s life based on
CH6 Page 110 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

110 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

his biographies in the dynastic histories and the copious biographical

material in Yan’s stele inscriptions for his various relatives.35 Lastly, Liu
produced the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium.

The Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium

The contents of the Compendium, to put it kindly, are miscellaneous.
Volumes 1 and 2 most resemble a typical model-letters compendium.
They contain twenty-five letters and other brief writings, including the
draft of the Letter on the Controversy over Seating Protocol. I suspect
that all these letters had already been engraved long ago and that Liu
used ink rubbings as the basis for his compendium. We know, for exam-
ple, that An Shiwen had already had the Letter on the Controversy over
Seating Protocol engraved in stone around 1086, and he owned other
letters by Yan Zhenqing that we may assume he also had engraved.36 In
the twelfth century, Ye Mengde testified to seeing engraved copies of the
Dried Deer Meat Letter, the Request for Rice Letter, the Cold Food
Letter, the Letter for Cai Mingyuan, the Letter to Administrator Lu Ba,
and the Letter for Liu Taichong, all of which are found in the Compen-
dium.37 In addition, other letters in the Compendium are found in
earlier fatie. The Fengci Letter was included in the mid-eleventh-century
Jiang tie, for example, and the Yihang Letter appeared first in the Ru tie
of 1109.
Volume 3 consists of three problematic pieces: the Poem for General
Pei, the Engraved Poem of the Daoist Qingyuan, and a unique version
of the Record of the Altar of the Immortal of Mount Magu. The anom-
alous stylistic qualities of the Poem for General Pei were discussed in
Chapter 4. The Engraved Poem of the Daoist Qingyuan purports to be
a copy by Yan Zhenqing of a poem written by a certain Daoist Qing-
yuan and his friend Shen Gongzi at Tiger Hill Monastery in Wu. Ap-
pended is a poem in response by Yan himself, signed as minister of jus-
tice in the year 770. Unhappily for the authenticity of this piece, Yan
did not serve as minister of justice in 770. Moreover, as the Qing-
dynasty scholar Huang Benji has noted, none of the Tang taboo charac-
ters are altered in this piece as they are routinely modified in Yan’s gen-
uine writings.38 The version of the Record of the Altar of the Immortal
of Mount Magu that Liu included in Volume 3 of the Compendium is
known as the “medium-character version” because its characters are
between one and two centimeters in height. This is to distinguish it
from the “large-character version,” the original stele on Mount Magu,
which had characters of about five centimeters in height, and the
“small-character version,” in characters of less than one centimeter, on
a stele that also stands in Nancheng county.39 The medium-character
version is found only in the Compendium. It is not recorded in any of
the standard epigraphic sources and is generally dismissed as a fake.
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Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 111

Volume 4 consists of the Record on the Reverse of the Encomium on

a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo of 754. Volumes 5 and 6 consist of the
Guo Family Temple Stele, which was set up in Chang’an in 764. The
remaining material is not clearly divided into volumes. It consists of the
Request to the Emperor to Write a Heading for the Ponds for the Re-
lease of Living Creatures Throughout the Subcelestial Realm Stele, in
Yan Zhenqing’s hand, and the Imperial Response, which is in a large,
florid running script that is probably Emperor Suzong’s hand. Both
pieces were written in 760 and were engraved on the same stele in
Huzhou.
Following this are several edicts granting posthumous offices to
Yan’s grandfather Yan Zhaofu, his uncle Yan Yuansun, his father Yan
Weizhen, and his mother Lady Yin, as well as two announcements of
office for Yan Zhenqing himself, one granting him the position of
minister of justice in 777 and the other granting him the post of junior
preceptor to the heir apparent in 780. It was a common practice for
officials in the Tang dynasty to copy out their official notices of ap-
pointment.40 These copies were rarely signed, however, since they were
not the original compositions of the copyist. In traditional times, critics
often assumed that the person who received the announcement of
appointment was also the calligrapher, but such is not always necessarily
or demonstrably the case.
Liu Yuangang made a number of interesting comments regarding
these edicts in a colophon following them that was also engraved in the
Compendium. Liu did not claim the edicts were all written by Yan
Zhenqing himself. He honestly states that they were traditionally said
to be either Yan’s own handwriting or that of his son Jun, his brother
Yunzang’s son Yu, or someone else in that generation.41 Almost as if to
apologize for their lack of attractiveness, Liu remarks that the edicts are
valuable for their inspirational quality and should not be discussed
solely in terms of the quality of the calligraphy. Lastly, he asserts that
although stone engravings of the edicts existed already, he was able to
bring together the ink originals to have them engraved for the Compen-
dium. This is a difficult statement for us to prove by measuring the
edicts in the Compendium against the originals. Only one of the edicts
is extant in an ink-written form. It is the one granting Yan Zhenqing the
post of junior preceptor to the heir apparent, known to posterity as the
Self-Written Announcement of Office (Zishu gaoshen) (Figure 33), now
in the collection of the Shodò hakubutsukan, Tokyo.
As is true of many other works in the Compendium, none of these
edicts was recorded in the Northern Song dynasty. Ouyang Xiu once
saw a group of announcements of office that were displayed in the Sec-
retariat by members of the Yan family, but they were entirely different
documents.42 The Self-Written Announcement of Office, however, does
bear a colophon written by Ouyang’s close friend Cai Xiang in 1055
CH6 Page 112 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

112 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

(Figure 42). This colophon was also engraved into the Compendium by
Liu Yuangang. That presents no particular problem. The real difficulty
lies in the conflict between Liu’s statement that he borrowed the ink
originals to copy for the Compendium and the later documentation on
the ink-written version in the Shodò hakubutsukan. It includes a colo-

Figure 33. Yan Zhenqing (attrib.), Self-Written An-

nouncement of Office, detail, 780, ink on paper.
Shodò hakubutsukan, Tokyo.
CH6 Page 113 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 113

phon of authentication for the imperial collection by the well-known

connoisseur Mi Youren (1074–1151) and a label said to have been
written by Emperor Lizong (r. 1225–1265).43 Thus the Shodò hakubu-
tsukan’s Announcement would appear to have been in the imperial
collection throughout the Southern Song dynasty. If the work in the
Shodò hakubutsukan is the same one that Liu Yuangang copied into his
Compendium, how could he have obtained it in Wenzhou in 1215? A
comparison between the Shodò hakubutsukan version and the version
in the Compendium (Figure 34) shows that the calligraphy in the Shodò
hakubutsukan version is quite weak, as I discuss further in Chapter 7.44
Moreover, the tentativeness and lack of skill are the same in the ink-
written version of the Announcement and the colophon by Cai Xiang
appended to it. I suspect they are both by the same copyist. As in the
case of the ink-written version of the Poem for General Pei, it may have
been produced by copying an ink rubbing from the Compendium. I
believe that Liu Yuangang probably did obtain the original of the Self-
Written Announcement of Office for the Compendium in 1215. All in
all, though, the Compendium is a very mixed collection. It contains
both early fakes and originals that are the source of today’s fakes.
Nevertheless, it is the Compendium as a whole that is of the greatest
significance.
I have argued elsewhere for the importance of examining the con-
tents of Song-dynasty fatie for their political significance.45 It may be
shown that the course of their development, in terms of content and
sponsorship, reveals how the compendia embodied the political ten-
sions between the scholar-official class and the throne during the Song.
As we have seen, the earliest compendia display the universal accep-
tance of the classical tradition of Six Dynasties calligraphy championed
by the throne in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. In the mid-
eleventh century begins the promotion of epigraphy and other nonclas-
sical calligraphy by scholar-officials. By the late twelfth century we see
the endorsement of the idea of cultural figures, especially Confucian
personalities, as important to the history of calligraphy by both impe-
rial and private sponsors.
In the case of the Compendium, compiled in 1215, what was its
political significance? Did it lie simply in the nature of the project itself
—that is, canonizing Yan Zhenqing in a monographic compendium?
Were there compelling reasons for Liu’s choice of pieces, or did he
merely collect and reengrave what was available to him in Wenzhou?
Let us summarize the contents of the Compendium. It contains two vol-
umes of personal letters and drafts in running script, one volume of pre-
viously unrecorded poems and inscriptions, three regular-script stele
inscriptions that predate 770, and six edicts from Yan’s official career.
What do these thirty-eight very disparate works have in common? Only
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114 Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

four were recorded by Ouyang Xiu (the Request for Rice Letter, Cold
Food Letter, Letter for Cai Mingyuan, and Encomium on a Portrait of
Dongfang Shuo). As we shall see in the following chapter, the majority
of pieces by Yan Zhenqing cited in Ouyang’s Collected Records of
Antiquity were regular-script steles dated between 770 and 780. The
calligraphic manner displayed in these stele inscriptions was canonized

Figure 34. Yan Zhenqing (attrib.), Self-Written Announcement of

Office, detail, 780, ink rubbing, from the Hall of Loyalty and Righ-
teousness Compendium. Zhejiang Provincial Museum.
CH6 Page 115 Monday, September 24, 2001 3:13 PM

Buddhist Companions and Commemoration 115

as the “Yan style.” My sense is that Liu’s purpose in creating the Hall
of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium was twofold. He wished
not only to mark Yan Zhenqing’s importance in the history of calligra-
phy with a monographic compendium, but also to fill in the lacunae in
Ouyang Xiu’s influential record. By publishing the letters-tradition part
of Yan Zhenqing’s oeuvre as a complement to the stele-tradition part
published by Ouyang Xiu, Liu Yuangang would make the full range of
Yan Zhenqing’s genius known.
CH7 Page 116 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

The Late Style

of Yan Zhenqing

Perhaps Yan Zhenqing would have been content to spin out the rest
of his days in Huzhou constructing pavilions and composing poetry, but
early in 777 his nemesis at court was removed from the scene. Yuan
Zai, who had kept him in the provinces for eleven years, was executed
in the third month of 777, and Yang Yan was sent into exile. In the
fourth month, Yang Wan (d. 777) was elevated to the rank of grand
councillor, and the following month he recommended Yan Zhenqing
for a position at court.1 The two even collaborated on a stele inscription
for the temple of the renowned general and statesman Li Baoyu (704–
777) in Chang’an, which Yang Wan wrote and Yan transcribed.2 That
autumn Yan was appointed minister of justice, and at the end of the
year he presented his dictionary Yunhai jingyuan, in 360 chapters, to
the court.

High Honors from the Throne

When he reached the age of seventy sui in 778, Yan petitioned the
throne to allow him to retire. Instead he was transferred to serve as
minister of personnel. Then, early in the summer of 779, Emperor
Daizong passed away and his son ascended the throne. It so happened
the new emperor’s mother was a daughter of the Shen clan of Wuxing.
During the Six Dynasties period, the Shen and Yan clans had inter-
married.3 As a result, Yan Zhenqing’s sons were honored by Emperor
Dezong (r. 780–805) as relatives. Yan Jun, who was serving in the estab-
lishment of the heir apparent, was given the title of Baron of Yishui
(Shandong), and Yan Shuo, a proofreader in the Palace Library, was
made Baron of Xintai (Shandong).
At this time Yan Zhenqing was appointed commissioner for rites and
ceremonies, a special post in which his long-standing and well-known
expertise in the ritual of the dynastic ancestral cult could be consulted

116
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The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 117

by the emperor. Yan Zhenqing’s biographer-nephew Yin Liang described

this post:

The present emperor [Dezong], on the occasion of his imperial mourn-

ing, appointed my lord commissioner for rites and ceremonies. Since
the time of Emperor Xuanzong, this post has noted omissions and re-
missions in ceremonial propriety. My lord was well versed in the deci-
sions of antiquity and modern times and did not involve himself in
court intrigue. He simply researched the canons of ritual and followed
the straight path. The present emperor entrusted him with [the rituals
for] the tomb of the late emperor, and when it was completed he was
granted the prestige title of grand master for splendid happiness.4

Of course, Yan Zhenqing’s strict views on state ritual had indeed

involved him in court intrigue—as when he criticized Yuan Zai for fail-
ure to arrange for sacrifices at the imperial tombs before the court
returned to Chang’an after the Tibetan scare of 763. Yan’s zeal for recti-
tude continued unabated in this new post. David McMullen has
described him as “particularly significant in the post-rebellion history
of the dynastic ancestral cult.”5 In addition to the Yuanling Rituals,
which he wrote to guide the rites performed at the tomb of Emperor
Daizong, Yan Zhenqing also researched and wrote memorials on the
great controversies then facing the practice of state ritual.6 One of these
concerned the proper rearrangement of the ancestors’ spirit tablets in
the imperial temple. The arguments in Yan’s memorial were accepted.
Another of his opinions focused on the controversy surrounding the ad-
visability of maintaining the imperial ancestral temple in Luoyang, the
Eastern Capital. The temple in Luoyang had been abandoned after the
An Lushan Rebellion, but some of the spirit tablets had been saved. Yan
presented a memorial requesting that they be replaced. Emperor Dezong
did not rule against him, but simply left it open for discussion.7 Other
ritual issues Yan addressed involved the complexity of the posthumous
names for emperors and the abolition of the taboo on marriage in ziwu
and maoyou years.8
In similar fashion, Yan Zhenqing soon after undertook to restore his
own family temple and erect a grand stele monument to his own long-
deceased father, Yan Weizhen. In the early autumn of 780, he composed
and transcribed the Temple Stele Inscription for Lord Yan, the Late
Tang Grand Master for Thorough Counsel, Companion to the Prince
of Xue, Pillar of State, Posthumously Entitled Vice Director of the
Palace Library, Chancellor of the Directorate of Education, and Junior
Guardian of the Heir Apparent. Although this stele inscription was
dedicated to Yan Weizhen, whose exalted posthumous titles were
gained for him by his well-placed sons, it is a genealogical record of the
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118 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

achievements of the entire Yan clan and is known familiarly as the Yan
Family Temple Stele.

Development of the “Yan Style”

As a work of art, the Yan Family Temple Stele constitutes the apogee
of Yan Zhenqing’s regular-script calligraphy. As his latest surviving
monumental stele inscription, it represents the furthest development of
his style, and because it was intended as a permanent monument to his
father and his clan, it was executed at his highest level of craftsmanship.
The characters are solid and weighty, yet expansive and even; the effect
is as much sculptural as calligraphic (Figure 35). The manner shown in
the Yan Family Temple Stele is what came to be known and imitated as
the “Yan style.” There are two points I wish to pursue with regard to
the “Yan style.” The first is technical: how did Yan himself, in terms of
the development of his calligraphic technique, arrive at this manner?
The second concerns the politics of calligraphic style: why was his “old-
age style” regular script promoted as the “Yan style”?
The periodization of the stylistic development of Yan’s regular script
has been the subject of a number of studies by modern Chinese art his-
torians in the last twenty years.9 The one observation they all make in
common concerns the transition from his early use of the “square,”
slanted-brush, clerical-script brush method to the “round,” centered-
brush, seal-script brush method as his distinctive style evolved. We have
seen the sharp-edged stroke endings and highly modulated strokes of
the “square” brush method in his Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele of 752.
This early manner accorded with the kind of calligraphy that was
expected of officials at the court of Emperor Xuanzong: tight composi-
tions and attractive exposed brush-tip work, yet substantial and weighty,
like the style of the emperor himself.10
Yan Zhenqing’s transition away from the “square” brush method
and the tight compositions of his “metropolitan” calligraphy coincided
with his departure from Chang’an, the destruction of the court of
Emperor Xuanzong soon after, and the subsequent decline in imperial
patronage and control in the arts. As early as the Encomium on a Por-
trait of Dongfang Shuo of 754, Yan Zhenqing’s characters began to
expand internally and the strokes became less modulated, while the
entry point of the strokes began to disappear, disguised by the use of the
cang feng, or “concealed brush-tip” technique. The decreasing modula-
tion in the brush stroke and the increasing use of the “concealed brush
tip” indicate the greater use of the centered brush, the brush method
characteristic of seal script.
Seal script enjoyed a renaissance during the Tang dynasty. Its greatest
practitioner was Li Yangbing, a calligrapher with whom Yan Zhenqing
CH7 Page 119 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 119

worked on several inscriptions.11 Yan himself was competent at seal

script, as the heading to his Record on the Reverse of the Encomium on
a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo Stele shows.12 Not only did he change his
brush method to that used in seal script, but the compositions of his
characters became increasingly taller, more evenly distributed, and
more spacious inside, in imitation of seal-script character forms. This
transition period extends, from the evidence of extant works, from the
Encomium inscription of 754 and the similar Inscribed Record of a
Visit to the Shrine of Shaohao of 758 (Figure 36) through the inscrip-
tions of the early and mid-760s, such as the Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu
of 762 (Figure 16) and the Guo Family Temple Stele of 764 (Figure 37).
The fully realized “Yan style” is seen in the works of Yan’s final decade

Figure 35. (left) Yan Zhenqing, Yan

Family Temple Stele, detail, 780, ink rub-
bing. Shaanxi Provincial Museum. From
Shoseki meihin sòkan, vol. 90.
Figure 36. (above) Yan Zhenqing, In-
scribed Record of a Visit to the Shrine of
Shaohao, detail, 758, ink rubbing. Shaanxi
Provincial Museum. From Zhongguo
shufa: Yan Zhenqing, vol. 1, p. 159.
CH7 Page 120 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

120 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

as a calligrapher—from the Immortal of Mount Magu stele of 771 (Fig-

ure 28), through the Stele for Li Hanguang of 777 (Figure 38), to the
Yan Family Temple Stele of 780 (Figure 35).
What the Song literati found so admirable about the “Yan style”
was, of course, the contrast it provided to the style of Wang Xizhi. The
compositional structure of Wang-style characters is described as “left
tight, right loose,” meaning that the shapes of the characters tend to
cluster on the left side and fan out to the right. By comparison, Yan
Zhenqing’s characters are even and rectangular. There is no sense of
movement in one direction over another; rather, a weighty stability is
evident, as in seal script. Seal script has traditionally been characterized
as “level, upright, round, and straight,” and these are the qualities that
Yan Zhenqing applied to his regular script. “Level” refers to the heng
(horizontal) strokes, which are virtually even from top to bottom and
side to side; “upright,” the right angles at which the intersecting strokes
meet; “round,” the brushwork, with its blunt stroke ends and unmodu-
lated strokes; and “straight,” the absolute verticality of the shu strokes.
Yan Zhenqing’s application of seal-script technique to the writing of
regular script is what the Song literati saw as his revolutionary contri-
bution to the history of calligraphy.

