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“Passing Fire Mountain” (“Jinghuoshan” 经 火 山 ): 144
火 山 今 始 见
Fire Mountain 145 , today seen for the first time,
突 兀 蒲 昌 东 Towers to the east of Puchang. 146
赤 焰 烧 虏 云 Red smoke scorches the Lu 147 clouds,
炎 气 蒸 塞 空 Blistering vapours steam the frontier emptiness.
不 知 阴 阳 炭 How do the coals of Yin and Yang
何 独 燃 此 中 Burn alone in the midst of this place?
我 来 严 冬 时 I arrived when the year was at its coldest,
山 下 多 炎 风 Below the mountain many scorching winds.
人 马 尽 汗 流 Men and horses drenched in flowing sweat,
148
熟 知 造 化 功 Who knows of the exploits of nature's invention 149 ?
“Passing Fire Mountain” discards accustomed and contrived imagery found in many frontier poems to
instead “describe [a] strange landscape...[and] original experience [which hitherto had received little
notice] in simple and unelaborate language” 150 . The effect is that of lingering awe, an intimate and
unfiltered encounter with a place whose poetic realization resists mediation through traditional lexical
144
The poem will be revisited in a later chapter when a deeper reading will be made.
145
“The mountains lie on a major fault line dividing the Turpan [basin], which is itself a fault trough north of the Qurug Tag
Mountain. At its lowest point, the trough descends to some 505 feet below sea level while surrounding areas bordering
the Tarim River and Lop-nor Lake are between 2,000 and 3,000 feet above sea level. The area has great climatic
extremes”. See Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 81.
146
County whose borders are equivalent to today's Shanshan county 鄯 善 县 Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
147
Referring to the northwestern frontier.
148
CSJJZ, p. 79.
149
This final line resonates with two previous exclamations of near ineffable amazement over the ability of nature's creative
forces to rattle the senses and confound the mind. Lines nine and ten of Li Bai's “Gazing Upon the Waterfall at Lu
Mountain” (“Wang Lushan pubushui sanshou” 望 庐 山 瀑 布 水 二 首 ), “Look up and observe the strength of its shifting
power/So strong, the exploits of nature's invention” 仰 观 势 转 雄 , 壮 哉 造 化 功 (QTS 180.1837), are a near verbatim
precedent to Cen Shen's call to the power of creation itself in his description of Fire Mountain. In the final couplet of an
even earlier work by Zhang Jiuling 张 九 龄 , “Zhenyang Gorge” (Zhenyangxia” 浈 阳 峡 ), the interrogative aspect of Cen
Shen's statement can be found: “Saddened that such things arise far away and remote/Who knows the mind of nature's
invention?” 惜 此 生 遐 远 , 谁 知 造 化 心 ? . See QTS 48.590.
150
Marie Chan, “The Frontier Poems of Ts'en Shen”, p. 428. The high temperatures of the poem also melt the convention
of frontier poetry as portraying China's northern regions as a blasted, desolate place of ice and snow enshrouded by
gloom. See Ronald Miao's “T'ang Frontier Poetry: An Exercise in Archetypal Criticism” for discussions of the sensual
aspects of the prototypical frontier climate and its relationship with the poet-narrator as an agent affected by the
environment and as an agent involved in the presentation of said environment. Chapter six of this thesis will devote a
few pages to discussing this latter aspect, namely how the mindset of Cen Shen's poet-narrators, as read through the
frontier landscape he conveys in the poem, is involved in the presentation of the frontier landscape.