Wang Guowei discovers Qin Fu Yin in Dunhuang
3 min readThe Longest Tang Epic Qin Fu Yin (Song of a Lady of Qin) Lost a Thousand Years Ago
Qin Fu Yin is a long epic of Wei Zhuang,a famous Tang poet. It is one of the rarest great works of classical poetry and is over 1,600 characters in length. It was long lost and not included in the Complete Collection of the Tang Poetry. At th beginning of 20th century, Wang Guowei came across it in the Dunhuang manuscriptsand made it public, which caught the attention of the literary world. There are bynow 9 copies found in the manuscripts unearthed from the Library Cave, among them P.3381 is the earliest version. It was only 22 years after the poem had been written, so it is a precious copy rather close to the original.
Another copy was made 60 to 70 years after the poet’s death, so from here we can see how popular thepoem was and therefore it is of important literary and documentary value. This poem depicts, through the mouth of a woman captured by Huang Chao’s soldiers, the conditions of Chang’ an before and after Huang Chao’s troops entered the city. The poet witnessed the upheavals of the era in which he suffered a great deal from the drifts from place to place. With the realistic technique of masterly generalization, he put history and emotion into the lines of his poem composed at one stretch anddemonstrated the grand scene of history and as a result deeply reflected the real conditions of the Tang society with the impact of peasant rebellions at the end of the dynasty.
There are more literary data similar to this in the Dunhuang manuscripts and they may be generally divided into two types:1) Anthologies of poems and essays headed by Book of Songs and Wen Xuan (General Anthology of Prose and Verse), including Yu Tai Xin Yong (New Chants from Jade Terrace), Zhu Ying Xue Shi Ji (Poems Collected by Grand Academicians of Zhuying), and Collected Tang Poems containing poems and essays untitled, individual anthologies of poems like Gu Chen Zi’ ang Yi Ji (Posthumous Anthology of Late Chen Zi’ ang), Collected Poems of Bai Juyi, Li Qiao Za Yong Zhu(Annotation to Miscellaneous Chants of Li Qiao), and classical literary works like Wen Xin Diao Long (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons). Thoughfragmentary, their precious value cannot be neglected even if they consist of a fewlines or dozens of lines.2) Literary research-related data concerning the genres of pop literature and folk literature. Chanting works or vernacular poems, ci (lyric) popular prose, story-telling scripts, and novels represented by bianwen are novel data groups greatly different from traditional orthodox literature. The so-called bianwen,a popular form of chanting and storytelling based on Buddhist sutras, history, biography, classics and records. It is an indispensable style in the development of Chinese literary history. Therefore, it had caught great attention upon discovery.
The amount of literary works of Dunhuang, the variety of genres, and the wealth and color of thought and artistic features make Dunhuang literature a phenomenon with important value of appreciation and academic research. What is most evident is that they are helpful in solving some problems in the history of Chinese literature.