Promotion of the “Yan Style”

The revival of Yan Zhenqing’s style among the Song scholar-officials
appears to have begun in the 1030s in the circle of Han Qi. According
to Mi Fu, Han’s predecessor Song Shou had his own style, which be-
came fashionable, whereas “Han Qi loved the calligraphy of Yan Zhen-
qing.”13 Han’s practice of Yan’s style is evident in his calligraphy, and
though he was no artist he could convey some of the four-square quali-
ties of Yan’s style in his personal handwriting, as in his Two-Night-Stay
Letter (Figure 39). Fan Zhongyan, another of the Qingli reformers,
coined the famous phrase “sinews of Yan, bones of Liu [Gongquan]” to
identify the stylistic references in the calligraphy of his friend, the poet
Shi Manqing (994–1041).14 Though the reformers practiced Yan’s style,
these men were neither great artists nor critics. They copied his style,
but they did not transform it. They were connoisseurs of calligraphy, but
so far as we know they did not collect it or write about it systematically.
The member of their circle who did collect calligraphy and write crit-
icism systematically was Ouyang Xiu. He was a zealous propagandist
for the regular-script calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing’s final decade which
he promoted as the “Yan style.” Ouyang used his collecting and criti-
cism in the Collected Records of Antiquity to focus his contemporaries’
feelings of dissatisfaction with the court-sponsored Wang style and their
admiration for the “Yan style” into a competition between the two as
CH7 Page 121 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

Figure 37. Yan Zhenqing, Guo

Family Temple Stele Inscription,
detail, 764, ink rubbing.
Shaanxi Provincial Museum.
From Shodò zenshû, 3rd ed.,
vol. 10, pl. 35.

Figure 38. Yan Zhenqing, Stele for Li

Xuanjing [Li Hanguang], detail, 777, ink Figure 39. Han Qi, Two-Night-Stay Letter, detail,
rubbing. From Zhongguo shufa: Yan Zhen- undated, ink on paper. Collection unknown. From
qing, vol. 4, p. 170. Zhongguo lidai fashu moji daguan, vol. 5, p. 28.
CH7 Page 122 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

122 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

representatives of an imperial style and a scholar style. He seems to

have taken his cue from the caustic appraisal of the Wang style by his
much-beloved model in literature, Han Yu, who wrote that “[Wang]
Xizhi’s vulgar calligraphy took advantage of its seductive beauty.”15
Apparently Han Yu did not record his opinion of the calligraphy of Yan
Zhenqing, but he was connected to some of Yan’s followers and descen-
dants. As a young man, Han Yu knew Xiao Cun, the son of Xiao Ying-
shi, who worked with Yan Zhenqing on his dictionary project in
Huzhou, and in later life Han was a friend of Wei Dan, one of Yan’s
grandsons.16 In literature, Han was a great admirer of the writings of
Yan Zhenqing’s close friend Dugu Ji (725–777). Furthermore, Meng
Jiao (751–814), Han’s partner in writing linked verse, had been an asso-
ciate of Jiaoran, Yan Zhenqing’s partner in linked verse.17 To Ouyang
Xiu, whose youthful discovery of the literary works of Han Yu shaped
his life as a man of letters, Han’s disapproval of the style of Wang Xizhi
and his association with the circle of Yan Zhenqing may have suggested
the rough outline for the conflict between imperial and scholar-spon-
sored styles that Ouyang Xiu fostered.

Collecting the “Yan Style”

Ouyang Xiu’s instrument of propaganda for the “Yan style” was his
collection of ink rubbings of stone inscriptions by Yan Zhenqing and
the colophons he wrote for those ink rubbings, which were published in
Ouyang’s Collected Records of Antiquity. Which works did Ouyang
Xiu collect and discuss? Chapter 7 of Collected Records of Antiquity
lists the following.

Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo and Record on the

Reverse of the Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang Shuo Stele (Figure
4). These are the two sides of the Encomium stele of 754. Xiahou
Zhan’s essay is found on the obverse. On the reverse is Yan’s record of
the outing to the temple of Dongfang Shuo with An Lushan’s spies. The
stele that stands in Lingxian (Shandong) today is said to have been reen-
graved during the Jin dynasty.

Inscription at Quiet Dwelling Monastery. Written to record a visit to

the Quiet Dwelling Monastery (Jingjusi) in Jizhou with friends in 766,
it is apparently no longer extant. The text is preserved in Yan’s collected
writings.18

Record of the Altar of the Immortal of Mount Magu (Figure 28).

Ouyang collected an ink rubbing of the original stele of 771, called
the large-character version, and one of the small-character version. The
original large-character stele no longer exists. The stele now in Nan-
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The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 123

cheng (Jiangxi) was reengraved during the Ming dynasty by Prince Yi.
The small-character version is in Nancheng also. The medium-character
version does not appear in the documentary record until Liu Yuan-
gang’s Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium of 1215.

Paean to the Resurgence of the Great Tang Dynasty (Figure 14).

Yuan Jie’s tribute to Emperor Suzong was written in 761 and inscribed
on the cliff face at Wu Creek, near Qiyang (Hunan), by Yan in 771.

Lexicon for Gaining Employment (Ganlu zishu). This manual of

orthography was written by Zhenqing’s uncle Yan Yuansun to be studied
in preparation for the government examinations.19 In 771, as prefect of
Huzhou, Yan transcribed it onto a stele that was set up in the courtyard
of the prefectural office for the edification of local scholars. Ouyang
Xiu collected two versions: the original by Yan Zhenqing and the re-
engraving ordered by Yang Hangong, prefect of Huzhou, at the request
of Yan’s nephew Yan Yu in 839. These are no longer extant. The few
ink rubbings known today are from the “Shu version,” a reengraving of
1142.20

Stele for Ouyang Wei. In 775, Yan composed and transcribed this
regular-script stele, which was set up in Zhengxian (Henan).21

Spirit Way Stele for Du Ji. Yan wrote this epitaph for the Spirit Road
stele at the Chang’an tomb of his friend and son-in-law Du Ji upon his
death in 777.22

Record of the Archery Hall. This stele, dated to 777, was written in
Huzhou. It was already shattered in Ouyang Xiu’s day, and the text
does not survive in Yan’s collected works.

Stele for Zhang Jingyin.23 Ouyang assigned the date of 779 to this
stele, although it was already ruined and he admits very little of it was
legible. According to him, the stele was destroyed deliberately:

The stele for Zhang Jingyin was written and transcribed by Yan Zhen-
qing. It stood in the middle of peasant fields in Linying district in
Xuzhou. Early in the Qingli era, those who knew about this stele
came one by one to make copies from it. The local people grew con-
cerned that they would trample the crops in the field, so they smashed
up the stele. When I was in Chuyang, I heard about it and sent some-
one to search it out. I was able to obtain the smashed remnants, of
which there were seven pieces. The text could not be put back in
order. Only his name was left. It said: “My lord’s taboo name was
Jingyin, and he was a man of Nanyang. His grandfather was Cheng
CH7 Page 124 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

124 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

and his father Lian.” The strokes of the characters are particularly
unusual. What a terrible pity!24

Spirit Way Stele for Yan Qinli (Figure 40). This stele for Yan Zhen-
qing’s great-grandfather disappeared at the end of the Northern Song
and was excavated in Xi’an in 1922.25 It is now in the third hall of the
Forest of Steles, Shaanxi Provincial Museum, Xi’an. As a consequence

Figure 40. Yan Zhenqing, Spirit Way Stele for Yan Qinli, detail,
undated, ink rubbing. Shaanxi Provincial Museum. From Sho-
seki meihin sòkan, vol. 6.
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The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 125

of being spared eight hundred years of abrasion from the taking of ink
rubbings, it is in an excellent state of preservation. Although the stele
bears no date, Ouyang Xiu arbitrarily recorded it as a work of 779.
Based on internal evidence, Huang Benji argued it was written in 759.26

Yan Family Temple Stele (Figure 35). As described earlier, this stele
was produced in 780 to honor Yan’s long-deceased father, Yan Wei-
zhen. It is his latest surviving inscription, and there is a seal-script head-
ing by Li Yangbing. Standing approximately three meters high on a tor-
toise base, the stele is now prominently placed in the center of the front
row in the second stele hall at the Forest of Steles.

Stele for Yan Yunnan. The stele inscription of 762 for Zhenqing’s
older brother Yunnan is apparently no longer extant.27

Huzhou Stone Record. This list of tombs, temples, residences, moun-

tains, bodies of water, and other interesting sights in the districts of
Huzhou prefecture is now lost. It was probably written during Yan’s
tenure as prefect between 773 and 777.28

Letter for Cai Mingyuan (Figure 31). This running-script letter of rec-
ommendation describes the dedicated service of the clerk Cai Ming-
yuan, who worked for Yan when he was prefect of Raozhou. It prob-
ably was written in 759. First engraved in the mid-eleventh century, in
the Jiang tie, it has been included in later compendia as well. No ink-
written original exists, but a poor tracing copy once in the collection of
Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) has been reproduced.29

Cold Food Letter (Figure 32). In this brief undated letter in running
script, Yan reports on the chilly weather at the time of the Cold Food
Festival in early spring. In the eleventh century there was an ink-written
version and various engraved versions.30

Twenty-Two Character Letter. This may be an alternate title for the

Writing a Letter Letter (Figure 23), which is twenty-two characters long
exclusive of the signature. It is extant only in the Hall of Loyalty and
Righteousness Compendium.

Request for Rice Letter. This brief running-script letter was writ-
ten to ask for financial assistance from one Grand Guardian Li, who
was probably Li Guangjin, younger brother of Li Guangbi, the great
loyalist general of the An Lushan Rebellion. It was probably written
around 765.31
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126 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

Epitaph for Yuan Cishan (Figure 41). Cishan is the style name of
Yuan Jie, author of the “Paean to the Resurgence of the Great Tang Dy-
nasty.” The stele is in Lushan district (Henan). As the inscription is par-
tially effaced, the date is either 772 or 775. In his colophon Ouyang
says nothing about calligraphic style. Instead he discusses the history of
literature, declaring Yuan Jie a member of the ancient-style prose lineage:

Figure 41. Yan Zhenqing, Epitaph for Yuan Cishan, detail, 772,
ink rubbing. Lushanxian, Henan. From Tang Yan Zhenqing shu
Yuan Cishan mu bei (Kaifeng: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1979),
p. 15.
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The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 127

The epitaph for Yuan Cishan was written and transcribed by Yan
Zhenqing. During the Tang the height of government was reached
with Emperor Taizong, perhaps equaling the Three Dynasties of
antiquity, yet only in literature were they unable to break with the
degeneracy of the Chen [557–589] and Sui dynasties. Only a long
time later did Han [Yu] and Liu [Zongyuan (773–819)] and their fol-
lowers emerge. It is difficult to change common practices, and chang-
ing the style of literary writing is also difficult. During the Opened
Prime and Heavenly Treasure eras, Cishan was the only one to prac-
tice ancient-style prose. The force of his brush was heroic and his
expression extraordinary. He was no less than a follower of Han Yu.
He may be called a scholar of brave independence.32

Defining the “Yan Style”

With the exception of the four letters, the works Ouyang collected are
large public monuments in regular script. Of these fourteen regular-
script stele inscriptions, eleven date from the decade of 770–780. Thus
when Ouyang Xiu extolled the calligraphic style of Yan Zhenqing, the
style in question was that of his engraved regular script of the 770s.
This focus on his “old-age style” was furthered by Ouyang’s habit of
assigning the date of 779 to works on which the date could no longer be
read. Through sheer weight of numbers, then, Ouyang defined the “Yan
style” as the regular script of Yan’s last decade.
The content of these inscriptions consists mostly of information of
historical interest. This was, in fact, the aspect of Yan Zhenqing’s writ-
ing that Ouyang Xiu dealt with principally in his colophons. In his
introduction to the Collected Records of Antiquity, he said of his pur-
pose in collecting ink rubbings that “I have recorded those that may
correct the omissions and errors in the histories and biographies.”33 On
ten of the eighteen works listed, Ouyang Xiu discussed only historical
information. Of the remainder, on five of them he considered Yan’s cal-
ligraphy from the connoisseur’s point of view; on the other four he took
the moralist’s point of view, expressing his admiration for Yan’s regular-
script style as a manifestation of his personality.
These panegyrics for Yan Zhenqing as a paradigm of Confucian
morality find their equal only in Ouyang’s praises for Yuan Jie and Han
Yu. He promoted Yan as the Confucian standard in calligraphy, just as
he championed Yuan Jie and Han Yu in literature:
I consider my lord Yan’s calligraphy to be like the loyal minister,
exemplary officer, or the gentleman of morals in its uprightness, grav-
ity, and reverence. When a person first sees it, he is in awe of it. And it
follows that the longer he looks at it, the more admirable it becomes.34

The virtue of my lord’s loyalty and righteousness was bright as the

sun and moon and steadfast as metal and stone. Thus was he able to
illumine the generations that followed.35
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128 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

This man’s loyalty and righteousness emanated from his heaven-sent

nature. Thus his brush strokes are firm, strong, and individual and do
not follow in earlier footsteps. Outstanding, unusual, and imposing,
they resemble his personality.36
Only one flaw marked his hero, and that was Yan’s obvious tolerance
for Buddhism and Daoism:
The purity of my lord Yan’s loyalty and righteousness shone like the
sun and the moon. His personality was dignified and stern, firm and
strong, just like the strokes of his brush. And yet he could not avoid
being affected by the theories of immortality. Buddhism and Daoism
are truly the people’s sorrow!37
The very nature of Ouyang Xiu’s collection tended to favor the
works of Yan Zhenqing over Wang Xizhi. Ouyang’s real interest lay in
epigraphy as a source for history, and when he discussed calligraphy in
his colophons, he was talking largely about works engraved in stone.
The great majority of the thousand pieces listed in the Collected Records
of Antiquity are ink rubbings from engraved stone monuments and
bronzes. With the exception of three copies of Wang Xizhi’s Orchid
Pavilion Preface, an ink rubbing of Wang’s regular-script transcription
of the essay “On General Yue Yi,” and what are probably some of the
Jin-dynasty volumes of the Chunhua ge tie, his collection lacked any
works of the classical tradition to discuss.38 By collecting works with
historical and epigraphic interest, he restricted himself to a certain
range in which the large number of extant engraved stone steles by Yan
Zhenqing would be virtually certain to predominate. On the foundation
of his scholarly preference for epigraphy and the moralistic premise that
models should be chosen by reputation, he built the “Yan style” as an
aesthetic standard. Yet the simple fact of Yan’s oeuvre and reputation
does not explain why Ouyang so vigorously promoted Yan Zhenqing as
the patriarch of Confucian calligraphy. Yan’s calligraphic style and
the symbolic value of his reputation were both flexible implements:
Ouyang used Yan’s style as a sword in his attack on court styles in the
arts; he used Yan’s reputation as a shield in his defense against charges
of disloyalty.
In the arts, Ouyang’s Confucian activism led him to oppose court-
sponsored styles because of their focus on style and effect over expres-
sive and didactic purpose. In poetry, he opposed the Xikun court style;
in prose, parallel prose and the imperial academy style; in painting, pro-
fessional and court painting; and in calligraphy, the court-sponsored
Wang style.39 In their place he advocated informal poetry, the ancient-
style prose of Han Yu, literati amateur painting, and the calligraphic
style of Yan Zhenqing. All were promoted for their capacity to permit
personal expression, not as vehicles for displays of skill.
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The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 129

In politics, however, there is no such thing as “loyal opposition”

under an absolute monarchy. Confucian tradition allows for a single
individual to take his stand against improper government action, make
his remonstrance to the throne, and stand willing to suffer banishment
or execution for it. It specifically forbids the formation of cliques or
factions to further the aims of groups opposed to certain government
policies.40 The minor reform of 1043–1044 was undone by the charge
of factionalism. Indeed, Ouyang’s essay “On Factions” is his famous,
unsuccessful defense of the formation of parties by “loyal and righteous
gentlemen,” which he quickly repudiated.41 His unhappy experiences
with the problem of factionalism may help to explain his promotion of
Yan Zhenqing—the celebrated paragon of “loyalty and righteousness”
who was universally praised as a loyalist martyr, a man with a reputa-
tion for having stood as an individual against certain notorious grand
councillors but never against the emperor or government policies.
Perhaps one reason Ouyang Xiu hoisted the standard of Yan Zhenqing
was to fight the charge of factionalism.

