Sun-gilt lands of bright green pastures

A 19th century painting showing John Scott looking through a telescope at the Ware valley

In 2007 I wrote here about a prospect poem by John Scott of Amwell; I then added a postscript with more information in 2015. This is a further postscript really, but I'm writing a fresh blog post because I recently visited Ware and saw the summer house and grotto he built there. These are preserved in a fragment of what was once his extensive garden, leading down to the New River, which flows here alongside the Lea (they are now separated by the railway). For £2 you can enter and look around - the picture below shows the flint summer house, an 'airy octagon,' which would have provided a prospect of the vale. Scott wrote of the evening view here, of 'sun-gilt lands, / Of bright green pastures, stretch'd by rivers clear, / And willow groves, or other islands clear.' Today this prospect is obscured by trees and 1960s houses, although it could have been worse. The local developer was planning to bulldoze the grotto 'and erect Nos. 30-32 Scott’s Road on the site. The porch and dome of the Council Chamber were demolished, the summerhouse was damaged and the grotto was heavily vandalised.' The restoration work that has happened since then is really impressive.

The grotto is more extensive than I was expecting, with several passages, ventilation shafts and chambers all decorated with shells. Scott bought exotic shells from the Caribbean and South Pacific but also used cockle shells, white quartz and fossils from the beaches of Devon. The 'Council Chamber' is a nineteenth century name for the room shown below, with arched niches that you could imagine a group of illuminati sitting in to debate esoteric philosophical questions. Scott was clearly inspired by Pope, whose 'shell temple' at his Twickenham villa had started as a tunnel under the inconveniently sited road to Hampton Court. Samuel Johnson came to stay with Scott in 1773 and although he wasn't a fan of landscape gardening, he seems to have approved of the grotto, calling it a 'Fairy Hall'.

David Perman's detailed biography of Scott provides further information on the grotto and Scott's nature poetry, which was generally rather conventional, looking backwards to the era of James Thomson rather than anticipating the Romantic period to come. In reading this I was very surprised to learn that Scott had seemingly written about the great Chinese poet Li Bai in: 'Li-po : or, The good governor : a Chinese eclogue'. He can't have known the poetry, but maybe he had come across the name in a history of China? Regrettably, Scott doesn't actually refer to him as a poet and the details in the poem are hazy and don't correspond to the real life of Li Bai. The poem begins with the design of a pavilion - like Scott, Chinese literati were keen on building homes with good views and this Li-Po does not neglect to include a grotto. 'Bright shells and corals varied lustre shed; / From sparry grottos chrystal drops distill'd / On sounding brass, and air with music fill'd...' I'll conclude here with the landscape beyond the garden of Li-Po, a description familiar from eighteenth century chinoiserie, but also perhaps an imaginary equivalent to the river view Scott was able to enjoy.

The distant prospects well the sight might please, 

With pointed mountains, and romantic trees: 

From craggy cliffs, between the verdant shades, 

The silver rills rush'd down in bright cascades; 

O'er terrac'd steeps rich cotton harvests wav'd, 

And smooth canals the rice-clad valley lav'd; 

Long rows of cypress parted all the land, 

And tall pagodas crown'd the river's strand!

Branches Waving in the Current

Back in October I was fortunate to be able to attend a book launch for Michael Wood's new book In the Footsteps of Du Fu. He gave an excellent speech on Du Fu's life and importance (not everyone present had read the poetry) and was clearly moved when he quoted '500 Words on the Road to Fengxian'. He said his interest in Chinese poetry was sparked by A. C. Graham's Poems of the Late T’ang, published in 1965 (this was the book that inspired Roger Waters' lyrics for 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun'). When I first read this book in the mid eighties there were still hardly any translations of Chinese poetry available, although Arthur Cooper's Li Po and Tu Fu had appeared as a Penguin Classic in 1973. I've never understood why more haven't appeared over the years, although readers of this blog will have encountered quotes from the trickle of books published by American publishers. I doubt Michael Wood's book will provoke a new wave of enthusiasm here for Du Fu, but you never know.

