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Hao's “Hu” are compassionately captured in non-militarized moments, their identities decoupled from
the status of fearsome enemy 193 and latched instead to the non-threatening, and very ordinary, habits of
survival. 194 War is also conspicuously absent, if still lurking in the background, but Cui Hao's “Hu” do
not mourn the temporary reprieve; in fact, they avail themselves of the calm and drink to excess.
89
Gao Shi's “Song of Yingzhou” (“Yingzhou ge” 营 州 歌 ) 195 plunges even further into the
presentation of frontier society through a dense quatrain describing the sartorial habits and preternatural
imbibitional, as well as equestrian, abilities of the people populating the northern border. Compared to
Cui Hao's “Song: Hu People of Yanmen”, “Song of Yingzhou” applies a broader categorical range in
depicting the subject while also appending perceivable details of the subjects' appearance. For instance,
both Cui and Gao's poems present the frontier peoples through an action – hunting. However, Gao Shi
complements the action by including adverbial details missing in Cui Hao's poem on “how” the men
hunt, namely that they do it “in fuzzy fur garments” ( 皮 裘 蒙 茸 猎 城 下 ). This particular hemistich
sensualizes the hunters of Yingzhou, recreating in verse both the actions and garments of the non-
Chinese on the Tang frontier. Like Cen Shen's “Impromptu About Luntai” (“Luntaijishi” 轮 台 即 事 ),
“Song of Yingzhou” proffers a world divergent from that of civilized and cultured central China , one
where in this instance youth ride horses like men and alcohol is incapable of forcing drunken fits of
rhapsodic fancy. 196
193
Li Bai's yuefu topic poem “South of the Walls We Fought” (“Zhanchengnan” 战 城 南 ) also introduces non-martial
imagery in association with non-Chinese: “The Xiongnu treat slaughter as farmers treat ploughing/Since bygone days
only white bones are seen in their fields of yellow sand”. See Stephen Owen, tr., An Anthology of Chinese Literature:
Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), p. 244. 匈 奴 以 杀 戮 为 耕 作 , 古 来 唯 见 白 骨 黄 沙 田 .
See QTS 162.1682. However, unlike Cui Hao's poem in which falconry and hunting are not indirect expressions of Hu
ferocity and innate violence, Li Bai's association of non-Chinese with harmless peace time activities actually enhances
the familiar depiction of frontier people (in this case Xiongnu) as brutish, uncivilized slaughterers who in this instance
equate the normalcy people of an agricultural based society have towards tilling fields to killing. In “South of the Walls
We Fought”, the non-Chinese Xiongnu are only capable of producing a culture of unending death and destruction; they
are depicted as a people interminably locked in the role of dangerous foe.
194
Kam-lung Ng, “Tangdai biansaishi yanjiu”, p. 176.
195
See chapter one of this thesis for a translation of the poem.
196
Xue Zongzheng 薛 宗 正 , Lidai xichui biansaishi yanjiu 历 代 西 陲 边 塞 诗 研 究 (Lanzhou: Dunhuang wenyi chubanshe
敦 煌 文 艺 出 版 社 , 1993), p. 70