Cai Xiang’s Interpretation of the “Yan Style”

When Emperor Dezong ascended the throne in 779, he installed as
his most powerful grand councillor Yang Yan, the archenemy of Liu
Yan, whose clique Yan Zhenqing had been associated with for nearly
twenty years. In 780, Yang Yan destroyed Liu Yan, driving him into
exile and death. To deal with the venerable Yan Zhenqing, he decided
merely to promote him out of the way into a nonpolicymaking position.
Yang had Yan Zhenqing transferred from minister of personnel to the
more prestigious but less powerful position of junior preceptor to the
heir apparent. The announcement of appointment was composed by
Secretariat Drafter Yu Shao (712–792):

By Imperial Command: As the heir apparent is the root of the sub-

celestial realm, so his preceptor is the teacher of the greatly good
[future emperor]. To make this root firm, we must first establish the
teacher. Had we not sought out loyal worthies, how should we judge
and proclaim this teacher to be the Grand Master for Splendid Happi-
ness, Acting Minister of Personnel, Commissioner for Rites and Cere-
monies, Supreme Pillar of State, and Dynasty-Founding Duke of Lu
Commandery, Yan Zhenqing?
His establishment of virtue and pursuit of its practice put him in
the first of the four classes, and his admirable literary works and great
learning make him kindred to all the philosophers. His faithful admo-
nitions exhaust a minister’s virtue and his loyal warnings preserve the
official’s custom. He has appeared at court for service both domestic
and foreign and has borne the burden of service to the national altars
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130 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

of soil and grain. In repose, he is distinguished by his upright recti-

tude. In action, he has transcended the joys and sorrows of life and
death. As Lord Shan made appointments, so he purifies the ranks of
the officials. As Shusun determined ritual, so he illuminates Our
Royal Measure.42 Only when the emperor is greatly good will the
whole empire in fact be upright. To understand “what comes of devo-
tion to antiquity,” think on this man.43
Furthermore, the dowager empress venerates and honors our matri-
lineal connections. We regard his previous meritorious achievements
of long standing as the kindness of a worthy person of near relation,
and we invoke his protection in order to fledge our wings fully. This
imperial order of the Unique Sovereign states further that we permit
the appointment as junior preceptor to the heir apparent, with the
retention of service as commissioner for rites and ceremonies and pres-
tige titles, merit titles, and titles of nobility as before.44

When Yan Zhenqing received the announcement of his appointment,

he copied it over in his own hand. This is the work, discussed in Chap-
ter 6, known as the Self-Written Announcement of Office, which is
extant in ink-rubbing form in the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness
Compendium and as a copy in ink on paper in the collection of the
Shodò hakubutsukan in Tokyo (Figure 33). I call it a copy because the
strokes of the calligraphy are faltering and weak and there is an overall
lack of strength and balance in the characters—flaws shared by the
edict attributed to Yan Zhenqing and the colophon attributed to Cai
Xiang. Moreover, I do not think this is a copy of an original by Yan
Zhenqing. Certain elements in particular do not accord with Yan’s
method of writing. In comparing it to the Yan Family Temple Stele of
the same year, two examples stand out. First: in characters that have a
bei element, in the Announcement the right-hand dot at the bottom
often covers the bottom of the right-hand shu (vertical) stroke (see Fig-
ure 33, 1/5, 2/5). In the Yan Family Temple Stele, the right-hand dot in
this type of element does not cover the bottom of the right-hand shu
stroke (see Figure 35, 1/4, 2/2). Second: the lower left-hand dot at the
bottom of every character “qi” in the Announcement is a ti stroke,
which moves from lower left to upper right (see Figure 33, 2/7). But the
lower left-hand dot in all the “qi” characters in the Yan Family Temple
Stele is a pie stroke, which moves from upper right to lower left (see
Figure 35, 3/1). These differences do not represent the kind of variety
seen when a calligrapher writes under separate circumstances; they are
errors in reproduction that reveal another hand. As Liu Yuangang
remarked in his colophon to the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness
Compendium, some of the edicts were said to have been written over by
Yan’s sons and nephews. The Self-Written Announcement is probably
not by Yan Zhenqing, although it may represent a Tang-dynasty artifact.
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The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 131

No matter what we may think of this piece, it was considered a gen-

uine work of Yan Zhenqing during the Song dynasty. The brief formal
colophon of 1055 by Cai Xiang, which is appended to the Announce-
ment (Figure 42), reads as follows:
This announcement from the Duke of Lu’s final years reveals a loyalty
and worthiness such as we have never seen. Cai Xiang of Puyang

Figure 42. Cai Xiang, Colophon to Yan Zhenqing’s Self-Written An-

nouncement of Office, detail, 1055, ink on paper. Shodò hakubutsukan,
Tokyo.
CH7 Page 132 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

132 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

fasted and purified himself in order to examine it, this twenty-third

day of the tenth month of the second year of the Zhihe era.

At a glance one can see that Cai Xiang’s colophon was done after the
style of Yan Zhenqing. It has the seal-script qualities admired by the
Song literati: the round, centered-brush brushwork, the open, balanced
character forms, and the stable vertical axis; and it has the faults of the
“Yan style,” proudly displayed, such as “silkworm heads and swallow
tails”—the knobby beginnings of strokes and the indented ends of
strokes. The formal devices are all evident, but an extraordinary change
in spirit has taken place. Where Yan Zhenqing’s characters are weighty,
four-square, and monumental, Cai Xiang’s are graceful, lively, and
decorous. No heavy, blunt shu strokes are seen and no insistence on
absolutely level heng strokes.
Much the same transformation is seen in Cai Xiang’s large regular-
script engraved inscriptions in the style of Yan Zhenqing. Comparing
Cai Xiang’s Record of the Wan’an Bridge of 1060 (Figure 43) to Yan
Zhenqing’s Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu (Figure 16), we see that Cai
Xiang’s technical skill in imitating the brushwork and character forms
of Yan Zhenqing’s cliff inscription is quite good, yet a kind of neatening
and quickening has also taken place. The lively slanting horizontal
strokes seen in the colophon to the Announcement are employed here
also, and the awkward and grave demeanor of the model has been given
a lighter, more graceful look. This transformation of the “Yan style” is
undoubtedly due to Cai’s early and continuous study of the style of
Wang Xizhi.
As a young man Cai Xiang studied calligraphy with Zhou Yue (fl. ca.
1023–1048), the head of the Calligraphy School of the Directorate of
Education. Although, to my knowledge, no works by Zhou Yue are
extant, undoubtedly he practiced the court-sponsored Wang style.45 In
his running-script and cursive letters, Cai Xiang employed the exposed-
tip brushwork, delicate ligatures, and “left tight, right loose” compo-
sitional structure of the Wangs (Figure 44). Cai Xiang and Emperor
Renzong exchanged examples of their handwriting, and the emperor
requested him to transcribe epitaph stele inscriptions for members of
the imperial family. The emperor’s acceptance of his style also indicates
that Cai Xiang’s calligraphy was based on the court-sponsored style.
Cai himself testified to his lifelong interest in the Wang style—espe-
cially to his interest in copies of the Orchid Pavilion Preface, the pre-
mier work of Wang Xizhi. He saw the copy in the imperial archives,
another copy attributed to Chu Suiliang owned by the eminent collector
Su Shunyuan (1006–1054), and a third in the possession of his teacher
Zhou Yue. He was also familiar with several engraved versions.46 In
1063, he examined and signed the scroll containing Tang copies of three
CH7 Page 133 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

Figure 43. Cai Xiang,

Record of the Wan’an
Bridge, detail, 1060,
ink rubbing. Jinjiang,
Fujian. From Song Cai
Xiang shu Luoyang
qiao ji (Fuzhou: Fujian
renmin chubanshe,
1982), p. 20.

Figure 44. Cai Xiang, Letter to Yanyou, detail, 1064, ink on paper. Col-
lection of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China.
CH7 Page 134 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

134 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

letters by Wang Xizhi called Ping’an, Heru, and Fengju (National

Palace Museum, Taipei). This scroll belonged to the imperial son-in-law
Li Wei, who evidently invited a party of the Qingli reformers and their
followers to view it. The scroll was signed by sixteen men, including
Ouyang Xiu, Han Qi, Liu Chang, and Song Minqiu.47
Cai Xiang met Ouyang Xiu in 1030, when the eighteen-year-old prod-
igy from Fujian came to the capital and passed the examinations in the
same class as Ouyang. Cai Xiang was an important member of Ouyang
Xiu and Mei Yaochen’s circle of poets and antiquarians, and he spent
more than thirty years discussing and studying the works in Ouyang’s
collection of ink rubbings, including the many pieces by Yan Zhenqing.
We cannot say that Cai Xiang would never have practiced the style
of Yan Zhenqing had he not been an intimate of Ouyang Xiu. But his
extant comments about Yan sound as if they could have come from
Ouyang. Cai Xiang promoted Yan Zhenqing as a moral exemplar in the
Confucian fashion, as well, advocating his calligraphy on the basis of
the correspondence of personality and handwriting:
Yan, Duke of Lu, had natural ability and was a loyal and filial man.
People greatly love his calligraphy, for is not the calligraphy the
expression of the man?48

It can scarcely be a coincidence that Cai Xiang’s rendition of Yan Zhen-

qing was limited to that aspect of it represented in Ouyang Xiu’s collec-
tion—that is, the monumental regular script of Yan Zhenqing’s last
decade.
Cai Xiang was the one artist among Ouyang’s contemporaries cap-
able of a creative transformation of the style of Yan Zhenqing. This
transformation was a combination of the styles of Wang Xizhi and Yan
Zhenqing, in which he draped the upright frame of the Tang loyalist in
the elegant robes of the Eastern Jin aristocrat. By offering the possibility
of interpretation of Yan’s style, he was as responsible as Ouyang for
making the study of the “Yan style” part of the standard curriculum of
future generations of scholars. Where Ouyang promoted Yan Zhenqing
in his calligraphy collection and the accompanying colophons, Cai
Xiang was the one who studied and copied from that collection, using
his considerable artistic ability and his status as a favorite calligrapher
of Emperor Renzong to make the style of Yan Zhenqing a workable
tool in the Song context. Without him, Su Shi would not have created
his Record of Enjoying Rich Harvests Pavilion or Copy of the Letter on
the Controversy over Seating Protocol.

Critical Influence
The attitudes expressed by Ouyang Xiu concerning Yan Zhenqing
were well known in his day and quite influential on the succeeding gen-
CH7 Page 135 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 135

eration of critics. Han Yu’s judgment on Wang Xizhi was familiar to

them, as well, and they used the term “zi mei,” “seductive beauty,” as a
metonym for the Wang style. It could be used neutrally—as Huang
Tingjian used it to describe the result of Su Shi’s study of the Orchid
Pavilion Preface—or it could be used pejoratively as Zhu Changwen
did. Zhu Changwen was a friend and contemporary of Su Shi who
passed the Presented Scholar examination as a teenager but was
prevented from holding office due to a birth defect.49 Living in his
hometown of Suzhou, he wrote works of history, including a history of
calligraphy that began with the artists of the mid-Tang, where Zhang
Huaiguan’s (fl. ca. 714–760) Calligraphy Judgments (Shu duan) had left
off. In his Sequel to Calligraphy Judgments (Xu Shu duan) of 1074,
Zhu Changwen wrote:
Some say that the calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing is quite lacking in
“seductive beauty” and that it seems to overexpose its sinews and
bones, so how can it surpass that of Yu Shinan and Chu Suiliang or
match that of Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi? I answer that it is not
that Yan Zhenqing was unable to be seductive, but that a sense of
shame kept him from it. Tuizhi [Han Yu] once said: “[ Wang] Xizhi’s
vulgar calligraphy took advantage of its seductive beauty,” which he
considered its flaw. Seeking to accord with popular custom was not
Yan Zhenqing’s ambition.50

The idea of Yan Zhenqing’s final decade as the ultimate expression

of his style was also advocated by Zhu Changwen:
The Qianfusi Stele [Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele] that has been handed
down to today, which dates from when Yan Zhenqing was a young
vice director in the Ministry of War [752], has a vigorous strength
and an elegant maturity, comparable to the old-age style of Ouyang
Xun, Yu Shinan, Xu Hao, and Shen Chuanshi, but the Duke of Lu’s
calligraphic works following the Paean to the Resurgence [771] are
very different from his earlier ones, for would not the increase in his
years and the loftiness of his study refine his calligraphy to its
essence?51

In Zhu Changwen’s discussion of individual works by Yan Zhenqing,

they all date from his last decade:
In those who have skill in calligraphy, it will reflect the affairs to
which they respond and the inspirations they encounter, which can
then be perceived by looking at their calligraphy. Therefore, by looking
at the Paean to the Resurgence [771] with its vast and imposing ex-
pansiveness, we can picture the fullness of his merit and virtue; by
looking at the Family Temple Stele [780], with its grave and reverent
sincerity, we can see his respect for the legacy of his clan; by looking
at the Record of the Altar of the Immortal [771], with its refined and
clever excellence, we can imagine the marvels of his will and spirit;
CH7 Page 136 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

136 The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

and by looking at the Epitaph for Yuan Cishan [772], with its honest
and magnanimous generosity, we can see the purity of his conduct as
an official.52

Now that we are familiar with the view of Yan Zhenqing put for-
ward by the reform officials and their friends, we should look at the
response by the throne. Although no works by Yan were included in
any imperial engraved calligraphy compendia until 1185, twenty-eight
pieces of his calligraphy were held in the palace collection at the end of
the Northern Song. These works were not ink rubbings from regular-
script steles of Yan’s last decade, such as Ouyang Xiu and Zhu Chang-
wen promoted, but ink-written letters, poems, drafts, and announce-
ments of office. Around 1120, the Calligraphy Catalog of the Xuanhe
Era was compiled. The entry on Yan Zhenqing reads as follows:

Yan Zhenqing, whose style name was Qingchen [Incorrupt Official],

was a fifth-generation descendant of [Yan] Shigu and a man of Langye.
In his career as an official, he reached grand preceptor to the heir
apparent, and he was enfeoffed as Duke of Lu Commandery. Early on
he passed the Presented Scholar examination, then was selected for
other special examinations, and as a censor was sent out to Hexi-
Longyou. The Wuyuan area was experiencing a great drought, but
when he settled the case of someone who had been wrongly jailed,
rain commenced to fall, until the entire prefecture was soaked, and so
the people called it “the censor’s rain.” While he was governing Ping-
yuan, twenty-three commanderies of Hedong-Shuofang [sic] were
sacked by the rebels, and Pingyuan alone was prepared. When his
memorial arrived, Emperor Minghuang exclaimed over it, seeing
what kind of man he was. Later he was harmed by evil elements, and
Lu Qi particularly disliked him. When Li Xilie sacked Ruzhou, Lu Qi
was determined to send Zhenqing to proclaim the imperial order to
surrender. Though all the officials commented on how lamentable it
was, Zhenqing had to go. When he saw Xilie, he understood that he
could not be instructed, so he cursed him and died.
As his loyalty was bright as day and his ability the loftiest in the
realm, so the essential spirit revealed in the manifestations of his
brush and ink is independent yet comprehensive. His large seal script,
small seal script, bafen script, clerical script, and so on all are formed
by a single rule. To call this the “Greater Odes” of calligraphy would
not be inappropriate! A critic [Zhu Changwen] said of his calligra-
phy: “Dots like falling stones, strokes like summer clouds, hooked
verticals like bent metal, hooked horizontals as if shot from a cross-
bow.” These were his cardinal principles. As for their myriad trans-
formations, each has its own manner, such as the vast and imposing
Paean to the Resurgence, the grave and reverent Family Temple Stele,
the refined and clever Record of the Altar of the Immortal, and the
magnanimous generosity of the Epitaph for Yuan Cishan, and all the
CH7 Page 137 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 137

others are different, too. The Qianfosi Stele [sic] written in his youth
was already comparable to the old-age style of Ouyang Xun, Yu Shi-
nan, Xu Hao, and Shen Chuanshi, while the works following the Re-
surgence are very different from the earlier ones—and what was gained
was due to his increasing age.
Ouyang Xiu obtained [an ink rubbing of] the broken stele [for Yan
Yunnan] and wrote a colophon for it, which said: “Like a loyal minis-
ter, exemplary officer, or a gentleman of morals, its uprightness, grav-
ity, and reverence inspire awe yet are admirable. Though this [ink
rubbing] is not whole, I could not bear to throw it away.”53 This is
how high his fame and popularity were. Later vulgar followers sought
only to imitate his little idiosyncrasies, and of them it was said, “they
only obtained the silkworm heads and swallow tails.” Having failed
to understand the marvels of [writing with a seal-script method] “like
an awl drawing in sand,” what their minds comprehend and their
natures grasp is not worth discussing. Yan once wrote “The Twelve
Concepts of Brush Method,” which provides all the instructions of his
teacher [Zhang Xu]. Hence his regular script is truly good enough to
hand down to posterity.
The imperial archives contain at present twenty-eight pieces:
Regular script: Imperial Order on Wayside Banners; Announce-
ment Granting Posthumous Honors to Yan Yunnan’s Father Weizhen;
Announcement Granting Posthumous Honors to Yan Yunnan’s Mother
Lady Shang [sic]; Poems Written at Magistrate Pan’s Bamboo Hill
Library; Announcement of Office for Zhu Juchuan; Shuzhuo Letter.
Running script: Preceding Letter on the Seating Controversy; Suc-
ceeding Letter on the Seating Controversy; Sending Off a Manjusri
Stele Text Letter; Bow to My Wife Letter; Letter to Grand Guardian
Li Guangyan [sic]; Letter of Recommendation for Cai Mingyuan of
Poyang; Letter of Recommendation for Liu Taichong; Imperial Com-
missioner Liu Letter; Kaifu Letter; Luhou Letter; Yaotai Letter; Large
Seal and Small Seal Script Letter; Midsummer Letter; Huzhou Letter;
Sending Off Writing Letter; Request for Rice Letter; Request for Dried
Meat Letter; Fine Writing Letter; Sick Horse Letter; Letter of Recom-
mendation for Xin Huang; Eulogy for Uncle Yan Yuansun; Eulogy
for Nephew Jiming.54

Two important observations may be drawn here. The first is that this
entry on Yan Zhenqing in the imperial Calligraphy Catalog of the
Xuanhe Era is an amalgam of the reformers’ opinions. The first two-
thirds of the entry is largely a paraphrase of Zhu Changwen’s entry
in his Sequel to Calligraphy Judgments. The last third quotes one of
Ouyang Xiu’s colophons in which he promoted Yan’s calligraphy on the
basis of his character. The only dissonant note is the remark that Yan’s
followers “only obtained the silkworm heads and swallow tails.” This
remark seems to echo Mi Fu’s opinion that “none of Yan’s authentic
CH7 Page 138 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

Figure 45. Yan Zhenqing, Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter, ca. 775, ink on
paper. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of
China.

