The Subject:     The true s

The Artist:     Tao Gu's Qing-i-lu [Ch'ing-i-lu, T'ao Ku], a Song collection of expressions from the Tang and Five Dynasties and arranged by subject matter, includes the following:
        The wealth of General Censor Sun Cheng-yu [Ch'eng-yu] of Wu-yue [Wu-yüeh, in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces] threatened to overthrow the dynasty.  He had acquired a shi-lu [shih-lü] rock [malachite] at the price of a thousand pieces of gold.  Nature had formed it under stresses so that it resembled a mountain.  [Sun] ordered a craftsman to make an incense burner of the bo-shan type from it.  At the summit of the peak a hidden hold was arranged so that the smoke could emerge...  He called it Bu-er-shan [Pu-erh-shan] (Mountain without peer)...
        Sun Cheng-yu...spent a great deal on curious objects.  He had a little model of Mount Li, the tomb of Qin Shi Huang Di [sic], made of Borneo camphor [Dryobalanops aromatica Gaertn.; lung-nao] and boiled fermented milk.  The landscape, houses, people, animals, forests, bridges, and highways -- all were represented in detail.  

        The Song dynasty had poems describing penwan as well as literature on how to form them.  Many books were written about artistic pot plants during this time, and dwarfed tree growers began to add landscape and figurines to their trees.  Even before the year 1000 the training of penzai is discussed in specialist literature.  