 

Michael Wood on the Yangtze
(from the one hour BBC documentary Du Fu: China's Greatest Poet, 2020)

Rather than discuss the whole book, I thought I'd use the opportunity to talk here about a specific landscape which Du Fu wrote about. White Emperor City (Baidicheng or Baidi Fortress) is on the northern shore of the Yangtze, near Fengjie. Sadly, construction of the Three Gorges Dam submerged many buildings although tourists can still visit what remains on an island. Du Fu was one of many poets who came here over the years - ‘Early Departure from White King City’ by his friend Li Bai (701-62) is in the Arthur Cooper book. On the 15th of November 767 Du Fu saw here ‘a pupil of the Lady Kung-Sun dance the sword mime.’ In response he wrote a beautiful, moving meditation on aging, at about the age I am now. He had seen Lady Kung-Sun when he was a child in 717, but now even her pupil was past her prime. Arthur Cooper says in his notes for the poem that the dance, in the style of ‘West of the Yangtse’, was ‘probably at its climax very fast and vigorous, much like Tartar or so-called Polovtian dances known today through Russian ballet.’

A. C. Graham, in Poems of the Late T'ang, explains that Kuizhou (K’uei-chou), was ‘a town adjoining and apparently no longer distinguished from Pai Ti (White Emperor City)’. These places can be seen in the helpful map above, which I hope it's OK to reproduce from Michael Wood's book. ‘K’uei-chou had been part of the old kingdom of Shu and contained a temple to the great Shu statesman Chu-ko Liang, who was one of Tu Fu’s heroes’ (David Hawkes). ‘Ballad of the Old Cypress’ concerns a tree that Chu-ko Liang (Zhuge Liang) was supposed to have planted. Also near the city ‘there was a formation of dolmens which appeared as the Yangzi river sank. This was supposed to have been Zhuge Liang’s symbolic representation of the military formations his army should assume in the conquest of Wu’ (Stephen Owen). Du Fu wrote a famous poem about these too, ‘The Diagram of Eight Formations’. This was the setting for Brian W. Aldiss's 1978 short story 'The Small Stones of Tu Fu' in which a time traveller meets the aging poet. 

Zhuge Liang's Diagram of Eight Formations, or Stone Sentinel Maze, features in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written in the 14th century about events at the end of the Han Dynasty. Lu Xun is leading his troops towards Kui Pass when he begins to sense danger, but no sign of enemy soldiers. One of his followers inspects the area but finds only 'eighty or ninety chaotic rock piles alongside the river.' Some locals tell Lu Xun that when his enemy Zhuge Liang had been here, he had sent troops to arrange these rock formations and 'since then, a kind of cloudlike effluvium seems to emanate from their interiors'. As the sun goes down Lu Xun goes to investigate the rocks himself. Suddenly violent winds appear, the river rumbles and the sky is covered with streams of sand and stone. An old man appears and tells him this is the Eightfold Maze, whose openings appear unpredictably. They each have a name and Lu Xun had entered by the one called 'Perish'. But the man, who identifies himself as Zhuge Liang's father-in-law, leads him to safety. The novel then quotes Du Fu's poem.   

Du Fu had arrived in the Kuizhou-Baidicheng area in the spring of 766 and found two farmsteads to live in, the main house an hour’s walk uphill. Michael Wood, in the footsteps of Du Fu, noted that the poet's ‘vegetable garden with an orchard and orange grove of almost six acres commanded wonderful views which with a little imagination we can still see in the mind’s eye. Sometimes he walked higher up above the Gorges to see the whole vista unfold with distant mountain ranges beyond. So although the river has covered the site of Du Fu’s houses, if we look up, something of the ‘landscape remains’, as we would say’. It was here that the poet wrote his two great 'Autumn' sequences, which many consider the greatest of all Chinese poems. 