Figure 47. Yan Zhenqing (trad. attrib.), Poems

Written at Magistrate Pan’s Bamboo Hill Library,
detail, undated, ink on paper. Beijing Palace
Figure 46. Yan Zhenqing (trad. attrib.), Hu- Museum.
zhou Letter, detail, undated, ink on paper. Bei-
jing Palace Museum.
CH7 Page 139 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:55 AM

The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing 139

works have strokes with silkworm heads and swallow tails” and that
his follower Liu Gongquan “was the progenitor of later ugly and weird
writing.”55 This criticism is very tame, however, compared to Mi Fu’s
general dismissal of Yan’s regular script for being mannered and unnat-
ural.56 Anything that might connect Yan to imperial traditions is also
omitted. No mention is made of any relationship to Wang Xizhi, single-
stroke cursive script, or Daoism. In short, there is no sign of a com-
peting imperial position on Yan Zhenqing in his entry in the imperial
catalog.
The second thing to note, from the list of works, is how few pieces
collected by the throne have survived. Only four out of twenty-eight are
extant in ink-written form. The Imperial Commissioner Liu Letter
(Figure 45) and Draft Eulogy for Nephew Jiming (Figure 12) are in the
National Palace Museum, Taipei. The Huzhou Letter (Figure 46) and
the Poems Written at Magistrate Pan’s Bamboo Hill Library (Figure 47)
are in the Beijing Palace Museum. The first two are generally consid-
ered authentic; the latter two are not. The other nineteen works that
survive are found only in ink-rubbing form, and that is due largely to
the efforts of scholar-officials such as An Shiwen and Liu Yuangang.
Compare this to the fact that eight of the fourteen regular-script works
collected by Ouyang Xiu have survived in the same form to the present
day, and all are authentic. The visual record of the throne’s idea of Yan
Zhenqing’s style has mostly disappeared, while Ouyang’s has endured.
The entry in the Calligraphy Catalog of the Xuanhe Era indicates
how the throne conformed to the Qingli reformers’ valuation of Yan
Zhenqing over the course of the twelfth century. At the beginning of the
Northern Song, Yan was officially ignored in the imperial compendium
Chunhua ge tie. Then in the 1030s and 1040s, the reformers and their
friends began to study his style and to collect and publish his works.
Soon the imperial archives contained letters and drafts previously
owned by An Shiwen in the 1080s. In 1120 Yan was described in the
reformers’ words in the catalog of the imperial collection, and in 1185
he was represented for the first time in an imperial engraved calligraphy
compendium. After the fall of the Northern Song, his ink-written letters
continued to disappear, but his regular-script stele inscriptions endured.
By the end of the Southern Song, one view of Yan Zhenqing prevailed.
The visual and critical record is dominated by the image of the upright
Confucian martyr who wrote an upright regular script. This image is
the one that has come down to us.
CH8 Page 140 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:56 AM

Confucian
Martyrdom

Early in 781, Censor-in-Chief Lu Qi (died ca. 785) was elevated to

serve as a grand councillor. Like so many before him, Lu Qi had no tol-
erance for the outspokenness of Yan Zhenqing, and so he had Yan pro-
moted to grand preceptor to the heir apparent but dismissed from his
post as commissioner for rites and ceremonies. Though this was seem-
ingly a routine maneuver, it was particularly villainous coming from Lu
Qi, for he owed Yan Zhenqing an unusual consideration. One of the
severed heads of the chief officials of Luoyang that Duan Ziguang had
dragged through the gates of Pingyuan twenty-five years earlier had
belonged to Lu Qi’s father, and it was Yan Zhenqing who had buried
him and performed the ritual mourning. When Yan heard that Lu Qi
was also considering sending him out to a military post, he went to see
Lu at the Secretariat and gently rebuked him:

I have been hated by small men because of their pettiness. I have fled
into exile more than once. Now I am emaciated and aged. Fortu-
nately, I have you to protect me. When the head of your father, the
former vice censor-in-chief, was sent to me in Pingyuan, I dared not
wipe the bloodstains from his face with my robe, but instead I licked
them off with my tongue. Can you not bear to tolerate me?1

In the first month of 783, Li Xilie, the military commissioner of

Huaixi, revolted against the Tang and sacked the city of Ruzhou. Lu Qi
immediately recommended that Yan Zhenqing be sent out to induce Li
Xilie to surrender. The court was aghast, but none of the officials’
memorials could persuade the emperor to refuse Lu Qi’s plan. And so
Yan Zhenqing was issued a team of four horses from the government
courier station, and he set off for Luoyang. From there he traveled a
short distance south to the rebel camp at Xuzhou. Immediately Yan
proceeded to read Li Xilie the imperial instructions to surrender, but he
was rushed by the rebel troops before he could finish. Li prevented his
men from killing Yan, and for a time treated him as a guest, all the

140
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Confucian Martyrdom 141

while sending memorials filled with false information to the throne,

forged in Yan Zhenqing’s name.
Li Xilie apparently enjoyed looking on Yan as a cultured ornament
to his fraudulent court, and he ordered him to attend a number of his
official banquets. At one of these, in Yan’s presence, Li was asked by
another of the rebel leaders why he did not set up his own dynasty and
reign title and employ the venerated grand preceptor as his own grand
councillor. Yan Zhenqing replied for him:

What grand councillor would this be! Have you gentlemen never heard
of Yan Gaoqing? He was my elder brother. When An Lushan re-
volted, he was the first to raise loyalist volunteers, and as he was
being killed, he never ceased to curse them. Now I am nearing eighty.
In my official career, I have reached the post of grand preceptor. I will
preserve the virtue of my elder brother in death and beyond. How
could I be coerced by the likes of you?2

Soon after, Li gave up the pretense of civility and had Yan Zhenqing im-
prisoned. Yan’s sons, his nephew Xian, and his friend Zhang Jian (ca.
745–ca. 805) repeatedly sent memorials begging the court to ransom
him, but Lu Qi intercepted them all.3
In 784, Li Xilie sent his troops to attack the imperial army under
Geshu Yao, who had retaken Ruzhou. Li’s generals, however, were plot-
ting among themselves to turn and attack Li himself and make Yan
Zhenqing the new military commissioner. When news of the plot was
leaked, Li had the generals killed and Yan sent to be held in Longxing
Monastery in Caizhou. In his cell, Yan composed his own tomb epitaph
and funeral eulogy.
Late in the year, Li Xilie sacked Bianzhou and declared himself
“August Emperor of the Great Chu Dynasty” with the inaugural reign
title of “Martial Success.” He sent a messenger to Yan Zhenqing to find
out from the former commissioner for rites and ceremonies the ritual
for ascending the throne. Yan remained unwilling to collaborate in any
way. He chided the rebellious official, saying: “I am an old man now,
but once I did know state ritual. Now all I can remember is the ritual
for a feudal lord’s audience of submission to the emperor.”
During the time of Yan’s captivity, Emperor Dezong and the court
were forced to flee the capital by mutinous frontier troops led by
Zhu Ci (742–784), the brother of one of Li Xilie’s rebel confederates.
Only in the autumn of 784, after the death of Zhu Ci, was the court
able to return to Chang’an, where justice was meted out to Zhu’s
cohorts. Among those executed by imperial order was Li Xiqian, a
younger brother of Li Xilie. Eventually this news made its way to
Li Xilie. In response he dispatched some of his men to Longxing Mon-
astery in Caizhou, and there, on the thirteenth day of the eighth month
CH8 Page 142 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:56 AM

142 Confucian Martyrdom

of the inaugural year of the Honorable Prime era, they hanged Yan
Zhenqing.
The following year, Li Xilie was murdered by poison and Huaixi was
pacified. The new Huaixi military commissioner sent Yan Zhenqing’s
coffin off under escort, and it was met at Ruzhou by his sons, Jun and
Shuo. They conducted funerary services at Ruzhou, then accompanied
their father’s coffin home to Chang’an, where Yan Zhenqing was buried
in the family tomb south of the city walls. Emperor Dezong suspended
court audience for five days and ordered a record compiled of Yan
Zhenqing’s achievements. He was granted the posthumous title of min-
ister of education and the posthumous epithet of “Cultured and Loyal.”
As Sima Qian’s famous dictum has it: “Men die but one death, and
this death may be as weighty as Mount Tai or as light as a goose feather.”
Yan Zhenqing’s martyrdom was as weighty, as meaningful, as any has
ever been in Confucian China. There is no more exalted sacrifice at the
altar of Confucian filial piety than to lay down one’s life for loyalty to
the emperor. Mencius said: “I desire life, but I also desire righteousness.
If I cannot have both, I will let life go and choose righteousness.” Yan
Zhenqing’s fate as a martyr set the seal on his life as a moral exemplar.
Thanks to the belief in characterology, a calligrapher who is a moral
exemplar may become an artistic model. In their search for a standard
of calligraphy to raise in the struggle against the power and culture of
the court, the Song literati found in Yan Zhenqing a man whose life as
scholar, statesman, and amateur artist resembled theirs. The supreme
difference in his life was the manner of his death. Many of the impor-
tant Song literati suffered hardships and exile, but they were persecuted
for insufficient allegiance to the throne, not martyred for loyalty. The
unassailable rectitude of Yan Zhenqing’s martyrdom ennobled every-
thing about him. For the Song literati to imitate his style of writing was
to borrow for themselves the sword and shield of this heroic artist,
“cultured and loyal.”
NOTES Page 143 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Notes

Chapter 1: The Politics of Calligraphy

11. Yang Xiong, Fayan, Sibu beiyao ed., chap. 5, p. 3b.
12. Sima Qian, Shiji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), chap. 47, p. 1947.
13. Xin Tang shu, by Ouyang Xiu, Song Qi, et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975),
chap. 45, p. 1171.
14. See Lothar Ledderose, Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 30.
15. Alfred Forke, trans., Lunheng, pt. II, 2nd ed. (rpt. New York: Paragon Book
Gallery, 1962), 2:229.
16. Liu Xun et al., Jiu Tang shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), chap. 165, p. 4310.
17. Translation by William R. B. Acker, Some T ’ang and Pre-T ’ang Texts on Chi-
nese Painting (Leiden: Brill, 1954 and 1974), p. lvi.
18. Biyizan, in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, ed. Huang Jian (Shanghai: Shanghai shu
hua chubanshe, 1979), 1:62.
19. From Zhu Wengong yu, quoted in Huang Benji, ed., Yan Lugong ji (Taipei:
Zhonghua shuju, 1970), chap. 21, p. 4a.
10. Fang Xuanling et al., Jin shu, (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), chap. 80, pp.
2107–2108.
11. Song shi, ed. Tuotuo et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1977), chap. 296, pp.
9872–9873.
12. E. A. Kracke Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 59.
13. E. A. Kracke Jr., “Region, Family, and Individual in the Chinese Examinations
System,” in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 253.
14. E. A. Kracke Jr., “The Expansion of Educational Opportunity in the Reign of Hui-
tsung of Sung and Its Implications,” Sung Studies Newsletter 13 (1977): 6–30.
15. James T. C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu: An Eleventh-Century Neo-Confucianist (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 1967), pp. 86–87.
16. Mencius, II B:2; II A:7; I B:9.
17. This summary of the Qingli reform is based on “The Minor Reform,” in Liu,
Ou-yang Hsiu, pp. 40–51.
18. Mi Fu, Shu shi (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), p. 57.
19. Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T ’ang Search for Unity (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), pp. 84–86.

143
NOTES Page 144 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

144 Notes to Pages 10–18

20. Gaylord Kai Loh Leung and C. Bradford Langley, “Hsi-k’un ch’ou-ch’ang chi,”
in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H.
Nienhauser Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 412.
21. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu; Ronald C. Egan, The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu
(1007–1072) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Lien-sheng
Yang, “The Organization of Official Historiography: Principles and Methods
of the Standard Histories from the T’ang Through the Ming Dynasty,” in His-
torians of China and Japan, ed. W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 44–59.
22. See Ronald C. Egan, “Ou-yang Hsiu and Su Shih on Calligraphy,” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 49 (2) (Dec. 1989):382.
23. Cai Xiang, Cai Zhonghuigong ji, Xunminzhai ed. (1734), chap. 24, p. 21a.
24. Stephen Owen, Remembrances: The Experience of the Past in Classical Chinese
Literature (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 26.
25. “Tang Yan Lugong ershier zi tie,” Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1177, in Ouyang Xiu,
Ouyang Xiu quanji, 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 1986).
26. “Song Wendi shendao bei,” Jigulu, chap. 4, p. 1140; translation by Egan,
“Ou-yang Hsiu and Su Shih,” p. 383.
27. See Amy McNair, “The Engraved Model-Letters Compendia of the Song
Dynasty,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 114 (2) (April–June
1994): 214.
28. Zhu Jianxin, Jinshixue (rpt. Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1981), p. 21.
29. In a letter to Cai Xiang, Ouyang Xiu states that he collected the one thousand
scrolls in his collection in the years from 1045 to 1062 (Ouyang Xiu quanji,
chap. 69, p. 506), whereas the dates that appear in the colophons on the
works of Yan Zhenqing range between 1063 and 1066.
30. Han Yu, “The Song of the Stone Drums,” Han Changli ji (Shanghai: Commer-
cial Press, 1936), chap. 2, p. 44.
31. According to Jorgensen, the Chan scheme itself was modeled on the Confucian
idea of “legitimate internal dynastic succession.” See John Jorgensen, “The
‘Imperial’ Lineage of Ch’an Buddhism: The Role of Confucian Ritual and
Ancestor Worship in Ch’an’s Search for Legitimation in the Mid-T’ang
Dynasty,” Papers on Far Eastern History 35 (March 1987): 89–133.

