I love you. Tang Dynasty - Golden Age of China

 Tang Dynasty - Art & Poetry.

During the Golden Age of China, poets and poetry was highly revered amongst royalty, court officials, concubines and commoners. Not only do they appreciate poetry, almost everyone became poets themselves, writing and reciting about life, unfolding in their time.  Records revealed that, thousands of poets had written thousands upon thousands of poetry. Thanks to the Tang court and others who came after, like the Song, Ming, and Ching Emperors, who made it mandatory to archiving volumes of Tang poetry.

 *According to the pre-eminent collection of Tang poetry entitled Complete Tang Poems( Quan Tangshi in Chinese), there were around 49,000 surviving poems divided into 900 volumes and written by a total of 2,200 authors.

They say; Art mirrors Life. And life during the Tang period in China was blossoming. 

Almost all aspects of life were going gloriously well. This was mostly due to the good governance of the Li Family who ruled during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD). Li Yuan, the founder was a garrison commander in Taiyuan when revolt against the Sui Dynasty broke out in 613. He marched to the Sui capital, forced the last Sui emperor to abdicate and founded the Tang Dynasty. From here onwards, it took five years of campaigning by the imperial princes Li Jiancheng and Li Shimin before the country was reunified.

Here are some notable achievements during the Tang Dynasty aka China's Golden Era;

• Commerce and Economy - Trade flourished within inter-cities as well as internationally. Merchants flocked to China via the Silk Road opening up trade routes and exchanges of knowledge and culture between East and West flourished. Chang'An, the capital was the largest city in the world rivalling Rome which was the Western equivalent at that time. China was the most powerful and the most prosperous nation on earth.

• Good Governance - Just like all dynasties, it was ruled by a powerful emperor who instituted, modified and carried out reforms within a legal system with laws that benefitted everyone. 

The government of the Tang Dynasty had three basic departments that came up with laws and policies. The framework of rules and laws were all administered by a group that was called the Six Ministries. These ministries were; 

1-military, 

2-personnel administration, 

3-finance, 

4-justice, 

5-rites 

6-the public works. 

This system worked very well and it actually outlived the Tang Dynasty, which collapsed in the year 907. The government system was actually modelled upon which every dynasty based its own systems. This was also widely used by other kingdoms and countries, including Korea and Vietnam.

• Art and Culture - Creativity in the form of culture, art, painting and poetry were heavily promoted during this time. Notably Tang poetry which stood to define Chinese literary culture to this day. 

Some characteristics of Tang poetry.

Tang poetry was strongly connected to religion and had a major impact on the Song Dynasty poetry and even on world literature. The most popular Tang poetry styles included ”jintishi,” used by poets such as Cui Hao and Wang Wei and ”gushi,” used by Li Bai.

The former poetical style is characterized by seven Chinese characters per line, an antithesis between the second and the third couplets, and eight-line stanzas. Poetry contests were very popular and Tang poems were often recited in Classical Chinese, which was spoken during that era.

Here is one of the most famous, that almost all Chinese scholars would know:

Song of Unending Sorrow

China's Emperor, craving beauty that might shake an empire,

Was on the throne for many years, searching, never finding,

Till a little child of the Yang clan, hardly even grown,

Bred in an inner chamber, with no one knowing her,

But with graces granted by heaven and not to be concealed,

At last one day was chosen for the imperial household.

If she but turned her head and smiled, there were cast a hundred spells,

And the powder and paint of the Six Palaces faded into nothing.

...It was early spring. They bathed her in the FlowerPure Pool,

Which warmed and smoothed the creamy-tinted crystal of her skin,

And, because of her languor, a maid was lifting her

When first the Emperor noticed her and chose her for his bride.

The cloud of her hair, petal of her cheek, gold ripples of her crown when she moved,

Were sheltered on spring evenings by warm hibiscus curtains;

But nights of spring were short and the sun arose too soon,

And the Emperor, from that time forth, forsook his early hearings

And lavished all his time on her with feasts and revelry,

His mistress of the spring, his despot of the night.

There were other ladies in his court, three thousand of rare beauty,

But his favours to three thousand were concentered in one body.

By the time she was dressed in her Golden Chamber, it would be almost evening;

And when tables were cleared in the Tower of Jade, she would loiter, slow with wine.