Bill Porter (Red Pine) visited this location a few years before Michael Wood for his odyssey round the poetic sites of China, Finding Them Gone (2016). The island of Baidicheng (Paiticheng) was surprisingly quiet - 'the only sounds I heard above the wind were those of crickets and doves. I was also joined by a passel of sparrows and what must have been the last butterflies of the year.' The famous view down the gorge (which can be found on a 10 Yuan note) still looked beautiful. As the site of Du Fu's Western Study has been drowned, a replacement version has been carved from rocks higher up. Red Pine ignored this and headed instead for Huanhua Village, named after the stream Du Fu lived by in Chengdu where he could look down over a slope of farm plots to the water, beneath which the poet's hut and orange grove now lie. He then made for the site of Du Fu's second submerged home, at a place called Huangchuehshu. A local explained that it is named for the ancient trees (Ficus virens) planted there.

'The trees were so big, he said, it took the outstretched arms of several people to encircle one of them. The huang-chueh was a relative of the banyan and was often used in that part of China to honour sites of historical or communal importance, and the site of Tu Fu's former house would have qualified. I thought about all those branches waving in the current where so many poems were written. It wasn't simply the landscape that inspired Tu Fu's poems. It was also his life coming to an end and he felt it.'

Viewing the Three Lakes

 

Hsieh T'iao

'Viewing the Three Lakes'

I have previously devoted a post to Hsieh Ling-yün (Xie Lingyun, 385-433), known as the founder of the shan-shui ("rivers-and-mountains") tradition in Chinese poetry.  Here I want to focus on Hsieh T'iao (Xie Tiao), a younger kinsman also known for his landscape poetry, who lived from 464-499.  His work is not easy to find online and his Wikipedia entry is currently just a stub.  However, I have actually quoted one of his poems before, 'Viewing the Three Lakes' - 'Red clouds mirrored where the waters meet. / From the red terrace -- birds returning, / the encircling plains, mosaic of river isles. / Inklings of spring's luxuriance / as autumn's last yellows fade...'

Cynthia L. Chennault has written a study of Hsieh's work.  In The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, she says that his poetry 'is perhaps best known for the rich variety of ways in which it describes qualities of light'.  She points to two ways in which he developed the nature writing tradition in Chinese poetry:

• Subject matter: his landscapes are expansive, more generalized, less 'vertical' and often include man-made features.
• Style: he uses syntactic variation to give more variety to his descriptions and incorporate emotional expression - a river as a metaphor for the poet's directional ambivalence, for instance.

Hsieh T'iao held various official posts and in 495 was made governor of Hsüan-ch'eng (Xuancheng).  'Hardly different from a hermit's life' he called it, with 'few law suits to hear on the grass-grown terrace.'  Hsieh built himself there a pavilion that would later feature in a poem by Li Po (Li Bai, 701-62) - 'Farewell to Uncle Yun, Imperial Librarian, at Xie Tiao Pavilion in Xuancheng'.  A century later another great poet, Tu Mu (Du Mu, 803-52), came to the city and saw Hsieh's old home.  There he wrote poems about Kai-yuan temple, built earlier in the T'ang Dynasty, long after Hsieh's time ('the brook's sound enters the dreams of monks, / and the moonlight glows on its stucco walls.')

Moving further ahead in time to 1170, another great poet, Lu Yu (Lu You, 1125-1209), visited Hsieh's old residence, and also the Southern capital of Chin-Ling (Jinling) where Hsieh had lived and written poetry.  There is a good article by Nathan Woolley, based on Lu's 'An Account of a Journey to Shu', of his time at Chin-Ling.  It quotes three of Hsieh's poems - here are the opening lines of 'About to Set Forth From Stone Fortress, I Ascend the Beacon-fire Loft':

Wavering and hesitant, I pine over the capital;
With dragging steps, I tread up to the storied loft.
Seen from a height, the palace grounds and gate towers seem close by,
But as I peer into the distance, windblown clouds are many.

Departure for Hsieh was hard when all he could see beyond the city was upsurging hills and a sea of dashing waves. 

