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Part One: Overview of High Tang Frontier Poetry
Chapter One: General Introduction
1.1. A Brief Historical Sketch
While the Han 汉 dynasty 1 was a time of discovery and military expansion, and the Northern
and Southern dynasties 2 (Nanbei chao 南 北 朝 ) an era of reversal which witnessed the incursion of
non-Chinese peoples into northern China, the Tang 唐 (618-907) dynasty was a combination of both
movements as China at this juncture was both expanding outwards while concurrently encountering
large numbers of non-Chinese peoples and their associated culture and customs. Under the Han,
China's borders were populated by nomadic tribes whose cultures and lifestyles were unfamiliar and
seen as inferior by many people who identified themselves as Han Chinese. This sense of “Chinese” as
defined through systematic contrasts with northern nomads at the the empire's borders became a key
notion of Han civilization, one which would become blurred when ruling families derived from peoples
inhabiting these peripheral lands would control northern China during the time of the Northern and
Southern dynasties. However, by the time of the Tang circumstances had changed. The territories
belonging to the previous Northern and Southern dynasties had been unified under the Sui 隋 (581-
618) until an uprising led to the imperial reins passing on to what would become the Tang dynasty, and
again, as had been the reality during the Han dynasty, a world of Eurasian states with China at the
centre emerged. 3
1 The Han dynasty is divided into two periods with the Western Han ( 西 汉 ) covering the years 206 BC to 25 AD and the
Eastern Han (Dong Han 东 汉 ) occupying the years 25 AD to 220 AD on China's dynastic time scale.
2 A series of Northern and Southern dynasties lasting from 420 to 589 AD.
3 This paragraph borrows heavily from Mark Edward Lewis, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 145-46.