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Before continuing, it should be noted that these three facets do not mutually exclude one
another: a single frontier poem may be woven together from threads of representatives from two or
three classificatory headings, or its content may very well be derived from a single facet. In order to
better understand the spool from which these threads are drawn, a selection of pre-Tang poems have
been chosen which herald the frontier school of poetry that was to come. The three subsections are
intended to function as headwaters for frontier poetry's main thematic streams, and is intended to
clarify how these early works influenced the gradual accretion of the frontier poetry subgenre.
2.1. The First Facet: Frontier War
The Book of Songs 6 (Shijing 诗 经 ) hosts a selection of poems whose themes include many
nascent characteristics of later frontier poetry. 7 Those aspects most relevant to the current discussion –
thematic origins of frontier poetry – are descriptions of battle and military life which include both
negative and positive attitudes towards martial activities; the pangs of homesickness experienced by
those drafted to serve in a military capacity far from their loved ones; and the distressed feelings of
wives separated from husbands serving in the army far from home. 8 Although the settings of some of
the following poems used to illustrate the importance of the Book of Songs in the development of
frontier poetry are not all identified as the border where “China” (in this case the northern extent of the
Zhou 周 dynasty) meets the non-Chinese world, meaning that the poems cannot be called “frontier
experience into the frontier poetry classificatory scheme by assigning frontier poems to one of two categories: works
written by those who spent time on the frontier, either serving in a military capacity or travelling, and who had intimate,
first-hand knowledge of the frontier's geography and culture, such as Cen Shen and Gao Shi, and works authored by
those who did not have experience on the frontier and who composed frontier poems using pre-established imagery and
place names which minimized the author's relationship with the realities of frontier life as portrayed in his poetry. See
Ren Wenjing, Tandai biansaishi de wen hua chanshi, p. 132.
6 The Book of Songs is the oldest preserved collection of Chinese poetry. It consists of 305 poems dating from roughly
1000 BC to 600 BC. Their subject matter is extremely varied, touching every aspect of contemporary life. See Wilt
Idema and Lloyd Haft, A Guide to Chinese Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1997), p. 94.
7 This is not to say that the themes of the following poems are only found in frontier poetry nor are any claims being made
that the excerpted poems from the Book of Songs are themselves frontier poems – the absence of an easily definable, and
non-controversial, “frontier” in the poems precludes such a supposition. What is instead being suggested is that the
martial themes of the poems can be regarded as precipitating important characteristics of frontier poetry even while the
poems themselves are not examples of “frontier poetry”.
8 Kam-lung Ng, “Tangdai biansaishi yanjiu”, p. 27