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its novelty and perspicacity; it also employs a deeper degree of observation that is able to access
aspects of the frontier and assimilate them into striking vignettes of China's borderland.
In fact, it is in the inclusion of such minutiae that the delights of High Tang frontier poetry
become especially pronounced. These moments crafted by poets such as Cen Shen dispense with a total
reliance on climate and geography, as well as the neatness of the negation/contrast paradigm, in
presenting the northwestern hinterlands, following instead the sights, smells and sounds of human
habitation at the limits of the Tang empire, phenomena which would be near impossible to fabricate
without the threat of unrealistic absurdities infiltrating a poem, to undo caricatures of the frontier and
offer a more substantial world without near frenetic reference to its “differences” from central China. 183
By blurring, and not constantly referencing or reinforcing, the border between inner and outer China,
and removing the fright from frontier spaces, Cen Shen, above all other writers of the period, managed
to create a moment in the evolution of frontier poetry distinguished by fresh descriptions of unusual
physical environments which at times seem to familiarize the unfamiliar 184 non-militaristic activities
taking place in army camps and among the local population, a people who in many High Tang frontier
poems in addition to Cen Shen's own would finally come to be released from the strict friend-foe
binary prison common to the subgenre.
Advancements in responses to and descriptions of non-Chinese frontier peoples and customs,
183
Descriptions of and responses to the frontier landscape and its peoples/customs have been discussed as representing two
of the three thematic pillars of frontier poetry. In the majority of cases, however, these themes are realized in standard and
predictable manners. The frontier landscape, for example, is quite often an uninviting and desolate, cold place wracked by
violent winds and roiling sands; it is a climate conceived in sharp contrast to the gentler climes of central China, an
environment conducive to the integrative tendencies of poet and landscape found in landscape poetry (shanshuishi 山 水 诗 ).
Such stock, even hackneyed, representations of the frontier were frequently the norm until Cen Shen infused the subgenre
with new thermal variants and complex perspectives of the frontier landscape. The same poet, along with a selection of
other writers of the same period, is also responsible for draining conventional responses of the frontier poet-narrator to non-
Chinese peoples, their cultural practices and frontier martial life itself. With military service being an alternative to the
official examination system in seeking employment and personal success, and not merely a dreary form of exile, depictions
of army camp life and events often received a refined treatment in High Tang frontier poetry which exceeded the typical
reaction of homesickness and longing for those in central China to include moments of curiosity and conviviality during
raucous gatherings and even apathy for the once passionate motives buffeting one to the frontier as the tedium of secretarial
or clerical duties slowly set in. See Yan Fuling, “Han-Tang biansaishi zhuti yanjiu”, pp. 16, 177.
184
Li Mei, “Shilun Luo Binwang, Cen Shen biansaishi de wenhua guanzhao”, p. 160.