Chapter 2: Yan Zhenqing’s Illustrious Background and Early Career

11. See the preface Cen Shen wrote for his poem on Yan’s departure for Pingyuan,
Cen Shen ji jiao zhu, ed. Chen Tiemin and Hou Zhongyi (Shanghai: Shanghai
guji chubanshe, 1981), p. 107.
12. The principal biographical sources for the life of Yan Zhenqing are Xin Tang
shu, chap. 153; Jiu Tang shu, chap. 128; and Yin Liang, Yan Lugong xing
zhuang, in Quan Tang wen, ed. Dong Gao (Tainan: Jingwei shuju, 1965),
chap. 514, pp. 9a–26a. Yin Liang was the grandson of Yan Zhenqing’s uncle
Yin Jianyou and served as an official under Yan Zhenqing. His account, the
earliest and most detailed, was written for the court when the emperor
learned of Yan Zhenqing’s death in 786.
13. This stele is not extant. See Feng Yan (Presented Scholar, 756), Feng shi wen jian
ji jiao zhu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1958), chap. 10, p. 87.
14. In Wen xuan, ed. Xiao Tong (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937), chap. 10, pp.
15–18.
15. Huang Benji, ed., Yan Lugong ji (rpt. Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1970), chap. 5,
p. 6b.
16. Zhang Huaiguan, Shu duan, in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, 1:198.
NOTES Page 145 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Notes to Pages 18–24 145

17. Tao Hongjing and Emperor Wu of Liang, Lun shu qi, in Fashu yaolu, ed. Zhang
Yanyuan (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe, 1984), p. 50.
18. Chu Suiliang, Jin Youjun Wang Xizhi shu mu, in Fashu yaolu, p. 88; Sun Guo-
ting, Shupu, in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, 1:128.
19. See Tang Wei Shu xu shu lu, in Fashu yaolu, pp. 165–166.
10. Emperor Xuanzong composed and transcribed the text for a stele on Mount
Hua. In 750, he had one hundred copies (ink rubbings?) given to the court
officials. Yan Zhenqing and Yan Yunnan, who was serving as a remonstrance
official, each received one copy (Yan Lugong ji, chap. 8, pp. 6b–7a).
11. Su Shi, Dongpo tiba (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), chap. 4, p. 76a.
12. See Rong Geng, Cong tie mu (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1980–1986), 1:49–
66. There is also an anonymous copy of the Encomium, attributed to the
Tang dynasty, now in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, that carries the
forged signature of Mi Fu. In ink on silk, in small regular-script characters, it
is quite similar to the ink-rubbing version. For a reproduction see Gugong lidai
fashu quanji (Taipei: National Palace Museum, 1977), 2:38–39.
13. Zhongguo shufa quanji, vol. 25: Sui Tang Wudai bian, Yan Zhenqing 1 (Beijing:
Rongbaozhai, 1993), p. 416.
14. See Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T’ang Search for Unity (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1986), p. 238.
15. Tuian jinshi shuhua ba (1845), chap. 4, p. 32b.
16. Shodò zenshû, 3rd ed. (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1966–1969), 4:155.
17. See Dou Ji, Shu shu fu, in Fashu yaolu, chap. 6; Xu Hao, Lun shu, in Fashu
yaolu, pp. 116–118.
18. See Yan Zhenqing’s epitaph for his father, Yan Lugong ji, chap. 7, p. 12b. See
also Jiu Tang shu, chap. 190 zhong, p. 5034; Xin Tang shu, chap. 199, p.
5683.
19. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 4, p. 7a.
20. Quan Tang shi (Taipei: Fuxing shuju, 1961), p. 1223.
21. Ibid., p. 745; translation adapted from Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chi-
nese Poetry: The High T’ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp.
107–108.
22. Li Zhao (fl. ca. 806–825), Tang guo shi bu (Shanghai: Gudian wenxue chuban-
she, 1979), p. 17. For biographies of Zhang Xu see Jiu Tang shu, chap. 190
zhong, p. 5034, and Xin Tang shu, chap. 202, p. 5764.
23. Lu Xie (d. 880), Lin chi jue, in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, 1:293.
24. Yan Zhenqing, Wenzhong ji (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936), chap. 12, p. 88.
25. First seen in Mo chi bian (1066), ed. Zhu Changwen (rpt. Taipei: National Cen-
tral Library, 1970).
26. See Yu Shaosong, Shuhua shulu jieti (rpt. Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), chap.
9, p. 5b.
27. The Cangzhen Letter, in Tang Huaisu san tie (Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe,
1982), p. 31.
28. For reproductions see Tangdai caoshujia, ed. Zhou Ti (Beijing: Beijing Yanshan
chubanshe, 1989), pp. 80–84.
29. For a reproduction see Zhang Xu fashu ji (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chuban-
she, 1992), pp. 45–53.
30. See Tangdai caoshujia, p. 57; Liaoning sheng bowuguan cang fashu xuanji (Shen-
yang: Wenwu chubanshe, 1962), vol. 5; and Zhongguo meishu quanji: Shufa
zhuanke bian 3: Sui Tang Wudai shufa, ed. Yang Renkai (Beijing: Renmin mei-
shu chubanshe, 1989), p. 29; a color reproduction is on pp. 112–119. See also
Xu Bangda, Gu shu hua wei’e kaobian (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji chubanshe,
NOTES Page 146 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

146 Notes to Pages 24–43

1984), 1:94–97, and Xiong Bingming, “Yi ‘Zhang Xu caoshu sitie’ shi yi lin-
ben,” Shupu 44:18–25.
31. See Shodò zenshû, 8:180 and pl. 98–99 for a reproduction.
32. Beibei nantie lun, in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, 2:637.
33. Shodò zenshû, 8:187 and 7:fig. 41g.
34. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 7, p. 12a.
35. Ibid., p. 13a.
36. Sun Chengze, Gengzi xiaoxia ji (1660) (Zhibuzu zhai ed.), chap. 6, p. 14a.
37. Zhu Guantian, Zhongguo shufa quanji, 25:6.
38. Ibid., 25:5.
39. Shodò zenshû, 6:191.
40. See, for example, Stephen J. Goldberg, “Court Calligraphy of the Early T’ang
Dynasty,” Artibus Asiae 49 ( 3– 4) (1988–1989):189–237.
41. See Amy McNair, “Engraved Calligraphy in China: Recension and Reception,”
Art Bulletin 77(1) (March 1995):106–114.
42. Translated in David Lattimore, “Allusion and T’ang Poetry,” in Perspectives on
the T’ang, ed. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1973), p. 412.
43. See the genealogical chart in Jiang Xingyu, Yan Lugong zhi shu xue (Taipei:
Shijie shuju, 1962), p. 7. For Zhenqing’s brothers see Yan Lugong nianpu, in
Yan Lugong ji, p. 15a.
44. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 8, p. 7b.
45. See David McMullen, “Historical and Literary Theory in the Mid-Eighth Cen-
tury,” in Perspectives on the T’ang, p. 310.
46. Dated to 765; in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 5, pp. 1a–2a.
47. On Yan Zhenqing’s marriage see Yan Lugong nianpu, in Yan Lugong ji, p. 3b;
on the friendship of Wei Shu, Yan Yuansun, Yin Jianyou, and Sun Di see Yan
Zhenqing’s epitaph for Yin Jianyou in Wenzhong ji, chap. 10, p. 77, and Yan
Zhenqing’s preface to Sun Di’s collected works in Wenzhong ji, chap. 12, p. 88.
48. Owen, The High T’ang, p. 243.
49. Cen Shen ji jiao zhu, p. 108.

Chapter 3: “The Nest Tipped and the Eggs Overturned”

11. The biographical sources used for Yan Gaoqing and Yan Zhenqing in this chap-
ter are Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, chap. 217; Yin Liang, Yan Lugong xing
zhuang, pp. 11b–20a; Yan Zhenqing’s epitaph for Yan Gaoqing, Wenzhong
ji, suppl. chap. 2, pp. 37– 40; the biographies of Yan Gaoqing in Jiu Tang shu,
chap. 187 xia, pp. 4896–4899, and Ouyang Xiu, Song Qi, et al., Xin Tang
shu, chap. 192, pp. 5529–5532; and the biographies of Yan Zhenqing in Jiu
Tang shu, chap. 128, pp. 3589–3592, and Xin Tang shu, chap. 153, pp.
4854–4857.
12. From Yan Zhenqing’s epitaph for Yan Gaoqing, Wenzhong ji, suppl. chap. 2,
p. 39.
13. See Edwin Pulleyblank, “The An Lu-shan Rebellion and the Origins of Chronic
Militarism in Late T’ang China,” in Essays on T’ang Society, ed. John Curtis
Perry and Bardwell C. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 1976), p. 41 and n. 11.
14. Wenzhong ji, chap. 2, pp. 8–9.
15. Ibid., chap. 2, p. 9.
16. Yan alluded to his patrilineal connection to the eight disciples of Confucius sur-
named Yan in his epitaph for Yan Han and in the Yan Family Temple Stele
(Wenzhong ji, suppl. chap. 2, p. 30, and chap. 16, p. 117).
NOTES Page 147 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Notes to Pages 43–63 147

17. Jiu Tang shu, chap. 128, p. 3592; Xin Tang shu, chap. 153, p. 4856; Yan
Lugong xing zhuang, p. 19b.
18. Adapted from James Legge, The Chinese Classics (rpt. Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 1960), 2:411.
19. Wenzhong ji, suppl. chap. 2, p. 40.
10. Jiu Tang shu, chap. 128, p. 3596.
11. Wenzhong ji, chap. 10, p. 80.
12. See Gugong fashu, vol. 5: Tang Yan Zhenqing shu ji ji wen gao (Taipei:
National Palace Museum, 1964), pp. 13a–15a.
13. Mi Fu, Baozhang daifang lu (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), p. 7a.
14. Huang Tingjian, Shangu tiba (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), chap. 4, p. 40.
15. Zhuangzi (Shanghai: Shanghai guji Press, 1988), chap. 29, p. 150; translation
by Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1968), p. 324.
16. Nan shi, ed. Li Yanshou (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975), chap. 71, p. 1739.
17. The calligraphers were Handan Chun and Cao Xi. See Yu Shinan, Shu zhi shu,
in Fashu yaolu, p. 87.
18. Fashu yaolu, p. 217.
19. See Fu Shen, “Huang T’ing-chien’s Calligraphy and His Scroll for Chang Ta-
t’ung: A Masterpiece Written in Exile” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton Univer-
sity, 1976), p. 65.
20. Quan Tang wen, chap. 380, pp. 7a–7b.
21. Shu moya bei hou (Written on the cliff after the stele), in Huang Tingjian,
Huang Shangu shi, ed. Huang Gongzhu (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1934),
pp. 105–106.
22. Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High T’ang (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 214–217; translated in David R. McCraw,
Du Fu’s Laments from the South (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press,
1992), pp. 201–204.
23. Fu Shen, “Huang T’ing-chien’s Calligraphy,” p. 194.
24. Shangu tiba, chap. 7, p. 64.
25. Ibid., chap. 5, p. 45.
26. Ibid., chap. 5, p. 44.

Chapter 4: Partisan Politics at the Postrebellion Court

11. See Shodò zenshû, 10:154–155 and pl. 22–23. For a complete reproduction see
Shoseki meihin sòkan (Tokyo: Nigensha, 1958–1981), vol. 34.
12. See Zhongguo shufa: Yan Zhenqing, 1:287–289. The stele was excavated in the
Jiaqing period (1796–1820) in pieces; only a dozen characters can still be
read. The complete text is found in Yan’s collected works (Yan Lugong ji,
chap. 5, pp. 6b–7b).
13. Cambridge History, p. 490– 491.
14. Yan Lugong xing zhuang, p. 20b; Jiu Tang shu, chap. 128, p. 3592; Xin Tang
shu, chap. 153, p. 4857.
15. Xin Tang shu, chap. 207, p. 5863; Cambridge History, pp. 573–574; David
McMullen, State and Scholars in T’ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1988), pp. 53 and 60.
16. Jiu Tang shu, chap. 117, pp. 3396–3397, and Xin Tang shu, chap. 133, p. 4546.
17. Zuo zhuan, Duke Xiang, year 24; see Legge, Chinese Classics, 5:507.
18. “You drove back Shi Siming’s recalcitrant army” is a reference to Guo Yingyi’s
appointment as military commissioner of Huainan to prevent Shi Siming from
NOTES Page 148 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

148 Notes to Pages 63–68

moving south after the sack of Luoyang in the autumn of 759. “Resisted the
Uighurs’ insatiable demands” is apparently a sarcastic reference to Guo
Yingyi’s failure, while serving as regent of Luoyang, to prevent the pillaging
of Luoyang by both Tang and Uighur troops after it was retaken from the
rebels in 762. See Guo Yingyi’s biography in Xin Tang shu, chap. 133, p. 4546.
19. The probable date of this honor was the proclamation of the new reign title
Ample Virtue in 763, when “the meritorious officials were granted iron staffs,
their names were reposited in the Imperial Ancestral Temple, and their por-
traits were fashioned in the Hall of Ascending to the Clouds.” See Xin Tang
shu, chap. 6, p. 169.
10. Yu shu, Da Yu mo, chap. 14; see Legge, Chinese Classics, 3:60.
11. The Bodhi Monastery was located in the Pingkang ward of Chang’an. This cere-
mony, which commemorated the anniversary of the death of an emperor, was
performed in all official Buddhist temples and Daoist monasteries throughout
the land. The anniversary closest to the date on which Yan’s letter was written
was that of Tang Taizu, which fell on the eighteenth day of the ninth month.
See Peng Yuanrui, Zhengzuoweitie kaocheng, in Enyutang jingjin xugao (n.p.,
ca. 1735–1796), chap. 6, p. 11b.
12. Earlier in the same month the letter was written, Guo Ziyi came to court to an-
nounce his victory over Pugu Huaien and the Tibetan–Uighur forces at Fen-
zhou the month before. A banquet was held for him by the court officials. His
son, Guo Xi, was a vanguard commander in the Shuofang Army, under his
father’s command. See Sima Guang, Zizhi tongjian, chap. 223, pp. 7167–7169.
13. Lunyu, bk. xvi, chap. 4; see Legge, Chinese Classics, 1:311.
14. Zizhi tongjian, chap. 224, pp. 7189–7190; Jiu Tang shu, chap. 128, pp. 3592–
3594; Xin Tang shu, chap. 153, pp. 4857– 4859.
15. According to Huang Tingjian, Shangu tiba, chap. 4, p. 40.
16. Ibid.
17. Xuanhe shupu (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), chap. 3, p. 93.
18. According to Mi Fu, Baozhang daifang lu, p. 7a.
19. Shangu tiba, chap. 4, p. 40.
20. Baozhang daifang lu, p. 7a.
21. Su Shi, Dongpo tiba, chap. 4, p. 76.
22. For discussions of the various versions see Wen Yan, “Yan Zhenqing de ‘Zheng-
zuowei tie,’ ” Shupu 17:34–36, and Wang Zhuanghong, Tiexue juyao (Shang-
hai: Shanghai shuhua chubanshe, 1987), pp. 143–145.
23. According to the Yuan-dynasty connoisseur Yuan Jue (1267–1327) in a colophon
dated to 1315; from Qingrong jushi ji, quoted in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 24, p. 2b.
24. Shu shi, p. 20.
25. Dongpo tiba, chap. 4, p. 76; translation by Ronald Egan, Word, Image, and
Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies,
Harvard University, 1994), p. 278.
26. Translation by Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1968), p. 201.
27. Egan, Word, Image, and Deed, pp. 82– 83.
28. Baozhang daifang lu, p. 7a.
29. Shu shi, p. 20.
30. Shangu tiba, chap. 4, p. 39.
31. See Susan Bush, The Chinese Literati on Painting: Su Shih (1037–1101) to Tung
Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971);
Ronald C. Egan, The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–1072) (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Jonathan Chaves, Mei Yao-
NOTES Page 149 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Notes to Pages 72–85 149

ch’en and the Development of Early Sung Poetry (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1976).
32. Jiu Tang shu, chap. 165, p. 4310.
33. Dongpo tiba, chap. 4, pp. 92b–93a.
34. Quoted in Bian Yongyu, Shigutang shuhua huikao (Taipei: n.p., 1958), 2:122–
123.
35. The ink rubbing I studied is in the Field Museum of Natural History (file no.
244489 a–d). See Hartmut Walravens, ed., Catalogue of Chinese Rubbings in
Field Museum of Natural History, Fieldiana Anthropology, n.s., no. 3 (Chi-
cago: Field Museum, 1981), no. 804.
36. In his Gongkui ji, quoted in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 30, p. 8a–b.
37. An ink-written version of the Poem for General Pei is in the collection of the
Beijing Palace Museum. Xu Bangda considers it a probable Yuan-dynasty
copy after the engraving in the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compen-
dium. He believes the Poem for General Pei, both as a poem and a work of
calligraphy, was originally fabricated sometime during the Song, and so he
terms the Palace Museum scroll “a fake within a fake.” See Xu Bangda, Gu
shu hua wei’e kaobian, 1:123–125; reproductions in 2:165–168.
38. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 12, p. 1a–b. For Pei Min see Xin Tang shu, chap. 71
shang, p. 2184, chap. 202, p. 5764, and chap. 216 shang, p. 6084.
39. Shangu tiba, chap. 5, p. 44; Egan, Word, Image, and Deed, p. 273. In the tradi-
tional story, Xi Shi, a beauty of the fifth century b.c.e., pounded her breast
and scowled because of heartburn. Seeing her lovely face with knitted brows,
her homely neighbor imitated her expression, vainly hoping to achieve the
same effect. She had mistaken Xi Shi’s illness for the source of her beauty. See
Herbert Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary (rpt. Taipei: Ch’eng wen,
1975), p. 271.
40. Shangu tiba, chap. 5, p. 45.
41. Shangu tiba, chap. 5, p. 45; Dongpo tiba, chap. 4, p. 85.
42. Shangu tiba, chap. 5, p. 45; Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1173.
43. Shangu tiba, chap. 5, p. 45.

