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fwoopersongs · 1 year

Text

己酉元日 - First Day of Ji-You

by 陆游 (Lu You, 1125 to 1210)

夜雨解残雪朝阳开积阴 yè yǔ jiě cán xuě zhāo yáng kāi jī yīn Night rain melts what was left of the snow, the morning sun parts accumulated cold.

桃符呵笔写椒酒过花斟 táofú hē bǐ xiě jiāojiǔ guò huā zhēn Peachwood blessings, with brush breath-warmed, written; pepper-wine amongst the flowers, poured.

巷柳摇风早街泥溅马深 xiàng liǔ yáo fēng zǎo jiē ní jiàn mǎ shēn Alley willows sway in the early wind, street mud splashing, deepen the horse's coat.

行宫放朝贺共识慕尧心 xínggōng fàng cháo hè gòngshì mù yáo xīn The Travel-Palace opens for the Court's Greetings, so all may know admiration for our virtuous lord.

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NOTES

I've been procrastinating on my original intended New Year poem because I had a feeling the notes for that will be really long xD Oops. But THIS is another homework poem! And a cheerful one to make up for the last (sorry Li Yu lolol).

TITLE

I love this title because it immediately tells us exactly when this poem is set, if not when exactly it was written. Years in Lu You’s time were numbered by the sexagenary cycle, better known as 干支 (gān zhī) or stems & branch, in which a full cycle consisted of sixty combinations of the heavenly stems and earthly branches, representing sixty years. Here is a lovely explanation of how this works.

The Stem-Branch year was usually paired with the Emperor’s era name to identify which year it was. In this case, we only know it was a 己酉 Ji-You year (46th in the cycle)... but we also have Lu You’s birth and death years 1125 to 1210. Comparing that with the list of Ji-You years, we see that there were two Ji-You years in his lifetime. One in 1129 when he was four, and the other in 1189 when he was sixty four. And though he could compose poetry and essays by the age of twelve, I doubt he could have written this at four years old xD

It turns out that despite my confusion, 元旦 is actually an alternate name of 元日, though what we now call the first day of the new agricultural calendar year is 元旦. A quick search of ctext's historical records and compilation sections returned 295 results from both pre and post Qin-Han periods for 元日, while 元旦 returned only 19 from Han and after. This made me SUPER curious because 元旦 is one of the names we know the first day of New Year by these days. Could it actually be newly adopted?

So a deeper dive into the results! 元日 was used as 'first day of the first month' in 《书·舜典》, a chapter of the Book of Documents which was a collection of rhetorical prose attributed to figures of ancient China. It was supposedly compiled by Kongzi (551- 479 BCE) in the 6th or 5th century BCE. Meanwhile, the earliest mention of 元旦 was in《太平御览》Readings of the Taiping Era, which was an encyclopedic document commissioned by the Song Imperial Court that took six years to complete, from 977 to 983 CE. The term 正旦, used in《列子·说符》to refer to the first day of the new year may have been an inspiration for the term. However, 元旦 as we know it in modern times, was in fact first used by Sun Yat Sen in 1912, on the 1st of January as he dated his signoff for the document《临时大总统宣言书》Inaugural Address of the Provisional President. However, this was not the official naming of this day yet. That came in 1949, on the 27th of September, as a result of the first Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (x).

BACKGROUND

Since we can infer that the title refers to new year’s day in 1189, let’s have a look at what was happening during this period.

Do note that the source used is Baidu, though it seems fairly well researched from what I saw of it (checked only the relevant references for this section xD). I appreciate their dedication to putting together such a detailed timeline from a variety of records and documents!

Some ten years prior in 1179, Lu You had resigned from his post of Changping Supervisor (over granaries) when an official impeached him for insufficient restraint and crossing lines, referencing his actions of ordering for granaries in the commandery to be opened for disaster relief during the Jiangxi floods. He retired to Shanyin, where he had grown up, for five years. In 1186, he was given the post of Yan Prefecture’s Prefect, and was very popular with the people. During this time, he compiled his works in《剑南诗稿》Jiannan Poetry Manuscripts - so titled because he had lived there (Jiannan) for some time and loved it so. Two years later in 1188, his term of office was up. In the seventh month of that year, Lu You returned to the capital and was promoted to the position of Vice Director of Weapons and Military Equipment.

It was Emperor Xiaozong who was in power at that time. He had only just taken full power in 1187 after the death of Taishanghuang Emperor Gaozong (who had remained the de facto ruler despite abdication in 1162), and himself abdicated in the second month of 1189, in favour of his son who became Emperor Guangzong.