Ten poems by Hsieh appear in the anthology New Songs from a Jade Terrace (compiled 534-45) but none of them are 'landscape' poetry.  Five might be considered 'still life' - 'object poems' on a lamp, a candle, a bed, a mirror stand and falling plum blossom.  He also wrote a set of 'Songs of the Drum and Flute', dedicated to the Prince of Sui which Cynthia Chennault describes as charming early works. Arthur Waley translated one of them in his seminal anthology, A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1919), a 'Song of the Men of Chin-Ling' who are marching back to the capital.

The green canals of the city stretch on and on 
And its high towers stretch up and up. 
Flying gables lean over the bridle-road: 
Drooping willows cover the Royal Aqueduct.

Hsieh T'iao did not make it into our sixth century - he died in prison in 499.  It was a sad echo of the fate of his predecessor Hsieh Ling-yün, who was executed following a third and final banishment from court.  A year before his death, Hsieh T'iao wrote a 'Poetic Essay Requiting a Kindness', addressed to his fellow poet Shen Yüeh (it is the subject of a 1990 article by Richard Mather).  After Hsieh's death, Shen wrote a lament for him.  'His melodies resound in tune with bells and lithophones; / His thoughts soar high above the winds and clouds.'

Chinese edition of The Selected Works of Xie Tiao and Yu Xin

This snow has never melted

Anon (once attributed to Guo Xi), Mount Emei under Heavy Snow, 17th century

Mount Omei, or Emei, in Sichuan province, is one of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China and has often featured in Chinese poetry.  Li Po spent the early part of his life (before 725) in Sichuan and wrote a 'Song of Mount Omei's Moon', that would later be quoted by Su Shi in one of his own poems.  Su Shi was actually born near the foot of the mountain, in 1037, but spent his life being moved from one post to another, getting further and further away until he eventually found himself living on the island of Hainan (he died, back on the mainland, four years later).  Fan Ch'eng-ta, one of the 'Four Masters of Southern Sung Poetry', specialising in the field-and-gardens genre, described Mount Emei in his Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (1177).  The higher he got, the colder it was - intensely so at night.  Reaching Brilliant Cliff he looked down into the clouds and glimpsed halos of coloured light.  Further on he could see the mountain range that stretches West, until it eventually becomes the Himalayas:

'Lofty, rugged, carved, sliced; scores, perhaps a hundred peaks in all.  When the rising sun first illuminates them, the snow glistens like shiny silver, shimmering in the light of the dawn.  From antiquity to the present, this snow has never melted.  These mountains extend all the way to the land of India and to tributary kingdoms along the border for a distance of I don't know how many thousands of li.  It looks like it is spread out on a table before one.  This spectacular, unique, unsurpassable view was truly the crowning one of my entire life.' 

Last month I was surprised to encounter a fragment of Mt Emei, perched on the summit of a mountain in Switzerland.  This 8 ton lump of basalt, the Emei Stone, was installed on the top of Mt. Rigi in 2015, a year after a Rigi Stone was 'inagurated' on Mt Emei.  They are meant to 'symbolise the cultural and touristic collaboration' between the two mountains.  An explanatory board refers to these landscapes like global corporations, with the exchange symbolising 'the valuable and long-standing partnership between RIGI and EMEI.'  I had not been to Switzerland for a while and was surprised by the number of Chinese tour groups.  There are visitors too from other parts of Asia.  At the bottom of Mount Titlis, a high, snow-capped peak near Rigi, you encounter the inviting smell of Indian street food on sale at the Spice Bistro.  And at its summit, you can take a selfie with cardboard cutout stars of the famous Bollywood film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), which was set in Switzerland (though not actually on Titlis).  The appeal of the Alps for Bollywood directors is discussed in an article for The Smithsonian and the Indian fascination with Switzerland is explored in an interesting piece by Anuradha Vikram's for Hyperallergic.