Chapter 5: From Daoist Inscriptions to Daoist Immortal

11. “Inscription at West Grove Monastery” and “Inscription at Quiet Dwelling
Monastery,” Yan Lugong ji, chap. 6, p. 2b.
12. “Stele Inscription for the Two True Lords, Wang and Guo, of Mount Huagai,”
Yan Lugong ji, chap. 6, p. 11a.
13. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 6, pp. 6b–9b.
14. See Edward H. Schafer, “The Restoration of the Shrine of Wei Hua-ts’un at Lin-
ch’uan in the Eighth Century,” Journal of Oriental Studies 15(2) (1977):124–
137.
15. On the transmission of the Shangqing scriptures see Michel Strickmann, “The
Mao Shan Revelations, Taoism and the Aristocracy,” T’oung Pao 63 (1977):
1–64, and Le taoisme du Mao Chan, Chronique d’un Révélation (Paris: Col-
lège de France, 1981).
16. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 6, pp. 9b–10b. On Huang Lingwei see Russell Kirkland,
“Huang Ling-wei: A Taoist Priestess in T’ang China,” Journal of Chinese Reli-
gions 19 (Fall 1991):47–73.
17. See Shodò zenshû, 10:159–160, and Yang Zhenfang, Beitie xulu (Chengdu:
Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1982), p. 160.
18. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 5, pp. 10a–11b. On Miss Hemp see also Edward H. Schafer,
Mirages on the Sea of Time: The Taoist Poetry of Ts’ao T’ang (Berkeley: Uni-
NOTES Page 150 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

150 Notes to Pages 85–93

versity of California Press, 1985), pp. 90–102, and Henri Doré, “Recherches
sur les Superstitions en Chine,” Variétés Sinologiques 12 (48) (1918): 1118–
1124.
19. Ge Hong, Shen xian zhuan (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, 1974), pp. 18b–19a.
10. For a translation see J. D. Frodsham, The Murmuring Stream: The Life and
Works of the Chinese Nature Poet Hsieh Ling-yun (385–433), Duke of K’ang-
lo (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1967), 1:155.
11. Deng Ziyang may have been invited to the capital by Emperor Xuanzong to
participate in the grand project of collating and editing the Daoist canon in
the Great Unity Palace, which was initiated around 748. This project is men-
tioned in Yan Zhenqing’s epitaph for the Maoshan Daoist master Li Han-
guang (683–769), Yan Lugong ji, chap. 7, p. 6a–b. The Nancheng District
Gazetteer, however, states that he was called to court during the Opened Prime
era to serve as a fangshi. See Nancheng xian zhi (n.p., 1672), chap. 11, p. 75b.
12. These Daoist women are more fully described in Yan’s Miss Flower stele inscrip-
tion. See Yan Lugong ji, chap. 6, pp. 9b–10b.
13. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 5, pp. 11a–b.
14. Schafer, “Wei Hua-ts’un,” p. 126.
15. Shen Fen (tenth century), Xu xian zhuan, quoted in Gujin tushu jicheng (rpt.
Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1934), 509:3b; Li Fang, Taiping guang ji (Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, 1961), chap. 32, pp. 205–208; Wang Dang, Tang yu lin
(Changsha: Commercial Press, 1939), p. 154.
16. Record of Prodigies in the Luo Region was written by Qin Zaisi of the Song dy-
nasty. His entry on Yan Zhenqing is quoted in the Song-dynasty Daoist Chen
Baoguang’s Sandong qunxian lu, in Dao zang, vol. 994, chap. 14, p. 15b.
17. For his biography see Song shi, ed. Tuotuo et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1977), chap. 352, pp. 11128–11130.
18. See Nakata Yujiro, Bei Futsu (Tokyo: Nigensha, 1982), pp. 194–195.
19. Cao Fu, “Feixian Yan Lugong xin miao ji” (Record of the New Temple to Yan,
Duke of Lu, in Feixian), in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 17, pp. 8b–9b.
20. Shodò zenshû (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1930–1932), 18:203–205.
21. Mi Fu, “Yan Lugong bei yin ji [or Lugong xian ji ji],” in Bao Jin yingguang ji,
chap. 7, pp. 54–55.
22. Shu shi, p. 19.
23. Zeng Gong, “Fuzhou Yan Lugong ci tang ji” (Record of the Temple of Yan,
Duke of Lu, in Fuzhou), in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 17, p. 8a.
24. Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1173.
25. Bao Jin yingguang ji, buyi, p. 75.
26. Lothar Ledderose, Mi Fu and the Classical Tradition of Chinese Calligraphy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 58.
27. Wen C. Fong, Images of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton Art Museum, 1984),
p. 90.
28. Mi Fu, Baozhang daifang lu, p. 7a.
29. Shu shi, p. 11.
30. Ibid., p. 8.
31. Lothar Ledderose, “Some Taoist Elements in the Calligraphy of the Six Dynas-
ties,” T’oung Pao 70 (1984):246–278.
32. On Daoism at the court of Emperor Huizong see Sun Kekuan, Song Yuan dao-
jiao zhi fazhan (Taizhong: Donghai daxue, 1965), chap. 4, pp. 93–165; Jin
Zhongshu, “Lun Bei Song monien zhi chongshang daojiao” (On the Promo-
tion of Daoism at the End of the Northern Song), Xin Ya xuebao 7(2) (1966):
NOTES Page 151 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Notes to Pages 93–98 151

323– 414 and 8(1) (1967):187–296; and Michel Strickmann, “The Longest
Taoist Scripture,” History of Religions 17(3– 4) (1978):331–354.
33. See Ledderose, Mi Fu, p. 47.
34. Ye Mengde, Bi shu lu hua (n.p., Qing dynasty), chap. xia, p. 70b.
35. See Chen Yinke, “Tianshi dao yu binhai diyu zhi guanxi” (The Way of the
Celestial Master and the coastal regions), Bulletin of the National Research
Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 3, pt. 4 (1933):439– 466.
36. See Yan Han’s biography, Jin shu, chap. 88, pp. 2285–2287.
37. Yao Cha and Yao Silian, Liang shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973), chap. 50,
p. 727.
38. See the Spirit Way Stele inscription for Yan Zhenqing’s brother-in-law Du Ji,
Wenzhong ji, chap. 8, p. 63. On the interaction between the Wangs and the
Yans during the Six Dynasties period see Su Shaoxing, Liang Jin Nan Chao de
shi zu (Taipei: Lianjing, 1987), pp. 179–180.
39. According to Zhou Bida: “During the Yuanfeng era [1078–1085], Miss Hemp
was enfeoffed as Lady of Purity and Truth. During the Yuanyou era [1086–
1094], her title was changed to Marvelous and Solitary Perfected One, and
during the Xuanhe era [1119–1125], another title was added: Superior Per-
fected Solitary Primal Worthy of Magnanimous Response. Emperor Huizong
also wrote out the four characters for ‘Palace of the Primal Worthy.’ ” From
Lushan riji, quoted in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 25, p. 10b.
40. For example, Yan Zhenqing drew on Daoist books for material for his dictio-
nary, Yunhai jingyuan. Feng Yan wrote: “When he was prefect of Huzhou, he
supplemented and edited [the manuscript of Yunhai jingyuan], and aside from
the standard classics he also took from the philosophers, the histories, and
Buddhist and Daoist books” (Feng shi wen jian ji jiao zhu, p. 12).
41. Zhongguo shufa quanji, 25:10.
42. See Feng shi wen jian ji jiao zhu, pp. 3, 12, 25, 30, 39, 87, and 98.

Chapter 6: Buddhist Companions and Commemoration

11. “Fuzhou Yan Lugong citang ji,” in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 17, pp. 7b–8b.
12. No longer extant. See Yan Lugong ji, chap. 7, pp. 2a–5b. Four tombs of Yan
Han’s descendants were excavated in 1958. See “Nanjing Laohushan Jin mu”
(Jin Tombs at Laohushan, Nanjing), Kaogu 6 (1959):288–295.
13. “Stele Inscription for Profound Joy Monastery, Mount Zhu, Wucheng District,
Huzhou,” Wenzhong ji, chap. 4, pp. 18–20.
14. See Lu Yu’s biography in Xin Tang shu, chap. 196, p. 5611, and Lu Wenxue
zizhuan (Autobiography of Instructor Lu), quoted in Fu Shuqin and Ouyang
Xun, Lu Yu Chajing yizhu (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1983), pp. 82–
90.
15. In Hanxuetang congshu, ed. Huang Shi (1893), tao 5.
16. The Qieyun is still extant. Originally compiled in 601 by Lu Fayan and a group
of scholars including Yan Zhitui, it was republished in 751 under the title
Tang yun and then revised and enlarged in 1011 and published under its
present title, Guang yun. On the Qieyun see Ch’en Yuan, “The Ch’ieh-Yun
and Its Hsien-pei Authorship,” Monumenta Serica 1(2) (1935):245–252.
17. Pan Shu was the man to whom the set of linked verse called “Poems Written at
Magistrate Pan’s Bamboo Hill Library” was dedicated (Yan Lugong ji, chap.
12, p. 9b). In the Beijing Palace Museum is an ink-written version of these
couplets (likely a fake). See Xu Wuwen, “ ‘Yan Zhenqing shu Zhushan lienju’
bianwei” (Yan Zhenqing’s calligraphy of the Bamboo Hill couplets as fake),
NOTES Page 152 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

152 Notes to Pages 98–107

Wenwu 6 (1981):82–86. For a color reproduction see “Yan Zhenqing beitie

xulu,” Gugong wenwu yuekan, no. 17, p. 37.
18. Xiao Cun was the son of Yan Zhenqing’s friend, Xiao Yingshi.
19. Should be Yan Cai, a relative of Zhenqing’s cited in his “Inscription at Quiet
Dwelling Monastery,” according to Huang Benji (Yan Lugong ji, Shixibiao,
p. 6).
10. On Jiaoran see Thomas P. Nielson, The T’ang Poet-Monk Chiao-jan, Occasional
Paper 3 (Tempe: Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1972).
11. See Stephen Owen, The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1975), pp. 116–117, and Craig Fisk, “Chiao-jan,” in The
Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H. Nien-
hauser Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 270–273.
12. See Nan shi, chap. 34, p. 881, and J. D. Frodsham, The Murmuring Stream,
(Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1967), 1:28.
13. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 12, p. 5b.
14. Ibid., chap. 12, p. 8b.
15. See, for example, Hong Mai (1123–1202), Rong zhai sui bi (Shanghai: Shang-
hai guji chubanshe, 1978), san ji, chap. 16, pp. 600–601.
16. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 12, p. 10a; translation by Elling Eide, personal communi-
cation. See also Stephen Owen, The Great Age of Chinese Poetry: The High
T’ang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 296.
17. See Liu Zhengchen’s biography in Xin Tang shu, chap. 151, p. 4823.
18. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 16, p. 2b.
19. In the brush grip that is used to write large characters, the thumb is bent out-
ward, making a “hollow.” See Jiang Xingyu, Yan Lugong zhi shu xue (Taipei:
Shujie shuju, 1962), pp. 43– 46.
20. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 1, p. 6a.
21. Ibid., chap. 1, p. 6b.
22. Ibid., chap. 5, p. 13a–b.
23. Ibid., chap. 6, pp. 3b– 4b.
24. Ibid., chap. 27, p. 4b.
25. Reproduced as Song taben Yan Zhenqing shu Zhongyitang tie, 2 vols. (Hang-
zhou: Xiling yinshe chubanshe, 1994). See also Zhu Guantian, “Zhejiang bo-
wuguan cang Song ta Yan Zhenqing ‘Zhongyitang tie’ ” (A Song ink rubbing
of Yan Zhenqing’s “Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness Compendium” in the
Zhejiang Museum), Shupu 43:18–24. On the history of the Compendium see
Lin Zhijun, Tie kao (Hong Kong: n.p., ca. 1962), pp. 141–151, and Rong
Geng, Cong tie mu (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 1980–1986), 3:1137–1146.
26. See Zeng Hongfu (d. after 1248), Shike buxu (Changsha: Commercial Press,
1939), pp. 7–15; Lin, Tie kao, pp. 15–48; Roger Goepper, Shu-p’u: Der Trak-
tat zur Schriftkunst des Sun Kuo-t’ing (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1974), pp.
408– 410; Rong, Cong tie mu, 1:1–49; and Amy McNair, “The Engraved
Model-Letters Compendia of the Song Dynasty,” Journal of the American
Oriental Society 114(2) (April–June 1994):210–213.
27. Zeng, Shike buxu, pp. 22–23.
28. Ibid., p. 24; Rong, Cong tie mu, 1:127–133.
29. Cao Shimian, Fatie puxi (1245) (Changsha: Commercial Press, 1939), p. 3, and
Zeng, Shike buxu, pp. 15 and 21.
30. For reproductions see Song ta Tan tie (Chengdu: Sichuan cishu chubanshe,
1994), pp. 281–290. The Tan tie, or Changsha tie, is said by the traditional
sources to have been compiled by the eminent official Liu Hang (995–1060)
in 1045–1048 while serving as governor of Tanzhou (Song ta Tan tie, p. 2).
NOTES Page 153 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Notes to Pages 107–118 153

The original steles were lost in the fall of the Northern Song, and ink rub-
bings of it were always extremely rare, so this information was handed down
without corroboration. The recent publication of a rare rubbing in the
Sichuan Provincial Museum shows that the signature inscription mentions
only Xibai, not Liu Hang, and the dates given are 1042–1043. It is not clear
what role Liu Hang played; perhaps Xibai presented the Tan tie to Liu as the
local governor.
31. Quan Song ci, ed. Tang Guizhang (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1965), pp. 2423–
2424; Lu Xinyuan (1834–1894), Song shi yi (n.p.: Shi wan juan lou, 1906),
chap. 29, pp. 9a–10a; Song zhong xing xue shi yuan ti ming (n.p.: Ou xiang
ling shi, n.d.), p. 12; and Song zhong xing dong gong guan liao ti ming (n.p.:
Ou xiang ling shi, n.d.), p. 16.
32. Yan Lugong wenji houxu, Yan Lugong ji, chap. 18, p. 2a–b.
33. On the mutual interest in epigraphy of Liu Chang and Ouyang Xiu see Chen
Guangchong, “Ouyang Xiu jinshixue shulue” (Ouyang Xiu’s epigraphy), Liao-
ning daxue xuebao 6 (1981):54–57. With his father, Song Shou, Song Minqiu
compiled the Tang da zhao ling ji (Proclamations issued under the Tang) in
1070 and the first gazetteer on Chang’an, the Chang’an zhi, in 1076. See A
Sung Bibliography, ed. Yves Hervouet (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,
1978), pp. 116 and 137.
34. For Liu Chang’s preface see Yan Lugong ji, chap. 18, p. 1a–b.
35. For Liu’s chronology (Nianpu) see Wenzhong ji, suppl. chap. 4.
36. See Mi Fu, Baozhang daifang lu, p. 7a.
37. Quoted in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 30, p. 16a.
38. Ibid., chap. 12, p. 3b and chap. 26, p. 10a.
39. See Shodò zenshû, 10:159–160, and Yang Zhenfang, Beitie xulu (Chengdu:
Sichuan wenyi chubanshe, 1982), p. 160.
40. See Bai Huawen and Ni Ping, “Tangdai de gaoshen,” Wenwu 11 (1977):77–80.
41. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 18, p. 2b.
42. Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1176.
43. Shodò zenshû, 10:164.
44. For full reproductions of the two see Song taben Yan Zhenqing shu Zhongyi-
tang tie, 2:437– 439, 465, 466, and 468 (the lines of the text have gotten sep-
arated), and Shodò zenshû, 10:pl. 60–65 and the final section illustrated on
p. 165.
45. McNair, “The Engraved Model-Letters Compendia.”

