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the frontier and absence qualifying the Chinese interior.
In addition to straightforward description and negation, the frontier, both as a topographical and
cultural entity, was habitually construed by contrasting differences between its immediate strangeness
with that of a distant, but familiar, China deep within the country's own borders. As with negation, this
method also gestured towards that which was absent; the discontinuity between the two techniques,
however, is characterized by the latter's comments on how phenomena located both on the border and
in central China could still display certain inherent incongruities when contrasted against one another,
disparities which were then consolidated into an illustration of the frontier itself.
By demanding a certain degree of frontier familiarity, the approach of contrasting China's
periphery with its interior as a mode of description was not a technique frequently realized. One pre-
Tang example in which contrastive treatment is particularly pronounced is Lu Sidao's 卢 思 道 (535-
586) “In the Army” (“Congjunxing” 从 军 行 ). After constructing a frontier environment from an array
of peripheral place names and inclement weather conditions, the limits of the Chinese world are further
assembled as a place of pure contrast in which seasonal changes seem to obey a separate set of natural
laws:
边 庭 节 物 与 华 异
冬 霰 秋 霜 春 不 歇
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The seasons and scenes of the frontier differ from
the Chinese interior,
Spring cannot disperse Winter's soft hail or Autumn's frost.
(lines 21-22)
The previously excerpted “Frontier Song” concludes with a gesture of contrast, one often seen in the
subgenre, where the inner and outer realms of China are, as in Lu Sidao's “In the Army”, differentiated
by seasonal inconsistencies out of which the unfamiliarity of the frontier region itself is illustrated:
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YFSJ 32.482