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86
即 今 河 畔 冰 开 日
正 是 长 安 花 落 时
180
Today on the banks of the river ice starts to open up
Right now in Chang'an it is the time of falling blossoms
(lines 3-4)
The Spring season in this instance is disjointed between two locales: while just commencing on the
frontier, it is already well advanced in Chang'an. 181 This contrast in seasonal behaviour between one
geographic coordinate and another is here acting as the descriptive backbone of China's hinterlands, but
it is still a fairly imprecise picture of the frontier, and one which relies heavily on well-worn motifs and
imagery.
3.2.3. Forays Into Frontier Responses: Local Peoples and Customs
As personal exposure to Tang China's borderlands increased, a more refined utilization of
contrast between the familiar and unfamiliar in the creation of a frontier picture could be exploited.
The previously cited Cen Shen poem “Impromptu Poem About Luntai” 182 (“Luntai jishi” 轮 台 即 事 )
brilliantly reflects this trend. Beginning with direct acknowledgement of Luntai's “differences” in
fairly common terms, such as the fact that despite the season green grasses are nowhere to be found
(negation) while white elm trees, emblematic of frontier flora, surround domestic dwellings, Cen
Shen's poet-narrator moves from contrasting climatic and ecological inconsistencies with central China
and redirects the poem towards the linguistic peculiarities and divergent customs of the region's non-
Chinese peoples in his act of contradistinction: local orthographies are described through their
difference vis-a-vis Chinese written characters while the sound system of the local language is also
shown not to align with the phonetics of the poet-narrator's native tongue. This means of employing
contrast between inner and outer China through the writing and sound structures of local languages in
order to depict the frontier transcends many earlier poets' reliance on prototypical wasteland scenes in
180
QTS 75.819
181
Ronald Miao, “T'ang Frontier Poetry”, p. 117.
182
See chapter one of the thesis for a translation of the poem