        One author, Su Xun [Su Hsün] (1009-1066, style name or hao Laochuan [Lao-ch'üan], and courtesy name or tzu Ming-yun [Ming-yün]), was primarily a political essayist and his chief works consist of a number of penetrating essays on various themes in politics, history, and government.  Taken as a whole, they offer a realistic but unorthodox critique of the manipulative and restraining Confucian social idealogy.
        Coming from an obscure provincial family in southwest Sichuan, and armed with an impressive though improbable genealogy stressing social virtue over class distinction, Su married an able and industrious woman of the wealthy Ch'eng clan.  She supported him by running a clothing store during his early wanderings and his later studies.  It was only after his son, Su Shi (below), was born that Su Xun, nearly thirty, finally began to study for the official examinations.  He failed twice, in 1038 and 1047, and never again dared to face the examiners.  This shock, however, did inspire him to seclude himself for eight years to study the works of Confucius, Mencius, and all of the "sages and worthies" of Chinese history.
        At last he reached a sort of "sudden illumination," after which he feverishly wrote down his thought in the essays that established his fame.  Certain high officials during his later years praised the works of Su as models for the new prose style they advocated as a basis for reforming Confucian literature, scholarship, and the examination system.  Subsequently, Su's rhetorical style continued to receive high praise in standard anthologies, but his political ideas were passed over for having gone beyond the bounds of the orthodox Neo-Confucian consensus.
        Su narrates in an essay -- "Mu jiashan ji (Note on an artificial mountain in wood)" [Mu chia-shan chi] -- his visit to an artificial wood-hill, a miniature "wood garden" formed by the trunk and roots of a big tree, still extant in Sichuan: 
        All trees undergo disasters.  They are cut down and uprooted; they rot, break, and so on, and "the most fortunate are those that, either floating or submerged in water and sand for I know not how many hundreds of years, are attacked and eaten into and sometimes end up looking like a mountain.  For these are then gathered by collectors who make them with skill into a mountain on a small scale.  From that moment on they have escaped the mud and the axe."
        The expression "make them with skill" shows that natural resemblance alone was not enough.  By this time the intervention of a craftsman was sometimes needed and apparently not frowned upon or seen as destroying the value/symbolism of the piece.  
        Su Shi (1037-1101, hao or pen name Su Dongpo [Su Tung-p'o]; tzu, Zi-zhan [Tzu-chan]), was born to a family of scholarly distinction in a town situated at the foot of Mt. Omei in Sichuan.  His mother was an educated woman from a prominent family and a devout Buddhist.  With his father (above) and younger brother he made up the so-called "Three Sus," who were among the Eight Great Prose Masters of the Tang and Song dynasties.  Su Shi was one of the few Chinese literati to have mastered virtually all literary and artistic forms -- poetry, prose essays, calligraphy, and painting.  His shi, the standard form of classical Chinese poetry, was known for its spontaneity.  About 2400 shi poems by Su are extant today, most of them explicit descriptions of the poet's actual experiences.  
        In a way similar to Du Fu, Su Shi's literary experiences were enriched by his many political setbacks.  Though Su and his father -- as well as most thinking men of the time -- knew reforms were needed in the government, his criticisms of the emperor and the reformist Grand Councillor Wang An-shi resulted in repeated demotions to insignificant provincial posts and exile to remote places, such as Hainan Island (south of mainland China).  Although Su disagreed with Wang's political opinions, he bore no grudge against the Grand Councillor himself.  The two actually visited and exchanged poems in later years.
        All his life he moved from place to place, post to post.  Thus, the theme of separation stands out powerfully in his poetry.  Despite these sad experiences, Su manifested in his literature a transcendental outlook that rose above momentary human sorrow.  His genuine interest in life made it possible for him to be optimistic even in difficult times.  For example, he was exiled to Huang-zhou between 1080 and 1083, and life was so valuable to him there that he began to call himself Dongpo ("Eastern Slope") after the name of the lonely five-acre farm on which he lived and worked hard to revitalize.  (He may have adopted the sobriquet out of admiration for two poems by Po Chü-i which were written in 820 in Sichuan and entitled "Planting Flowers at the Eastern Slope.")  The farm was an abandoned army camp and there was a severe drought that year.  
        Su was also the central figure of the literati school of painting.  He often compared the art of painting to that of poetry, saying that both should, like streaming water, run spontaneously.  He once remarked that to talk about painting in terms of likeness is simply to show one's ignorance.  The ideas of the literati were not universally accepted, however, for the above statement was greeted with indignation by one writer: "Anyone who doesn't catch a likeness might as well not paint at all."  Such criticism had little effect on the literati, who painted neither for the public nor for patrons.  Painting for themselves and their friends, they refused to sell their pictures, but instead gave them away as gifts.  The literati also did not use their poems in the usual manner -- to pass examinations for government positions.
        Su also lived on an estate named Chou-chi [Ch'ou-ch'ih], after a famous site in Gansu province.  That was a particular mountain, also associated with Peng-lai, which was topped by a lake.  A flat area closed off on all four sides by high walls surrounded the body of water.  This especially perfect separate world was said to have had a cavern which connected the underground with Xiao-yu [Hsiao-yü], the first of the cave-heavens.  Su chose as the emblem of his retreat a holy place above all others, a land of immortals and good for mystical wanderings.  To further the symbolism he then bought a green and white stone, which he also called Chou-chi.  Another stone he acquired was specifically named "Xiao-yu.  At its base he constructed a holder and, whenever incense was burned there, clouds filled the peaks after rising through the many passages.
        For a very large price he bought yet another stone, Jiu-hua (Nine Splendid [Objects]) [Chiu-hua].  It resembled a mountain in Anhui famous for its nine peaks, which together look like a lotus.  For this miniature rock he composed a poem:

        Another verse, dated equivalent to 1092, is "A Pair of Rocks, with Introduction"
        When I came to Yang-chou I acquired two rocks.  One is green in color, like a long range of mountain peaks, with a cave in it extending all the way to the back of the rock.  The other is pure white and can be used as a mirror.  I filled a basin with water and set them in it near my desk.  Then suddenly I recalled how one day when I was in Ying-chou I dreamed that a man came and asked me to head a certain government office, and the plaque on the office read 'Ch'ou Lake.'  When I woke up, I recited to myself Tu Fu's lines:

 
        An alternate translation of this, as "Poem About Two Stones," is as follows:

         One other poem written by Su Shi contains the following lines:

        Zhao Xihu introduced techniques for miniature landscape creation in the chapter "Guai Shi (Grotesque Rocks)" of his book Dong Tian Qing Lu. 1