Mount Rigi became a major tourist destination in the nineteenth century, in part because it is easy to get to from Lucerne.  A Telegraph article on this phenomenon made the connection with Turner's Blue Rigi, a centrepiece of the Tate's 2014 Late Turner show (looking back I see I wrote at the time about Turner's Italian landscapes rather than the exhibition's views of the Alps).  Rigi developed a special appeal, and

'so great was this charisma, that within a couple of decades of Turner’s visit, a stay in Lucerne and an ascent of The Rigi were among the most desirable experiences for any traveller to Continental Europe. In 1857 the first grand hotel opened at the summit, and by 1860 there were 1,000 horses and numerous guides and sedan chairs stationed at the foot of the mountain in Weggis. The highlight of Thomas Cook’s first group tour to Switzerland, in 1863, was an ascent of The Rigi to watch the sunrise, and in 1868 Queen Victoria herself came here, to be carried up to the hotel in a chair, and woken before dawn for the same view.

J.M.W. Turner, The Blue Rigi, Sunrise, c. 1841-42

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Mount Emei has a much longer tradition of tourism than Mount Rigi, centred on its temples and the 'silver world' - a sea of clouds - visible from its summit.  In the Qing Dynasty, the poet Tan Zhongyue named ten scenic attractions, including 'Blue Sky After Snowfall on the Great Plateau', 'Crystal Waters and Autumn Winds', and 'Felicitous Light on the Golden Summit'.  Today, the UNESCO World Heritage site acknowledges the threat posed by visitor numbers ('there are numerous drink stands and souvenir stalls which detract from the natural atmosphere of the mountain'), but also notes that 'as a sacred place, Mount Emei has benefited from a long-standing and traditional regime of conservation and restoration.'

A thousand years ago, back in the Song Synasty, Fan Ch'eng-ta's does not mention encountering any other sight-seers.  Perhaps he had the view to himself.  Turner never tried making the ascent of Rigi, possibly put off by the prospect of tourists.  In J. M. W. Turner: A Wonderful Range of Mind, John Gage suggests that 'it may be that he felt the Rigi was already too popular a vantage point, and he did not want to share his experiences with the two or three hundred other tourists who were said to congregate daily on the summit for the dawn.'  Gage quotes an earlier traveller, Henry Matthews, who did make the ascent and what he saw is reminiscent of Fan Ch'eng-ta's vision of dawn on Mt. Emei.  Matthews found it a 'magnificent spectacle' and concluded that experiencing a sunrise on Rigi 'forms an epoch in one's life, which can never be forgotten.'

J.M.W. Turner, The Red Rigi, 1842

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Stone Bell Mountain

A short way downriver from Jiujiang, where the the Yangtze meets Boyang Lake, there is a famous sonorous landscape called Stone Bell Mountain (Shizhong Shan).  According to the Song dynasty poet Su Shih, 'Li Po of the T'ang was the first to travel to the site, and he found a pair of rocks protruding from the lake. "I struck them and listened," he wrote. "The one to the south sounded deep and turbid, the one to the north had a high, clear pitch. After they were struck, the sounds continued to reverberate as the vibrations slowly faded." He thought that he had thus solved the matter. But I still had my doubts about this theory.'  Su found himself in the area in July 1084 and went to investigate.  Testing Li Po's explanation he found that the rocks in the lake merely gave off a dull thud.  Later that evening, he and his son took a boat out under the cliff and heard the piercing cries of falcons, followed by the cry of an old man, or was it a crane?

'I had just begun to feel uneasy and wanted to return when loud sounds were emitted on the surface of the water, booming "tseng-hung " like continuous bells or drums. The boatman was frightened. We slowly approached to investigate and found that at the foot of the mountain were grottoes and fissures in the rock. I could not tell how deep they were, but it was the small waves which entered, surged around, and crashed against each other that were causing this sound.

'As the boat returned, it passed between two mountains and was about to enter the harbor. There was a huge rock standing in the middle of the current, which could accommodate a hundred people seated. It was hollow inside, and it also had many holes in it. It swallowed and spit out the wind and water, giving off ringing sounds—"k'uan-k'an t'ang-t'a "—as the water struck it. It seemed to reply to the booming sound we had previously heard, just like a musical performance.'