Chapter 7: The Late Style of Yan Zhenqing

11. Xin Tang shu, chap. 62, p. 1699.
12. No longer extant. See Yan Lugong ji, chap. 28, pp. 10b–11a.
13. See Yan Zhenqing’s record of the achievements of the Shen clan of Wuxing,
Wuxing Shen shi shu zu de ji, in Wen zhong ji, chap. 13, pp. 97–98.
14. Yan Lugong xing zhuang, p. 22a–b.
15. David McMullen, State and Scholars in T’ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), p. 142.
16. The Yuanling Rituals is found in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 3.
17. McMullen, State and Scholars, pp. 142–146.
18. Yan Lugong nianpu, pp. 14b–16a; Yan Lugong wenji, chap. 2.
19. See Guo Fenghui, “Yan zi de tedian he ta de shuxie fangfa” (The special charac-
teristics of the Yan style and its method of writing), Shufa 5 (1982):31–32; Jin
Kaicheng, “Yan Zhenqing de shufa” (The calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing), Wen-
wu 10 (1977):81–86; Hu Wensui, “Shitan Yan shu yishu chengjiu” (On the
NOTES Page 154 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

154 Notes to Pages 118–127

artistic achievement of the Yan style), Shufa 2 (1978):15–18; Chen Ruisong,

“Cong ‘Yuan Cishan bei’ hua Yan zi” (Discussing the Yan style from the
“Yuan Cishan stele”), Shupu 63:45; and Ouyang Hengzhong, “Yan shu de
tedian he linxi” (The special characteristics of the Yan style and how to copy
it), Shupu 17:34–37.
10. See, for example, the stele inscription by Han Zemu dated 752, reproduced in
Shaanxi lidai beishi xuanji (Xi’an: Shaanxi renmin chubanshe, 1979), pl. 126.
For the calligraphic style of Emperor Xuanzong see his Ode on Pied Wagtails,
now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, reproduced in Masterpieces of
Chinese Calligraphy in the National Palace Museum: Supplement, (Taipei:
National Palace Museum, 1973), pl. 2.
11. On Tang-dynasty seal script and Li Yangbing see Shi Anchang, Tangdai shike
zhuanwen (Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 1987).
12. Reproduced in Zhongguo shufa: Yan Zhenqing, 1:49.
13. Shu shi, p. 57.
14. From Fan Zhongyan’s eulogy for Shi Manqing, quoted in Ma Zonghuo, Shulin
zaojian, (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), chap. 9, p. 197b. For a reproduction of
Shi Manqing’s Baoguang deng timing see Zhongguo meishu quanji: Shufa
zhuanke bian 4: Song Jin Yuan shufa (Beijing: Renmin meishu chubanshe,
1986), p. 3.
15. Han Yu, “The Song of the Stone Drums,” Han Changli ji (Shanghai: Commer-
cial Press, 1936), chap. 2, p. 44.
16. On Xiao Cun see Xin Tang shu, chap. 202, p. 5770. Han Yu wrote Wei Dan’s
epitaph; see Yan Lugong ji, chap. 20, p. 3b.
17. See David L. McMullen, “Tu-ku Chi,” in The Indiana Companion, pp. 820–
821, and Stephen Owen, The Poetry of Meng Chiao and Han Yü, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 116.
18. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 6, pp. 2b–3a.
19. See Amy McNair, “Public Values in Calligraphy and Orthography in the Tang
Dynasty,” Monumenta Serica 43 (1995):263–278.
20. Yan Zhenqing shu Ganlu zishu, ed. Shi Anchang (Beijing: Zijincheng chuban-
she, 1990), p. 96.
21. The stele is not extant, but the text is recorded in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 10, pp.
7a–8b.
22. The stele is not extant, but the text is recorded in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 10, pp.
10b–12a.
23. For a reproduction of an extant fragment see The International Seminar on Chi-
nese Calligraphy in Memory of Yen Chen-ch’ing’s 1200th Posthumous Anni-
versary (Jinian Yan Zhenqing shishi yiqian erbai nian Zhongguo shufa guoji
xueshu yantaohui) (Taipei: Council for Cultural Planning and Development,
Executive Yuan, R.O.C., 1987), p. 41.
24. Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1175.
25. See Saian hirin, ed. Nishikawa Yasashi (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1966), pl. 85–88.
The text is recorded in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 8, pp. 2a– 4a.
26. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 23, p. 7a.
27. The text is recorded in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 8, pp. 6b– 8a.
28. The text is recorded in Yan Lugong ji, chap. 5, p. 14a–b.
29. Shodò zenshû, 10:pl. 66–67, and Ta Tao, “Luo Zhenyu suocang Yan Zhenqing
moji sizhong,” Shupu 43:46– 49.
30. Mi Fu, Baozhang daifang lu, p. 12a.
31. Lu Jinzhu, Zhongguo shufa quanji, vol. 26, p. 424.
32. Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1178.
NOTES Page 155 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Notes to Pages 127–141 155

33. Preface to the Jigulu, p. 1087.

34. Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1177.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., p. 1173.
38. Ibid., chap. 4, pp. 1138–1139.
39. See Ronald C. Egan, The Literary Works of Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072) (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 12–14, 80–82, and 198–200.
40. Lunyu, bk. 7, chap. 30. See Legge, Chinese Classics, 1:205.
41. See James T. C. Liu, Ou-yang Hsiu, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967),
pp. 47–64.
42. “Lord Shan” refers to Shan Tao (d. 283), one of the “Seven Sages of the Bam-
boo Grove,” who was famous as a minister of personnel for choosing the
right men for office. “Shusun” refers to Shusun Tong, a Qin-Han-period offi-
cial who established the Han-dynasty rituals. These are complimentary com-
parisons to Yan Zhenqing as minister of personnel and commissioner for
ceremonial propriety.
43. The Han scholar and teacher Huan Rong (21 b.c.e.–59 c.e.) attained very high
office at the end of his career. Displaying the many gifts he had received from
the throne, he exclaimed “This comes from devotion to antiquity.” See Her-
bert Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary (rpt. Taipei: Ch’eng wen, 1975),
p. 327.
44. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 17, p. 2a–b.
45. Huang Tingjian once referred to Zhou Yue’s style as possessing “seductive
beauty,” Han Yu’s derogatory term that served as a metonym for the Wang
style. See Shangu tiba, chap. 9, p. 97.
46. See Shui Laiyou, Cai Xiang shufa shiliao ji (Shanghai: Shanghai shuhua chuban-
she, 1983), pp. 12–14.
47. Reproduced in Gugong fashu, vol. 1: Jin Wang Xizhi moji (Taipei: National
Palace Museum, 1962), p. 21a–b.
48. Cai Zhonghuigong ji, chap. 34, p. 16b.
49. A Sung Bibliography, ed. Yves Hervouet (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,
1978), p. 131. Zhu Changwen was born with a crippled foot.
50. Xu Shuduan, in Lidai shufa lunwenxuan, 1:324.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. See Jigulu, chap. 7, p. 1177.
54. Xuanhe shupu (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), chap. 3, pp. 89–94.
55. Mi Fu, Haiyue mingyan (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1962), p. 2.
56. Mi Fu, Bao Jin yingguang ji, buyi, p. 75.

Chapter 8: Confucian Martyrdom

11. Jiu Tang shu, chap. 128, p. 3595.
12. Ibid., p. 3596.
13. Yan Lugong ji, chap. 17, pp. 3b– 4a.
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BIB Page 163 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:52 AM

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INDEX Page 171 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Index

Amateur aesthetic, 10, 11, 15, 68, 128 Buddhist emperors, 15, 100–105
Amoghavajra, 105 Buddhist monasteries, 97. See also Bodhi
An Lushan, 16, 17, 38–44, 51, 52, 61, Monastery; Jingju Monastery;
122, 141 Longxing Monastery; Miaoxi Mon-
An Lushan Rebellion, 51, 104, 117, 125; astery; Qianfu Monastery; Tiger Hill
Song-dynasty views of, xv, 50, 53, Monastery
59; and the Yan clan, xiv, 38–45, 60,
87, 96–98 Cai Jing, 93
An Shiwen, 47, 66, 67, 110, 139 Cai Tao, 93
Anti-Buddhism, 9, 90, 128 Cai Xiang, 82; and the amateur aesthetic,
Anti-Daoism, 90, 128 11, 68; in circle of Ouyang Xiu, 134;
Antiquarianism, xiv, 134 as copyist of Yan style, xvii, 58, 132,
Art collections, 105; imperial, 4, 5, 18, 47, 134; engraved calligraphy of, 108;
70, 105, 107, 113, 132, 136, 137, and his colophon to Yan Zhenqing’s
139; Ouyang Xiu’s, 13, 79, 122, 134, Self-Written Announcement, 111,
144 n. 29; Song Shou’s, 12 113, 130–132; as political reformer,
7–8; as student of Wang style, 132
Banishment. See Exile Cai Xide, 39, 41
Baozhang daifang lu (Record of Searches Calligraphy: arbiters of taste in, 9; brush
for Precious Scrolls), 66 techniques in, 81–82, 118; clerical
Beijing Palace Museum, 13, 139 script (lishu), 21, 22, 27, 35, 49, 136;
Bodhi Monastery, 64, 148 n. 11 colophons on, xv, 45, 66, 69, 111,
Boping, 38, 41 113, 122–128; Confucianism and, 1,
Brushwork: intentional, 14, 48, 49, 91; as 10, 59, 72, 81, 128; at court, 10, 31,
metaphor, 72, 81, 128; modulated, 36; criticism, 9; cursive script
xvii, 13, 26, 49, 73, 79, 81; “single- (caoshu), 21, 22, 47, 70, 75, 132;
stroke,” 92, 139; unintentional, 67– emotion in, 47, 48, 50, 73; haofang
68, 91–92; unmodulated, 49, 68, 73, manner, 79; imitation in, 2, 9, 10, 15,
81; upright, xvi, 2, 29, 49, 70, 72, 18, 59, 119, 132; imperial, 100–103,
139. See also Centered brush; Con- 107, 111; imperial sponsorship of,
cealed brush-tip; Haofang; Slanted xvi, 4, 5, 15, 49, 50, 68, 100, 105,
brush; Upright brush 113, 118, 122, 128, 136; innovation
Buddhism, xvi, 128; Chan, 15, 144 n. 31 in, 73, 79; intentionality in, 48, 49,
Buddhist: Han Qi as, 93; inscriptions, 67–68, 91; lineages in, 23; “mad cur-
100–105; monks, 97, 98, 107; prac- sive” (kuang cao), 22–23; metropoli-
tice of releasing living creatures, 100, tan, 31, 118; moral significance of, 2,
101, 103, 104. 72, 127, 142; premeditation in, 3;
Buddhist calligraphy. See Diamond Sutra; provincial, 31; regular script (kaishu),
Ponds for the Release of Living Crea- xvii, 1, 18, 35, 70, 73, 91, 113, 114,
tures Throughout the Subcelestial 118, 134, 137, 139; running script
Realm; Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele (xingshu), 26, 47, 73, 75, 91, 113,

171
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172 Index

132; and personality, xiii, xvi, 2, 10, Cui Ling’en, 48

11, 113, 134, 142; seal script (zhuan- Cui Miao, 22
shu), 13, 21–22, 36, 49, 70, 118, Cui Yuan (Han calligrapher), 23, 70
119, 132, 136; unintentionality in, Cui Yuan (Tang minister), 42
67–68, 91; the “Yan style,” xvi, 115,
118, 119, 127, 128, 132, 134. See Daoism, 92, 93, 128, 139; Maoshan, 83;
also Brushwork Shangqing, 83
Cang Jie, 70 Daoist: aesthetic, 91–92; calligraphy, 92;
Cangya, 98 Dongfang Shuo as, 17, 29; fangshi,
Cao Cao, 3 86; female, 83, 86; immortals, xv, 85,
Cao Fu, 87, 88 86, 89, 93; inscriptions, 83–88, 94;
Cen Shen, 36, 37, 78 literatus, 85; Mi Fu as, 91–93;
Centered brush (zhong bi), xv, 49, 70, 72, planchette writing, 92; priests, 94;
81–82, 118 thought, 48, 98; Wang Xizhi as, 15,
Cen Xun, 35 93; Yan Zhenqing as, 86, 87, 89–94
Chang’an, xiv, 26, 33, 34, 35, 39, 40, 44, Daoist sacred sites, xv, 83, 94
51, 62, 89, 96, 111, 117, 118, 123, Decree examinations, 18, 34, 109, 136
142 De yu yi wai (unpremeditated), 68, 92
Changshan, 38–41, 44, 45, 47, 87 Dezhou, 16, 31
Characterology, xiii, xiv, xvii, 1–3, 11, Diamond Sutra: engraved at Mount Tai,
142 30
Cheng Hao, 35 Dictionaries, 97. See Cangya; Qieyun;
Chen Zun, 2 Shuowen jiezi; Yunhai jingyuan
Chunhua ge tie (Model Letters in the Dongfang Shuo, 17, 29, 94, 122
Imperial Archives in the Chunhua Dong Qichang, 24
Era), 5, 10, 68, 105, 107, 128, 139 Dou Ji, 21
Chunxi bige tie (Model Letters in the Dou Meng, 48
Imperial Archives in the Chunxi Era), Draft of the Eulogy for Nephew Jiming,
107 xiv–xv, 44–50, 58, 60, 68, 107, 137,
Chunxi bige xutie (Supplementary Model 139
Letters in the Imperial Archives in the Duan Ziguang, 40, 140
Chunxi Era), 107 Du Du, 23
Chu Suiliang, 4, 18, 68, 132, 135 Du Fu, 22, 50, 52, 53
Cishutang tie, 12 Dugu Ji, 122
Civil service examinations, 5–6, 8, 9, 19, Du Hongjian, 33
26, 33, 123, 134, 135 Du Ji, 123
Cleverness (qiao), 48–50, 68
Clumsiness (zhuo), 2, 48, 49, 50 Egan, Ronald, 10, 68
Collaborative projects in calligraphy: with Emperor Daizong of Tang, xvi, 61–63,
Li Yangbing, 35, 118, 119, 125; with 102–105, 116
Xu Hao, 35; with Yang Wan, 116 Emperor Dezong of Tang, 88, 89, 90, 116,
Collecting of art, xiii. See also Art 117, 129, 141, 142
collections Emperor Gaozong of Song, 47, 108
Concealed brush-tip (cang feng), 118 Emperor Gaozong of Tang, 28
Confucian: aesthetics, 49–50; calligraphy, Emperor Guangzong of Song, 109
xvi, 10, 15, 59, 72, 81, 82, 92, 127, Emperor Huizong of Song, xv, 45, 93
128; classics, 103; education, 6, 98; Emperor Lizong of Song, 113
exemplar, 88; government, xiv, 6–7; Emperor Ming of Liu Song, 4
intellectuals, 34; martyr, 87, 139, Emperor Muzong of Tang, 2, 72
142; monuments, 35; morality, 104, Emperor Renzong of Song, 6, 7, 8, 11,
127, 128, 134, 142; personalities, 132, 134
113; teacher, 35; values, 43–44, 48, Emperor Suzong of Tang, xvi, 41–43, 51,
63, 90, 129 52, 60, 63, 100–105, 111, 123
Confucius, 1, 6, 15, 48, 65, 67; disciples Emperor Taizong of Song, 5
of surnamed Yan, 43, 146 n. 6 Emperor Taizong of Tang, 4, 28, 127
Copying of art, xiii, 69, 73, 111, 113, Emperor Wu of Han, 17
120, 130 Emperor Wu of Liang, 4, 18, 97
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Index 173

Emperor Xiaozong of Song, 109 Guo Ziyi, 41, 62–64, 148 n. 12

Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, xvi, 16, 34, Guwen (ancient-style prose), 9, 126, 127,
36, 39, 41, 43, 65, 86, 94, 117, 118; 128
as calligrapher, 18, 145 n. 10; as
Emperor Minghuang, 52, 136; as Han Qi, xvi, 7, 8, 58, 120, 134
Retired Emperor, 43, 51, 53, 60, 61, Han Si, 17, 31, 32
103, 104 Han Yu, 9; as advocate of return to antiq-
Emperor Yang of Sui, 4 uity, 34, 127, 128; as critic of Wang
Emperor Yingzong of Song, 93 Xizhi, 13–15, 122, 135
Emperor Yuan of Eastern Jin, 94 Haofang (bold and uninhibited), 79
Empress Wu (Southern Song), 47 Helan Jinming, 41
Empress Wu (Tang). See Wu Zetian He Qiannian, 38–39
Empress Zhang (Tang), 52, 53 He Zhizhang, 21
Encomium on a Portrait of Dongfang Huaisu, 22, 23
Shuo, xiv, 17–21, 26–32, 94, 111, Huang Ba, 36
114, 118, 119, 122 Huang Benji, 110, 125
Engraved calligraphy compendia, xvi, 5, Huang Lingwei (Miss Flower), 83, 86, 94,
105, 107–111, 113, 136, 139. See 95
also Changsha tie; Chunhua ge Huang Tingjian, 68: calligraphic style of,
tie; Chunxi bige tie; Chunxi bige 53–54, 72; engraved calligraphy of,
xutie; Cishutang tie; Jiang tie; Ru 108; on Su Shi’s calligraphy, 81–82,
tie; Tan tie; Yuanyou bige xutie; 135; and Yan Zhenqing’s Draft
Zhongyitang tie Eulogy for Nephew Jiming, xv, 48,
Epigraphy, xvi, 10, 12, 13, 31, 107, 113, 50, 58; and Yan Zhenqing’s Letter on
128 the Controversy over Seating Proto-
Eunuchs, 62, 65, 104 col, xv, 58, 66, 67; and Yan Zhen-
Exile, 142; of Han Yu, 9; of Huang qing’s Paean to the Resurgence of the
Tingjian, 50, 58; of Su Shi, 57; of Great Tang Dynasty, 51–54, 58, 59
Yan Zhenqing, xv, 60–61, 65–66, Huangzhou Cold Food Poems, 79
83, 140 Humor, 99
Huzhou, xv, 88, 96–98, 111, 116
Factionalism, 57, 61–63, 129 Huzhou Stone Record, 125
Factions: of Liu Yan, 61, 63, 129; of Yuan
Zai, 61–63, 117 Immortality, xv, 32, 86, 89, 90, 93,
Famine relief, 61 95
Fan Zhongyan, xvi, 7, 8, 120 Imperial ancestor worship, 43, 62, 116,
Fatie. See Engraved calligraphy compendia 117
Fengxiang, 42, 43, 51 Imperial tutor, 111, 129, 136, 140, 141
Feng Yan, 94
Fong, Wen, 91 Jiang tie, 18, 107, 110
Forest of Steles, 24, 35, 67, 124, 125 Jiaoran, xvi, 97–100, 105
Friendships, 34, 98, 105, 146 n. 47 Jiashan, 41
Fugu (return to antiquity), 34 Jigulu (Collected Records of Antiquity),
Fu Shen, 53 13, 114, 115, 120, 122, 127, 128
Fuzhou, 83, 85, 94, 95, 96 Jingju Monastery (Quiet Dwelling Monas-
tery), 122
Gao Lishi, 52, 65 Jing Yu, 61
Gao Miao, 38–39 Jinshilu (Record of Inscriptions on Bronze
Gao Ruonuo, 7 and Stone), 13
Ge (hooked diagonal stroke), 81 Ji Wen, 35
Ge Hong, 85, 86 Jizhou, 41, 66, 83, 122
Geshu Han, 41
Geshu Yao, 141 Lantingxu (Orchid Pavilion Preface), 4,
Guokou, 40 32, 50, 81, 128, 132, 135
Guo Kui, 35 Ledderose, Lothar, 91
Guo Xuji, 35 Letter for Cai Mingyuan, 58, 107, 110,
Guo Yingyi, 62–64, 67 114, 125, 137
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174 Index