The Artist:        Kui ling (12th century), literary appellation Wang Shipeng, described a penjing in the rock-grown style in his "Yan Song Ji (About a Pine on a Rock)":
        The roots embrace the rock like a fist.  The tree grows profusely without any signs of decay.  It is small yet displays the posture of a grand tree.  Its needles resemble the cypress, its frame the pine.  The contour is majestic.  A feeling of reaching into the sky and covering the ground is conveyed.  This kind of scene may be presented in an area the size of a palm.  
        Lu Yu (1125-1210), hao Feng-wang, tzu (style or courtesy name) Wu-kuan, was the most prolific lyric poet of the Southern Song dynasty.  He wrote more than 9000 shih poems during 65 years of mature creativity.  Shih was the loosely applied name for a variety of specific verse forms in classical Chinese poetry.
        Learning how to write poetry and how to play the role of a poet by studying and appropriating almost the entire Chinese poetic tradition, he then blended it with his own experiences to create a powerful personal statement.  Du Fu was his favorite poet.
        Romantically pro-war all his life, he strongly criticized the peace policies of Song emperors in hundreds of poems.  He was patriotic with traditional loyalty to the Chinese empire, looking forward to the re-establishment of the glory that was Han and the grandeur that was Tang.
        Lu Yu was a serious student of the Confucian classics and an ardent practitioner of Daoist meditation and alchemy.  This was balanced in his poems by his great love for the Chinese countryside and his identification with the simple but difficult life of the rural people.  The physical presence of nature -- the Chinese landscape -- is never far from his poetic expression.  His entire life and thought is presented in his verse as the working out of the creative tension between the culturally conditioned and contradictory demands of Confucian loyalty and public service and Daoistic individualism, universalism, and religious passion.
        Near death, Lu Yu wrote poems of Daoist resignation and return to Nature, and patriotic laments at never having seen the lost Chinese territories reconquered.

The Artist:      In the Yuan dynasty, there lived an eminent monk named Yun Shangren who travelled widely, visiting the famous mountains and great rivers and collecting a wealth of material which he then used to create xiezi jing.  These consisted of stones, trees, flowering plants, and grasses out of which were fashioned small bridges, thatched dwellings and other scaled-down objects all arranged in a single container.  Although this container was only about six inches in length, its visual impact loomed larger than life.  It was a small but complete microcosm of nature offering a view better than a thousand landscape paintings.  Nature was his model, and his miniature landscapes were rich in poetic sentiment and conveyed the kind of mood associated with painting.  Toward the end of the Yuan dynasty the poet Ding Henian [Ting Ho-nien, 1335-1424, a Muslim poet who became a Buddhist; courtesy name, Yung-k'ang] composed a fu poem "About 'Xiezi Jing' for Yun Shangren from Pingjiang":

        As the landscapes gradually became even more reduced in size during this period, a custom developed wherein the miniatures were displayed along with medium- and large-sized creations. 3

The Artist:      The Cu-hai [Tz'u-hai] dictionary lists the term "xiezi jing" [hsieh-tzu-ching] with a citation from Liu Luan.  Liu Luan was from Gui-chi [Kuei-ch'ih], his sobriquet was Yü-fu, and he lived towards the end of the Ming dynasty.  In the work Zhaodai congshu [Chao-tai ts'ung-shu] is found his monograph, "Wudan hu (Gourd Weighing Five Tan)" [Wu-tan hu], which includes the following observation:
 Nowadays people amuse themselves by placing trees and stones in containers.  Tall trees are shortened by twisting them; the big ones are reduced by cutting back.  Some of them bear fruit even though they are only five inches tall; fish of only eight or nine inches long are raised. {?}  The result is usually called a 'landscape in a container' [p'en-ching].  I think their origin is to be found in the constructions of Pingchuan [P'ing-ch'u..an] and Genyue [Ken-yüeh]...  4

