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seen to have a a direct intertextual 92 relationship with Bao Zhao's frontier. 93 For instance, Cen Shen's
“Song of White Snow: Sending Off Administrative Officer Wu on His Return to the Capital”
(“Baixuege song Wupanguan guijing” 白 雪 歌 送 武 判 官 归 京 ) encompasses a frontier which treats its
guest in a similarly discourteous manner as Bao Zhao's:
将 军 角 弓 不 得 控
都 护 铁 衣 冷 难 着
94
The general's horn bow cannot be pulled
The protector-general's 95 armour is freezing, difficult
to don
(lines 7-8)
Although Bao Zhao's line “ 角 弓 不 可 张 ”(jiao gong bu ke zhang) is pentasyllabic and Cen Shen's is
heptasyllabic through the addition of an overt subject (jianjun 将 军 ), an obvious parallel of
uncooperative military weaponry affected by frontier conditions exists nonetheless. The second line of
Cen Shen's poem also echoes Bao Zhao's: the armour covered in frost (and hence cold) returns in Cen
Shen's poem with the comment, absent in the earlier text, on its difficulty to be worn (nan zhuo 难 着 ), a
further instance of exemplifying how the frontier landscape can be realized through a characteristic
chill hampering ordinary military actions, one slightly expanded by Cen Shen three hundred years later
after Bao Zhao, and how the environment of the frontier itself can suddenly capture the focus of the
poem.
The effects of northern frontier temperatures on equine hair in Bao Zhao's piece is revisited by
Cen Shen in his “Song of General Zhao” (“Zhaojiangjun ge” 赵 将 军 歌 ). The original line from Bao
92 Intertextuality meaning the relationships a particular text has with another regardless of temporal distances between
their times of composition. When these relations are adumbrated through the act of reading the texts against one another,
new significance emerges which would otherwise remain hidden were the texts read in isolation. See Joseph R. Allen, In
the Voice of Others, p. 8. Given the glaring similarity between Cen Shen and Bao Zhao's quoted lines, a coordinated
intertextual reading is able to reveal how the same aspect of the frontier's effects on animate and inanimate objects
occupying its space can be treated with a gradient of variations retaining certain core qualities.
93 Chen Xin 陈 忻 , “Jianlun Cen Shen biansai shi de fengge” 简 论 岑 参 边 塞 诗 的 风 格 Tangdai wenxue yanjiu 唐 代 文 学
研 究 2004, pp. 330-335, especially p. 334.
94 CSJJZ, p. 163
95 Charles O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 540.
Translations of official titles in this thesis follow Hucker.