Su Shi felt he had solved the mystery of the Stone Bells, but his account stimulated further enquiries, as Richard Strassberg writes in Inscribed Landscapes, from which this translation is taken.  'Among those visiting the place during the Ming and Ch'ing periods were Ch'iu Chün (1420–1495) and Lo Hung-hsien (1504–1564), who argued that the name was based on the mountain's shape, and P'eng Yü-lin (1816–1890), who discovered an underwater grotto and asserted that the mountain was hollow like a bell.'  Are people still seeking to understand the mysteries of this landscape?  I can't find anything much about Stone Bell Mountain online beyond a few tourism sites - we need a sound artist like Wang Changcun, Yan Jun, or Chris Watson to go there and investigate in the spirit of Su Shi.

Some wine beside the white clouds

Landscape can be a solace to the exile, but it can be hard to contemplate the beauty of lakes and mountains without thinking of home, or the bitter circumstances and long journey that have led from there.  When the An Lu-shan rebellion broke out in 756, the poet Li Po travelled south to Kiukiang to escape the turmoil and fighting.  There he made an ill-fated decision to join Prince Lin, the Emperor's sixteenth son, whose flotilla was making its way down the Yangtze.  Instead of heading off to fight the rebels, Prince Lin was aiming to set up his own independent regime.  According to Arthur Waley (in The Poetry and Career of Li Po) it seems unlikely that the rather unworldly Li Po knew what the Prince intended - he would later claim to have been virtually kidnapped: "I allowed myself to be deceived by false pretences and was forced by threats to go on board a transport."  At the time though, he wrote poems like 'Watching the dancing-girls at a banquet on board Marshal Wei's transport; written while with the Fleet', indicating that he was thoroughly enjoying himself on this adventure.  This pleasant time came to an end near Yangchow, where Prince Lin's forces were met by government troops and his generals abandoned him - Li Po probably jumped ship as well at this point (the prince was captured and executed).  On his return to Kiukiang, Li Po was arrested as a traitor and imprisoned for several months.  After being set free he made his way to Wu-ch'ang, near Hankow, where he stayed for a while, hoping for a pardon, before continuing again, north, to Yo-chou, near the famous Tung-t'ing (Dong-ting) Lake.  There he met two friends, both exiles like himself.  Chia Chih was a writer (he had actually composed the Emperor's deed of abdication in 756) and former Governor of Ju-chou who had been demoted after being judged to have fled south from the rebels too hastily. Li Yeh was a relative of Li Po's, banished to the south after being charged with perverting the course of justice.  One day, the three friends decided to take an evening boating excursion on the lake...

Hermit Fisherman on Lake Dong-ting, Wu Zhen, 14th century

'The bright moon, the autumn wind / the waters of Lake Dong-ting, / a lone swan, the falling leaves, a tiny skiff.'  Thus Chia Chih conveys the beauty and the underlying sadness of the occasion.  In his Anthology of Chinese Literature Stephen Owen provides translations of the poems that resulted from this outing.  Li Po 'wrote a series of five of his most famous quatrains celebrating the beauty of the moment.'  But Chia Chih's are 'every bit as memorable.  Both poets called to mind echoes of exile and death beyond the edges of the vast lake, places like Chang-sha, where the Han intellectual Jia Yi was banished.' Li Po imagines riding the currents in the water up into the night sky and buying 'some wine / beside the white clouds.'  In the centre of the lake there is a mountain called Jun-shan (the source for one of China's ten famous teas) which Li Po pictures on a 'mirror of jade' - the 'bright lake, swept calm and clear.'  Chia Chih describes more turbulent waters, swollen with autumn floods.  The friends let the waves guide their light boat, 'no care whether near or far.'

