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“a far away place”; 边 also refers to the perimeter where neighbouring lands geographically connect
with one another. 33 The second character, 塞 (sai), made reference initially to walls built to repel
attacks from northern peoples against the disparate kingdoms of the Eastern Zhou period. These
architectural feats would eventually link up to form the Chang Cheng 长 城 , the Great Wall, during the
Qin 秦 dynasty. The semantics of the individual “ 塞 ”character is poignant in poems with titles such
as “On the Frontier” (“Saishang qu” 塞 上 曲 ) and “Below the Frontier” (“Saixia qu” 塞 下 曲 ) which use
the vast tracts of lands bordering the Great Wall as their setting.
By the Tang dynasty, the combination of “biansai” 边 塞 into a single term had already become
quite common. In its poetic usage, “biansai” tended to refer to China's northwestern border region, a
rather general term pointing to the geographic point of separation between Chinese lands and those just
outside or tentatively under its control. However, no one particular location was the “frontier”; rather,
the designated topography behind “biansai”was mutable, subject to the vicissitudes of imperial
expansion and contraction. Though in the majority of linguistic situations where “biansai” was
prominent in Tang poems, it was the west, north and northeastern areas where the world immediately
external to China and China touched that was designated as “biansai” or “the frontier”.
1.3. Key Locales Forming the Poetic Tang Frontier
Despite the vagueness inherent in such a general term, the Tang frontier did have a number of
specific geographic coordinates and place names which particularized a spacial expanse of otherness
qualified by yellow sands (huangsha 黄 沙 ), snowy mountains (xueshan 雪 山 ) and grasses which turned
33 Chen Xiuduan 陈 秀 端 “Cen Shen biansaishi yanjiu 岑 参 边 塞 诗 研 究 ”M.A. thesis, National Taiwan Normal
University 国 立 台 湾 师 范 大 学 国 文 研 究 所 国 文 教 学 硕 士 论 文 , 2004, p. 13