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34
胡 儿 眼 泪 双 双 落
77
The Hu man's tears fall in pairs one after the other.
(lines 5-8)
When weighed against works in which frontier war or landscape are the engine driving the poem's
thematic content, this second facet of frontier poetry, one whose focus pivots towards frontier peoples
and customs, is in a definite minority. Its infrequency prior to the Tang, however, can be attested to the
rarity of poetically inclined individuals venturing to the northern border regions and reflecting on the
experience through verse, a situation which underwent a severe transformation during the Tang
dynasty 78 once the importance of the frontier for both the nation's defence and economy rose to an
unprecedented degree in tandem with the expansion of both the territory and wealth of the empire. 79
But attention to the frontier alone does not suffice when framing poetic windows encompassing its
denizens' lives: a well-rounded intimacy with the region is also a prerequisite for such compositions in
this vein of frontier poetry. Aside from Gao Shi and Cen Shen, writers who did not merely travel briefly
throughout the northern periphery of Tang China but who spent years of their lives in the employment
of military officers on the frontier, the number of poets able to portray the peoples and customs of the
frontier were relatively few. That being said, the High Tang did have many exceptional samplings of
this theme; some of them will be discussed when the thesis addresses the distinct traits of High Tang
frontier poetry through Xiao Chengyu's thematic framework.
2.3. The Third Facet: The Frontier Landscape
It was not until the High Tang and Cen Shen's frontier poems, compositions in which the
frontier landscape itself had instances of being foregrounded against the emotional concerns familiar to
many frontier poems, that Xiao's third foundational facet in the classification of frontier poetry could
be seen in its least adulterated state. Many frontier works preceding Cen Shen did in fact evince an
77 QTS 133.1348.
78 That is until the An Lushan rebellion when many frontier military units were recalled to quell the uprising.
79 Chen Xiuduan, “Censhen biansaishi yanjiu”, pp. 37-38. For a sustained analysis of extra-literary reasons behind the
meteoric rise of frontier poetry during the Tang dynasty, especially the martial, political and social reasons, see chapter
three of Kam-lung Ng's “Tangdai biansaishi yanjiu”.