So in eight short poems we have a record of an evening in the autumn of 759, a moment of reflection before events, like waves on the lake, swept these men up again.  Climbing Pa-ch'iu Shan that autumn, Li Po glimpsed another fleet mustering and wrote in one of his poems of the rebel forces approaching Lake Tung-t'ing.  It was only near the end of the year that peace was restored to the Yangtze region and the poet was finally able to leave, making for Wu-ch'ang where he again expressed his hopes of one day being given a posting back in the capital.  But by this time Li Po knew that any such post would be his last.  He fell ill while traveling to Nanking and in 762 made his final journey to see the great calligrapher, Li Yang-ping near T'ai-p'ing.  Meanwhile Chia Chih had also made his way back and, a year later, on the accession of Emperor Tai-tsung, regained his former position, going on to serve as Vice Minister of War before his death in 772.  Li Po seems to have died at the home of Li Yang-ping, to whom the poet entrusted what writings he still had after his years of wandering in exile.  According to the well known story, he took another nighttime boat excursion, and this time, drunk on wine, fell into the river and drowned whilst trying to embrace the reflection of the moon.

Note: As always the sources vary in spelling Chinese words and here I've generally stuck to the older Wade-Giles system - for me the poet will always be Li Po rather than Li Bai.  The pinyin version of Chia Chih is Jia Zhi.  As noted above, Lake Tung-t'ing is now generally called Lake Dong-ting.

Lu Mountain's true face

Mount Lu

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lu Mountain (Lu-shan or Hermitage Mountain), at the juncture of the Long River and Lake P'o-yang in China, must be a contender for the most inspirational landscape in literature.  It became established as an important religious centre with the arrival of Hui-yung (332-414), for whom the West-Forest Monastery was rebuilt in 377, and Hui Yüan (334-416) who taught Pure Land Buddhism at the East-Forest Monastery.  The poet T'ao Yüan-ming (365-427), founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition (see my earlier post here) knew Hui Yüan and lived on a farm near the mountain.  Hsieh Ling-yün (385-433), whose mountains-and-rivers poetry I discussed here earlier, was influenced by the teachings of Hui Yüan and wrote about Lu-shan, with its 'jumbled canyons', 'thronging peaks' and 'dragon pools.'

Three hundred years later the T’ang Dynasty poet Meng Hao-jan (689-740) had his own mountain home further west in Hsiang-yang and made Deer-Gate Mountain there famous through his poetry.  But on one of the many journeys he made as an official he wrote about Incense Burner Peak, the most spectacular in the Lu Mountain range, and the distant sound of the bell from East-Forest monastery.  Li Po (701-62) stayed at the monastery and wrote of the silence and emptiness that could be found there away from the city. Climbing towards Incense-Burner Peak, he gazed at the waterfall, three thousand feet high, and wrote a celebrated poem which I have discussed here previously.

Po Chü-i (772-848) composed poems about the mountain and a famous prose account of the thatch hut he built in 817 facing Incense-Burner’s north slope. From this place he could experience 'the blossoms of Brocade Valley' in spring, 'in summer the clouds of Stone Gate Ravine, in autumn the moon over Tiger Creek, in winter the snows on Incense Burner Peak' (trans. Burton Watson). I particularly like his description of the way water was channeled around the hut, with a small waterfall that in twilight and dawn had 'the color of white silk' and at night made 'a sound like jade pendants or a lute or harp'  A bamboo trough led water from a spring in the cliff, across the hall into channels that fell from the eaves to wet the paving, giving 'a steady stream of strung pearls, a gentle mist like rain or dew, dripping down and soaking things or blowing far off in the wind.'

By the Sung Dynasty, the mountain was almost overburdened with poetic tradition.  In An Anthology of Chinese Literature Stephen Owen writes that Su Tung p’o (Su Shi, 1037-1101) resolved to visit the mountain as 'an "innocent traveler", wanting to experience the mountains without writing poems (as a modern tourist might resolve to travel without taking photographs).'  But he was unable to restrain himself and ended up composing several, writing his own reputation into the landscape with perhaps the best known of all the mountain's poems, a quatrain 'Inscribed on the Wall of West Forest Monastery', stating the impossibility of ever knowing Lu Mountain's true face.

