The Tang is a wonderful period for you to start thinking about using different kinds of historical sources. By the end of this week, you’ll have looked at poems, inscriptions, and government documents. As historians, how do we bring such documents together for sound analysis? This week, I want you to do exactly that.
I also want to give you a lot of freedom to explore for this week’s discussion. Choose one of the following options, write a post, and then respond in 2–3 sentences to someone else’s post.
1. Read through this week’s readings (including the website of Chinese poems) and select a Tang poem that speaks to you. Try to pick one that hasn’t been selected by another person yet (unless you have a very different interpretation). Otherwise, any poem is fine. Share the poem (if it’s long, a few lines will suffice) and tell us why you selected it. In your post, add at least one historical detail that you discern from the poem. Try to challenge yourself and look things up.
One place to start for inspiration is Edward Schafer’s The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics. The language in this book is a bit dated, but it is a classic of historical scholarship and it’s really fun to read. Schafer reconstructs a wide range of things and objects that people in the Tang dynasty understood as “exotic.” I’ve given you the chapters on food and wild animals, but there are other chapters on aromas, plants, images, etc. How does he manage to reconstruct past knowledge? In part, he relies upon Tang poems.
So this week, pick up where Schafer left off. Pick a poem and analyze it as a historian: who wrote it, why was it written, and what does it tell you about the culture, economy, or politics of the time? It is also good, even welcome, to acknowledge the practical limitations of a source in your response.
2. In 819, Han Yu composed his notorious “Memorial on the Bone of the Buddha” (See Hawaii reader). Not long before, the Leshan Giant Buddha was completed. Take stock of the readings for Session 14 and compose a post about the status of Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty. Through reading these sources, what do you perceive to be Buddhism’s social, legal, and/or political status in Tang China? Put another way, how did different classes of people engage Buddhism in Tang China?
These are big and complex questions, so feel free to hedge your answers a bit. Note that for this question, you can also bring in Tang poems—many of which touch on Buddhist themes (see the poetry of Wang Wei, for instance). You could also bring in the Wu Zetian reading from the previous week.
3. One of the consistent themes of this course has been the often blurred lines among “myth,” “memory,” and “history.” The story of Yang Guifei fits precisely into the longstanding historiographical trope of “powerful women who brought crisis upon a ruling house.” But Yang Guifei’s story is also like no other in China’s long history. Bai Juyi’s epic poem about her romance with Emperor Xuanzong, composed around fifty years after Yang Guifei’s dramatic assassination, instantly became the most renowned and celebrated account of their affair. It is also somewhat sympathetic to Yang.
Read through Bai Juyi’s poem. How might you read it as a work of history and as a work of fiction? Do any clues in the poem point one way or another? You might also bring the case of Yang Guifei in conversation with Wu Zetian—considering for instance that two of the most famous women (and two of the most enigmatic personalities more generally) in China’s history lived within a generation of each other.