I don’t really have the energy to dig deeper than this HAHAAHA, but all in all, it doesn’t seem like a bad time? Things are even looking up, at least for Lu You.

POEM

This one is a five character (eight line) regulated verse known as a 五言律诗 (wǔ yán lǜshī). Here’s a great page on this poetry form.

The parallels in Chinese poems are so neat! I love night rain vs morning sun, remaining/leftover snow vs. accumulated cold/darkness, and especially 解 (jiě) - probably short for 溶解 (róngjiě), melt, but by itself also meaning ‘untie’ and 开 (kāi) which I translated as part, but can also be ‘open’. So simple but effective setting the scene for Winter bowing out for Spring to come in. The first day of the new year marks the beginning of a new sexagenary cycle, it is also known by 立春 (lì chūn) Spring Commences, the first solar term.

In the beginning, 桃符 (táofú), peach wood amulets, were the engraved door god carvings of Shen Tu 神荼 and Yu Lei 郁垒 who were sent by the Emperor of Heaven to guard people from evil spirits. At first it was just them and their names that were written or carved into the peachwood, but gradually it became the trend to also write blessings as well. Meng Chang, ruler of Later Shu of the Five Dynasties Ten Kingdoms period, later in 964, became the first person to write a couplet on the peachwood. This was the earliest form of what came to be known as 春联(chūn lián), Spring Festival Couplets. By the Song Dynasty, writing Spring Festival Couplets had become customary for new year festivities. It was one of two options, one was the door gods, the other were auspicious couplets.

Do you know the !!!! excitement I felt when I saw 呵笔 (hē bǐ) and immediately imagined 一气呵成 (yīqìhēchéng)? It was such a confident, calm and awesome mental image of someone writing their paired couplet soooooo smoothly, in a single breath, that I was almost disappointed to find 呵笔 was a real word for describing the action of warming the brush with one’s breath from the mouth. But actually, it brought such a down-to-earth and everyday picture to the table that I was charmed instead.

How can there be festivities without wine? There is, of course, 椒酒 (jiāojiǔ) which is a type of alcohol infused with pepper and cypress leaves, drunk in the spirit of warding off illnesses and other nasty things.

With the arrival of the season of Spring, people awaken and begin to busy themselves going about their usual practice and rituals. In the house of an educated and cultured man like Lu You, the couplets were likely written by himself. How fun!

Besides the home activities, there is also another important event for court officials. And that is… respect to be paid to the Emperor; to bow, greet and offer their congratulations for the New Year. And that is how we get the next line taking us to the streets, with willows swaying in the morning breeze and melted snow turned to so much mud in the streets. The horses, perhaps pulling carriages, are splashed with the mud, and hence their coats darken under that. Can I just say, 溅马深 (jiàn mǎ shēn) is such a lovely and interesting way to phrase it!

I could not for the life of me figure out why the officials are having to be let in (i.e. 放行) in a 行宫 (xíng gōng), travel-palace of all places for their annual 朝贺 (cháo hè), and I continue to be confused. After a bit of poking around, I found that later in 1189, after Emperor Xiaozong abdicated for Emperor Guangzong, he moved to live in Deshou Palace like his adoptive father Emperor Gaozong before him. Emperor Xiaozong renamed the main body of Deshou Palace as Chong Hua Palace. The remaining part had been renamed Cifu Palace before and was occupied by Empress Wu, wife of Emperor Gaozong. Perhaps he had moved in in advance and was testing out the area?

Anyway, I think seeing the grand picture of officials all lined up in neat rows downstream, paying their respects to the emperor in one voice - that surely is the best way to establish publicly known facts 共识 (gòngshì), that the Emperor is respected by all. And for good measure, he throws in 尧心 (yáo xīn), which is what we call a sagacious ruler. One who is as wise and as virtuous as the Emperor Yao.

Add on because I was too sleepy last night to write the closing paragraph:

LOVE that we get to peek into new year activities this way in the capital of Southern Song. I like to think of this as the equivalent of a preserved instagram photo in that it is a snapshot of several memorable moments in a day, and probably was a trendy thing to do for many people (who could i.e. had that education, training and interest) in that time. Often wonder how these got shared. Do writers keep it at home for themselves, do they show it to their friends during parties, compile it in a collection and bind it for the year? I believe humans have always been humans, and whatever was done, it can't be that far from what we do now!

#己酉元日 #陆游 #oh my gosh #now it's really time to sleep!!!!!!#goodnight all ~#commentary #poems

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