1.     . Stein, pp. 37,39, note 76 on pg. 284.
 . Lesniewicz, pg. 13; Lesniewicz & Kato, pg. 8; Wu, 2nd, pg. 63; Koreshoff, pg. 4.
 . Nienhauser, pp. 728-729; Stein, pg. 284, which says that the essay is both in Su's Su Laochuan chuanji [Su Lao-ch'üan ch'üan-chi] and Jiayu ji [Chia-yu chi]; Wu, 2nd, pp. 62, 298, who has the name as "So Suen"; Koreshoff, pg. 3.
 . Nienhauser, pp. 729-730; Watson, pg. 4, states that "His remote family background is uncertain, though there is reason to believe that his people were connected with the local weaving industry.  His grandfather was illiterate...", also pp. 4-6, 9, 89, 92, and pg. 121 which has "A Pair of Rocks" poem.  This page also notes that the Du Fu lines quoted are the "opening lines in the fourteenth poem in the series 'Miscellaneous Poems on Ch'in-chou,' written in 759.  Ch'ou Lake is the name of a lake and mountain near Ch'in-chou in Kansu [some 300 miles west of Chang-An].  Taoist lore speaks often of 'heavens' or otherworldly realms that are hidden underground in certain mountains and can be reached only through narrow cave passages.  The poet [Du Fu?] imagines that the tiny cave in his rock leads to such a realm."  Is this the miniature landscape poem Du Fu composed?  Pp. 122-123 have a verses which follow the rhymes of Tao Yuan-ming's twenty poems [sic] entitled "Drinking Wine."; Stein, pp. 74-76 (including Jiu-hua poem), note 75 on pg. 283, and note 146 on pg. 296 which also mentions Du Fu's Gansu Chou-chi poem; Hu, pg. 130 ("Poem About Two Stones" and extra lines), and also includes a rendering of the middle of the Jiu-hua poem: "Do not be disheartened about the Five Mountains being so far apart.  Mount Jinhua can be contained in one pot."; Liang, pg. 102, has alternative readings of some of these lines; Horizon, pg. 139, + quote on 200; Po, Vol. 1, pg. 70; + Su (Watson, tr.), pp. 4-6, 9, 89, 92, 121.
 . Hu, pg. 130; cf. Wu, 2nd, pg. 62, who states that "Writer Chao Hsi-kok describes 'grotesque rocks' in his essay collection."  Koreshoff echoes this on pg. 3.

2.       . Hu, pp. 85, 130; Bretschneider, Bot. sin., pg. 207, which states that Kui ling also wrote a work entitled Wang mei k'i tsi.
 . Nienhauser, pp. 609-611, which also mentions that at age 64 Lu began what would be twenty-four years of rural retirement.  His travel diary, Ju-Shu chi (Record of a Journey to Shu) from Zhejiang to Sichuan between July and December 1170, is the longest and most comprehensive Chinese diary written before the seventeenth century.  It is written in elaborate and elegant prose, of course, with allusions to the classics, histories and other literary works.  It provides valuable information regarding political, economic, religious, and social conditions of twelfth century Southern Song China; Hucker, pg. 399; poem in Hu, pg. 130; alternative version in Liang, pp. 102-103; Bretschneider, Bot. Sin., pg. 139 gives passing reference to a Daoist tale by an unknown author, possibly from the Song dynasty, Chang pu chuan [Ch'ang p'u ch'uan, aka Ch'ang yang ch'uan].  Also about the Acorus, is this and Lu Yu's poem related?  Was this the inspiration for the verse?. .

3.    . Stein, pp. 24-26, notes pp. 279-280, 287.  The idea that something very small, such as a single hair or a mustard seed, can produce something infinitely large, such as a cosmos multiplied a thousandfold, is a Buddhist concept [see IChina1b].  The small evokes the large.  A miniature landscape can recreate natural phenomena in all their diversity.; an alternative version of this poem is in Hu, pg. 130; Liang, pg. 103.
 . Liang, pg. 103.

4.     Stein, pp. 24-26, notes, pp. 279-280; Pingchuan was the name of two rural estates, one in Hebei province and the other in Henan, owned by a former governor of the city of Chengdu, Li Te-yü (AD 787-849; courtesy name, Wen-jao).  Genyue was a man-made hill built in the year 1117 on a propitious spot situated northeast of the Song capital at Kaifeng, Henan.  At both sites were assembled collections of curiosities from every corner of the universe -- one of the most anciently attested preoccupations in China -- but the existence of a miniature garden in a container is not specified in any description of either extraordinary site.; Liang, pg. 103, states that there is a detailed account in Liu Luan's Jade Gourd (Yu-shih-hu) of the most common medium and large-sized tray landscapes: the "three friends of winter."  These arrangements of pine trees, bamboo, and plum trees were highly cherished year-round among enthusiasts.