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Not only does Cen Shen surpass the paradigm of assembling the land of China's northwestern periphery
through its negation against entities of China's heartland, he also sensualizes the scene through an
explicit fine-tuning of immediate percepts 172 apprehended both through sight (the damp felt walls) and
smell (the lingering odour of cooking mutton). The stock imagery of the first four lines shifts away
from view to allow the distinctness of High Tang frontier poetry to enter the text: the poet-narrator who
takes down his central-China blinders 173 and presents a brief vignette of the northwestern regions
without forcing the sights (and the scent as well) to undergo severe central-southern China
“sinification”, and offers instead a relatively unadulterated vision of the frontier unhampered by, though
not completely liberated from, literary tradition.
83
Cen Shen's employment of negation is not restricted to acts of structuring the frontier on a basis
of that which it lacks. In “Song of the Youboluo Flower” 174 (“Youboluohua ge” 优 钵 罗 花 歌 ), Cen Shen
reverses the direction of negative comparison and describes one tiny aspect of the northwestern
hinterland as a matter of what does not exist in central China:
白 山 南 South of White Mountain, 175
赤 山 北 North of Vermillion Mountain, 176
其 间 有 花 人 不 识 In between there exists a flower no one knows,
绿 茎 碧 叶 好 颜 色 Green stem, bluish-green leaves, a lovely appearance.
叶 六 瓣
花 九 房
Its leaves divided into six segments,
Its flowers have nine petals,
172
Kam-lung Ng, “Tangdai biansaishi yanjiu”, p. 174
173
Li Mei, “Shilun Luo Binwang, Cen Shen biansaishi de wenhua guanzhao”, p. 160.
174
Marie Chan notes that the “plant is probably the flower of the Persian variety of the fig...This blossom has never entered
Chinese poetry , hence Cen [Shen] perceives a correspondence between the anonymous flower and an anonymous
official like himself”. See Marie Chan, Cen Shen, p. 94. The flower “Youboluo” could be the Utpala, and here in the
poem refer to the Xuelian 雪 莲 (snow lotus, saussurea involucrata) (Dr. Tsung-Cheng Lin, personal correspondence,
February 2013).
175
Reference is to Tian 天 mountain. Another alternative name, “Snow Mountain” ( Xueshan 雪 山 ), also derives from the
fact that the mountain was covered in snow throughout the year.
176
Another name for “Fire Mountain” (Huoshan 火 山 or Huoyanshan 火 焰 山 ), so named for the colour of the mountain's
geology and the accompanying thermal intensities of the area.