Climbing Omei Mountain

China: Empire of Living Symbols is a book I've been recommending to anyone with even a passing interest in China. A collection of rather tired adjectives come to mind which don't really do it justice: charming, fascinating, beautiful. The book discusses the origins and evolution of all kinds of Chinese ideographs, but here I'm focusing on landscape. The cover of the book shows the characters for 'mountain' and 'water' - the smaller symbols are the early versions of these characters found on Shang dynasty bronzes, which resemble more closely the corresponding natural features. 'The character for water is the picture of a river with its currents, whirlpools, and sandbanks, as one sees when standing on the riverbank looking over the course of the river.' The character for mountain resembles China's sacred mountains - Taishan, Songshan and Huashan.

Cecilia Lindqvist juxtaposes the character for mountain written by the great painter-calligrapher Mi Fu (or Mi Fei) (1051-1107) with some of the mountains he painted. 'Despite the difference in technique, there is an unmistakable similarity between the character for mountain and the mountain peaks in the painting, not only in their outward form but most of all in the strength they convey.' Mi Fu and his son Mi Youren originated the cloudy mountain style of landscape painting in China.

The book discusses some other 'landscape' characters: 'island' which seems to derive from a picture of sandbanks in a river, 'valley' which looks like the opening to a valley, 'cliff' (included in Chinese compound characters) which clearly depicts a cliff, and 'rock' which seems to show a boulder that has fallen from a cliff.

It is all very reassuring to a reader like me who knows little about the Chinese language but whose imagination was caught long ago by Ernest Fenollosa's The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry and the 'ideogrammic' poems of Ezra Pound that it influenced. There have been many articles explaining how wrong Fenollosa was, e.g. in giving the impression that many Chinese characters have pictorial origins. Lindqvist's book, whilst clearly focusing on the primitive characters which have an iconic quality, shows how these occur throughout the whole of Chinese culture.

Fenollosa's notion that Chinese characters contain an inner energy and convey strong verbal actions may have been fanciful, but there is still something very appealing in the idea that a poem in Chinese can relate directly to what it signifies (a mountain) through the shape of a signifier, and that such a poem can be written out with all the artistry of a landscape painting.

There are numerous Chinese mountain poems on a site I've mentioned before, Mountain Songs, such as 'Climbing Omei Mountain' by Li Bai (Li Po). The character written by Mi Fu and reproduced above can be seen here in the poem's title, and Li Bai's description of Omei mountain resembles a 'cloudy mountain' painting: 'The blue mists support me / the sky opens out; / Colors commingle / is it a painted picture?'

The Waterfall on Lu Mountain

In his poem ‘The Waterfall on Lu Mountain’, Li Po (Li Bai) likened the sight of the ceaseless flow of water to stars falling from the sky. In Arthur Cooper’s 1971 translation it reads: “At first I feared Milky Way had dropped / And sprinkled stars, falling through the clouds!’ Cooper noted that the Chinese words that he renders as ‘sprinkled’ and ‘falling’, ‘sa’ and ‘lo’, are the first syllables of a word that some have suggested as the original for the mysterious term sharawadgy, used by Sir William Temple in his Gardens of Epicurus (1685) to refer to a quality of naturalness. This is what Temple wrote of Chinese gardeners:

“But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem.”

According to Arthur Cooper, the sa-lo in Li Po’s poem relates to the notion of Heraclitus: ‘the ever changing yet never-changing waterfall as the symbol of nature; a reason for the special importance of waterfalls in Chinese paintings.’ Whilst these speculations may not pass academic scrutiny, I think they offer a stimulating chain of connections and associations: Li Po – Temple – Heraclitus…
 
Incidentally, the Poetry Library archive has an old review of the Arthur Cooper translations which is not very complimentary. But I would still recommend the book for the pleasure of the notes and introduction.

Illustration: Li Bai watching a Waterfall by Okutani Shūseki (1871-1936)

Source: Wikimedia Commons