Letter on the Controversy over Seating Lu Yanyuan, 23

Protocol, xv, 58, 63–66, 72, 79, 80, Lu Yu, xvi, 97, 98, 105
92, 110, 137 Lü Yijian, 7
Lexicon for Gaining Employment, 3,
123 Magu (Miss Hemp), 85, 86, 95, 151 n. 39
Liang Zhangju, 21 Martyrdom, xvii, 87, 139, 142
Liaoning Provincial Museum, 24 McMullen, David, 117
Li Bai, 35 Mei Yaochen, 13, 134
Li Baoyu, 116 Mencius, 6, 7, 44, 142
Lidui Record of Mr. Xianyu, 56, 61, 119, Meng Jiao, 122
132 Metaphor: calligraphy used in, 72, 81
Li Fuguo, 52, 53, 60, 61, 65 Miao Jinqing, 43
Li Guangbi, 40, 41, 125 Miaoxi Monastery (Profound Joy Monas-
Li Guangjin, 125 tery), 97
Li Hanguang, 94 Mi Fu: as critic of calligraphy, 9, 91, 120,
Li Hua, 33, 34, 35 137, 139; engraved calligraphy of,
Li Jianzhong, 5 108; imitating Yan Zhenqing’s style,
Li Lin, 43 90–91; and Record of the Immortal
Li Longye, Prince of Xue, 33 Duke of Lu, 87–90; and Yan Zhen-
Linchuan, 83, 84 qing’s Letter on the Controversy over
Lingwu, 41, 42, 51 Seating Protocol, xv, 66–68, 90, 92;
Linked verse (lianju), 98, 99, 122, and Yan Zhenqing as Daoist, 87, 88,
151 n. 7 90–92
Li Qi, 22 Minor reform. See Qingli reform
Li Qincou, 38–39 Mi Youren, 113
Liquan, 34 Mortality, 32
Li Si, 101 Moya (cliff engravings), 29, 31
Li Wei, 93, 134
Li Xilie, 87, 88, 89, 136, 140–142 National Gallery of Art, xiv
Li Yangbing, 35, 36, 118, 125 National Palace Museum, Taiwan, 45,
Liu, James T. C., 10 134, 139
Liu Chang, 134; and epigraphy, 12, 13,
109; and Yan Zhenqing’s collected “Old-age style,” 118, 127, 135, 136
writings, 109 Orchid Pavilion Preface. See Lantingxu
Liu Gong, 3 Ouyang Wei, 123
Liu Gongquan, 2, 72, 120, 139 Ouyang Xiu, 56, 58, 93, 134: as advocate
Liu Niangzi, 47 of return to antiquity, 34, 127; as
Liu Yan, 61, 102, 129 anti-Buddhist, 90; as calligraphy
Liu Yuangang, xvi, 78, 109, 111, 113, critic, xv, xvi, 10, 11, 111, 120, 125,
115, 130, 139 134–137; as collector, xvi, 79, 114,
Liu Zhan, 60 115, 120, 122, 123, 127, 128, 137,
Liu Zheng, 109 139; engraved calligraphy of, 108;
Liu Zhengchen, 41, 42, 100 and epigraphy, 12, 13, 109, 128; and
Liu Zongyuan, 127 factionalism, 57, 129; and historiog-
Lizhou, 61, 102 raphy, 10, 109, 127; and literature,
Longxing Monastery, 141 10, 68, 70, 126; as political reformer,
Lou Yue, 77 7–8, 58; on Yan Zhenqing, 82, 127,
Loyalty, xvii, 11, 40, 42, 44, 57, 58, 62, 128. See also Jigulu
82, 87, 89, 90, 109, 129, 142 Ouyang Xun, 4, 68, 135, 136
Lu Jianzhi, 23 Owen, Stephen, 11
Luofu Mountains, 89
Luoyang, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 44, 60, 89, Paean to the Resurgence of the Great Tang
96, 117, 140 Dynasty, 51–55, 58, 59, 123, 126,
Luo Zhenyu, 125 135, 136
Luozhong jiyi (Record of Prodigies in the Painting, 128
Luo Region), 87, 89 Palace Library, 34, 97, 109, 116, 117
Lu Qi, 88, 89, 90, 136, 140, 141 Parallel prose, 9, 128
INDEX Page 175 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

Index 175

Pei Min, 77, 78 Shiwen (current-style prose), 9

Pengzhou, 61, 102, 104 Shu duan (Calligraphy Judgments), 135
Personality and art, xiii, xvi, 11, 134, 142 Shuowen jiezi, 48, 98
pingdan (blandness), 68, 73, 79, 80, 91 Shupu, 18
Ping Lie, 17 Shu shi (History of Calligraphy), 9
Pingyuan, 16–17, 29, 30, 32, 37, 38–45, Shusun Tong, 130, 155 n. 42
87, 98–100, 136, 140 Shu xin hua ye (writing is the delineation
Poem for General Pei, 75, 77–80, 110, of the mind), 1
113, 149 n. 37 Sima Guang, 66
Poetry, 83, 98, 99, 116, 128. See also Du Sima Qian, 1, 142
Fu; Linked verse; Poem for General Slanted brush (ce bi), xv, 49, 70, 72, 81,
Pei; yongwu poetry; Yuefu poetry 118
Politics: of calligraphic style, xv, 1, 113, Song Jing, 35
118 Song Minqiu, 77, 109, 134
Ponds for the Release of Living Creatures Song Shou, 109: and calligraphy, 9, 120;
Throughout the Subcelestial Realm, and epigraphy, 12
xvi, 100–105, 111 “Song of the Stone Drums, The” (Shiguge),
Prabhutaratna Pagoda Stele, 35, 118, 135 13
Prince Yi (Zhu Youbin), 85, 123 Spirit Way Stele for Yan Qinli, 124–125
Pugu Huaien, 61–62 Sponsorship: of engraved calligraphy
Puzhou, 44, 60 compendia, 105–110, 113, 136;
of schools, 6; of subordinates, 8
Qianfu Monastery, 35 Stele for Zhang Jingjin, 123–124
Qieyun, 97, 98, 151 n. 6 Su Shi, 135; on Cai Xiang’s calligraphy,
Qin dynasty: first emperor of, 101; stone 82; calligraphic style, 81; compared
steles, 12, 101 to Yan Zhenqing, 82; as copyist, xv,
Qinghe, 42 54–56, 59, 69, 73, 81, 134; as critic,
Qingli reform, 7–9, 57, 73 xiv, 18, 21; engraved calligraphy of,
Qiyang, 50 108; and epigraphy, 13; as official,
Qosu Khan. See Geshu Han 66; as Ouyang Xiu’s protégé, 73; and
Ouyang Xiu’s “Record of Enjoying
Raoyang, 38, 40 Rich Harvests Pavilion,” 55, 56, 58,
Raozhou, 60 134; as student of Yan Zhenqing’s
Record of the Altar of the Immortal of style, 58; and Yan Zhenqing’s Letter
Mount Magu, xv, 84, 85, 94, 110, on the Controversy over Seating
120, 122, 123, 135, 136 Protocol, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 79,
Reformers: and calligraphy, xv–xvii, 15, 80, 134; and Yan Zhenqing’s Lidui
49, 58, 59, 82, 109, 134, 137, 139 Record of Mr. Xianyu, 56, 58; and
Reputation, 128; of Ouyang Xiu, 57; of Yan Zhenqing’s Poem for General
Su Shi, 57; of Xianyu Zhongtong, 58, Pei, 79, 80; and Yan Zhenqing’s
61; of Yan Zhenqing, xiii, xvii, 15, Ponds for the Release of Living Crea-
17, 58, 87, 90, 128 tures Throughout the Subcelestial
Request for Rice Letter, 110, 114, 125, Realm, 104
137 Su Shunyuan, 132
Ritual: at court, 43, 62, 64, 65 Su Yijian, 5
Ruan Yuan, 27 Sun Chengze, 29
Ru tie, 107, 110 Sun Di, 33, 34
Sun Guoting, 18
Seductive beauty (zi mei), 13–14, 70, 122,
135 Taiping guangji (Extensive Records of the
Shanghai Museum, 85 Grand Tranquility Reign), 87
Shan Tao, 130, 155 n. 42 Tan tie, 107, 152 n. 30
Shen Chuanshi, 68, 135, 136 Tang yu lin (Forest of Tang Legends),
Shi Manqing, 120 87
Shiqu baoji, 24 Tao Hongjing: as calligraphy connoisseur,
Shiqu baoji xubian, 47 18
Shi Siming, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 63, 100 Tiancheng (natural perfection), 91
INDEX Page 176 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:58 AM

176 Index

Tianshi Dao (Way of the Celestial Master), Xiahou Zhan, 17, 122
93, 94 Xian li zhuan (Biographies of Immortal
Tiaoti, 91 Officials), 86
Tibetan armies, 61–62 Xian Qin guqi ji, 12
Tieweishan congtan, 93 Xianyu Shu, 45, 47
Tiger Hill Monastery, 110 Xianyu Zhongtong, 56, 57, 58, 61
Tong Pass, 41 Xiao Cun, 98, 122, 152 n. 8
Tongzhou, 43 Xiao Yingshi, 33, 34, 122, 152 n. 8
Toyama Gunji, 21 Xiazhou, 65
Tumen Pass, 38–41, 45 Xie Lingyun, 85, 99
Twelve Concepts of the Brush Method Xikun chouchang ji, 10
of Administrator Zhang, 23, “Xikun style,” 10, 128
137 Xi Shi, 81, 149 n. 39
Xi Xia, 7, 8
Upright brush (zheng bi), xv, xvi, 2, 29, Xuanhe shupu (Calligraphy Catalog of the
49, 70, 72 Xuanhe Era), 13, 47, 66, 136–137,
139
Values: Confucian, 1, 43, 44, 48, 104 Xue Ji, 68
Xu Hao: as calligrapher, 35, 36, 68, 81,
Wang Anshi, 9 135, 136; as critic, 21
Wang Chengye, 39, 45, 47 Xu Shu duan (Sequel to Calligraphy Judg-
Wang Chong, 2 ments), 13, 135–137
Wang Dang, 87 Xu Xian zhuan (Sequel to the Biographies
Wang Gongchen, 8 of Immortals), 86–87, 90
Wang Sengqian, 3 Xu Xuan, 5
Wang Shen, 93
Wang Su, 8 Yan Family Temple Stele, xvi, 117, 118,
Wang Wei, 78 120, 125, 130, 135, 136
Wang Xianzhi, 5, 9, 23, 70, 91, 92, 93, Yan Gaoqing, 38–39, 44, 45, 87, 141
135; in engraved calligraphy com- Yang Guifei, 16
pendia, 107 Yang Guozhong, 16, 35, 39, 41
Wang Xiu, 18 Yang Lien-sheng, 10
Wang Xizhi, 11, 23, 70, 92, 93, 128, Yang Renkai, 24
134, 135, 137; calligraphic style of, Yang Wan, 116
xvi, 13, 20, 49–50, 120, 122, 132; Yang Xi, 83
and cursive script, 23; in engraved Yang Xiong, 1
calligraphy compendia, 107, 132; Yang Yan, 61, 116, 129
On General Yue Yi, 128; his Enco- Yan Han, 94, 96
mium on a Portrait of Dongfang Yan Jiming, 39, 44
Shuo, xiv, 18–21, 29, 31–32, Yan Jun, 111, 116, 141, 142
145 n. 12; imperial sponsorship Yan Pei, 16
of his style, 4, 5, 11, 15, 49, 68, Yan Po, 41, 99, 100
113, 120, 122, 128; taught in Yan Qinli, 124
imperial academy, 29; use of slanted Yan Quanming, 39, 44, 45
brush technique, xv, 81. See also Yan Shigu, 33, 136
Lantingxu Yan Shuo, 116, 141, 142
Wang Zhu, 5, 105 Yan Weizhen, 21, 28, 33, 111, 117, 125
Wei Dan, 122 Yan Xie, 94
Wei Di, 34 Yan Yanzhi, 94, 99
Wei Huacun, 83, 86 Yan Yu, 111, 123
Wei Shu, 21, 34 Yan Yuansun, 28, 33, 34, 36, 111, 123;
Wen xuan, 19 eulogy for, 60, 67
Wu Daozi, 70 Yan Yunnan, 33, 43, 125, 137, 145 n. 10
Wuxin (no-mind), 68 Yan Yunzang, 33, 43, 95
Wuyi (unintentional), 67 Yan Zhaofu, 28, 33, 111
Wu Zetian, 6, 28 Yan Zhending, 33
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Index 177

Yan Zhenqing: and bandit relief, 60; calli- Yuan Gao, 97

graphic style of, xiii, xvi, 15, 20, 53, Yuan Jie, 34, 35, 50–53, 59, 123, 126,
73–74, 115, 120; and clan style of 127
calligraphy, 26–28, 79; collected Yuan Lüqian, 38, 44
writings of, 109, 122; descendants of, Yuanyou bige xutie (Supplementary
109; and famine relief, 61; imitation Model Letters in the Imperial
of calligraphic style of, 9, 120, 132; Archives in the Yuanyou Era), 107
immortality of, 89, 90, 93; “old-age Yuanyou period, 66
style” of, 118, 127; regular script of, Yuan Zai, 61–62, 65, 116, 117
26, 90, 91, 114, 118, 120; running Yu Chaoen, 62, 64
script of, 26, 91, 92; seal script of, Yu Jing, 7–8
119; temple to, 87, 90; and Zhang Yu Shao, 129
Xu, 21–26, 33, 36, 78, 79, 137 Yu Shinan, 4, 23, 48, 68, 135, 136
Yan Zhenqing (chronology): administra- Yuefu poetry, 99
tive aide in Xiazhou and Jizhou, 65– Yunhai jingyuan (Sea of Rhymes, Mirror
66, 102; commandery governor of of Sources), 97, 98, 122, 151 n. 40
Pingyuan, 16, 38–42; early appoint-
ments in Chang’an, 34–35; early edu- Zeng Gong, 90, 96
cation, 26, 33; examinations taken, Zhang Huaiguan, 135
33, 34; family background, 33; his Zhang Jian, 99, 141
mother, Lady Yin, 33, 34, 96, 111; Zhang Xu, xiv, 21–26, 33, 36, 78, 137
mission to rebels and death, 140– Zhang Yan, 45
142; prefect of Fuzhou, 83, 85, 94– Zhang Zhi, 23, 70
96, 102; prefect of Huzhou, 96–100, Zhao Kuangyin, 5
102, 123, 125; prefect of Raozhou Zhaoling, 28
and Shengzhou, 60; prefect of Tong- Zhao Lingkun, 93
zhou and Puzhou, 43–44; service in Zhao Mengfu, 47
Chang’an (762–766), 61, 62, 65, Zhao Mingcheng, 13
102; service in Chang’an (777–783), Zhao Yi, 2–3
116–117, 129–130; service in Zhao Zhongyuan, 93
Sichuan, 60–61; study with Zhang Zhiyong, 4, 23
Xu, 21–26, 33, 36 Zhongyitang tie (Hall of Loyalty and
Yan Zhitui, 16, 33, 98 Righteousness Compendium), xvi,
Ye Mengde, 93, 110 77, 78, 105, 106, 109–115, 123, 125,
yi bu zai zi (unintentional characters), 68 130
Yin Jianyou, 21, 33, 34 Zhong You, 101
Yin Liang, 40, 43, 94, 117, 144 n. 2 Zhou Mi, 47
Yin Lüzhi, 33 Zhou Yue, 132, 155 n. 45
Yin Shu, 7, 13 Zhuangzi, 48, 67
Yin Zhongrong, 27–29, 31, 36 Zhu Changwen, 13, 135–137
Yin Zijing, 33, 96 Zhu Ci, 141
Yin Ziqi, 42 Zhu Guantian, 29, 30
yongwu poetry, 99 Zhu Xi, 3, 72, 109
youyi (intentional), 68 Zishu gaoshen (Self-Written Announce-
Youzhou, 17, 38, 41, 100 ment of Office), 111, 130
Yuan Dexiu, 35
ABOUT Page 179 Monday, September 24, 2001 11:51 AM

About the Author

Amy McNair received her doctorate from the University of Chicago. She is
currently assistant professor of Chinese art at the University of Kansas.

179