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7
万 里 不 惜 死 Ten thousand li, no concern for death;
一 朝 得 成 功 In a single morning he achieved success.
画 图 麒 麟 阁 Portrait hung in the Unicorn Pavilion 24
入 朝 明 光 宫 The emperor met in Ming Guang palace 25
大 笑 向 文 士 Laughing heartily at the scholars
一 经 何 足 穷 What use is it to spend a life time poring over
one single classic 26 ?
古 人 昧 此 道 The ancients were in the dark regarding this truth
27
往 往 成 老 翁 And more often than not they only amounted to old, grey men
In the poem, committing oneself to study as a route to official recognition is forthrightly repudiated,
even mocked; eternal acclaim (so long as the portraits' paint does not peel nor pavilions within which
they hang crumble) is derived from battle and not books.
When the road to official success by becoming a scholar was blocked, an opportunity remained
through employment in a military related role. For those Tang poets ostensibly pursuing the military
(wu 武 ) path to imperial service as opposed to the scholastic (wen 文 ), the borderlands presented
themselves as not only a new world of opportunity but also a realm of the geographically and culturally
unfamiliar. 28 These places beyond the environs of central China exerted no small amount of creative
influence upon the poets' aesthetic and ideological visions while they devoted their intellectual powers
to martial causes. The mountainous snowy wilds and endlessly meandering deserts of these territories
often infused those works later to be classified as frontier poems with an intensity of imagery and
complexity of heroic spirit. 29
24 Built during the rule of Han Xuandi 汉 宣 帝 . Noteworthy officials had their portraits painted on the pavilion's walls.
25 A palace which stood during the Han dynasty. Here it refers to the imperial court.
26 “Classic” here referring to scholarly texts studied by Confucian academics.
27 GSJJZ, pp. 242-244.
28 See Krzysztof Gawlikowski's “The Origins of the Martial Principle (Wu) Concept”, Cina No. 22 (1988): 105-122 for a
comprehensive explanation of 武 in its relation to 文 , a dichotomy which “constituted a backbone of social
archetypes[:] scholars and warriors”. James Liu's Chinese Theories of Literature also cites numerous sources in the
Chinese tradition of the semantics constituting 文 over the centuries, including its Confucian association with
“scholarship [and] learning” . See James Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1975), p. 7.
29 Ren Wenjing, Tangdai biansaishi de wenhua chanshi, p. 21.