Her sisters and her brothers all were given titles;

And, because she so illumined and glorified her clan,

She brought to every father, every mother through the empire,

Happiness when a girl was born rather than a boy.

...High rose Li Palace, entering blue clouds,

And far and wide the breezes carried magical notes

Of soft song and slow dance, of string and bamboo music.

The Emperor's eyes could never gaze on her enough-

Till war-drums, booming from Yuyang, shocked the whole earth

And broke the tunes of The Rainbow Skirt and the Feathered Coat.

The Forbidden City, the nine-tiered palace, loomed in the dust

From thousands of horses and chariots headed southwest.

The imperial flag opened the way, now moving and now pausing- -

But thirty miles from the capital, beyond the western gate,

The men of the army stopped, not one of them would stir

Till under their horses' hoofs they might trample those moth- eyebrows....

Flowery hairpins fell to the ground, no one picked them up,

And a green and white jade hair-tassel and a yellowgold hair- bird.

The Emperor could not save her, he could only cover his face.

And later when he turned to look, the place of blood and tears

Was hidden in a yellow dust blown by a cold wind.

... At the cleft of the Dagger-Tower Trail they crisscrossed through a cloud-line

Under Omei Mountain. The last few came.

Flags and banners lost their colour in the fading sunlight....

But as waters of Shu are always green and its mountains always blue,

So changeless was His Majesty's love and deeper than the days.

He stared at the desolate moon from his temporary palace.

He heard bell-notes in the evening rain, cutting at his breast.

And when heaven and earth resumed their round and the dragon car faced home,

The Emperor clung to the spot and would not turn away

From the soil along the Mawei slope, under which was buried

That memory, that anguish. Where was her jade-white face?

Ruler and lords, when eyes would meet, wept upon their coats

As they rode, with loose rein, slowly eastward, back to the capital.

...The pools, the gardens, the palace, all were just as before,

The Lake Taiye hibiscus, the Weiyang Palace willows;

But a petal was like her face and a willow-leaf her eyebrow --

And what could he do but cry whenever he looked at them?

...Peach-trees and plum-trees blossomed, in the winds of spring;

Lakka-foliage fell to the ground, after autumn rains;

The Western and Southern Palaces were littered with late grasses,

And the steps were mounded with red leaves that no one swept away.

Her Pear-Garden Players became white-haired

And the eunuchs thin-eyebrowed in her Court of PepperTrees;

Over the throne flew fire-flies, while he brooded in the twilight.

He would lengthen the lamp-wick to its end and still could never sleep.

Bell and drum would slowly toll the dragging nighthours

And the River of Stars grow sharp in the sky, just before dawn,

And the porcelain mandarin-ducks on the roof grow thick with morning frost

And his covers of kingfisher-blue feel lonelier and colder

With the distance between life and death year after year;

And yet no beloved spirit ever visited his dreams.

...At Lingqiong lived a Taoist priest who was a guest of heaven,

Able to summon spirits by his concentrated mind.

And people were so moved by the Emperor's constant brooding

That they besought the Taoist priest to see if he could find her.

He opened his way in space and clove the ether like lightning,

Up to heaven, under the earth, looking everywhere.

Above, he searched the Green Void, below, the Yellow Spring;

But he failed, in either place, to find the one he looked for.

And then he heard accounts of an enchanted isle at sea,

A part of the intangible and incorporeal world,

With pavilions and fine towers in the five-coloured air,

And of exquisite immortals moving to and fro,

And of one among them-whom they called The Ever True-

With a face of snow and flowers resembling hers he sought.

So he went to the West Hall's gate of gold and knocked at the jasper door

And asked a girl, called Morsel-of-Jade, to tell The Doubly- Perfect.

And the lady, at news of an envoy from the Emperor of China,

Was startled out of dreams in her nine-flowered, canopy.

She pushed aside her pillow, dressed, shook away sleep,

And opened the pearly shade and then the silver screen.

Her cloudy hair-dress hung on one side because of her great haste,

And her flower-cap was loose when she came along the terrace,

While a light wind filled her cloak and fluttered with her motion

As though she danced The Rainbow Skirt and the Feathered Coat.

And the tear-drops drifting down her sad white face

Were like a rain in spring on the blossom of the pear.

But love glowed deep within her eyes when she bade him thank her liege,

Whose form and voice had been strange to her ever since their parting --

Since happiness had ended at the Court of the Bright Sun,

And moons and dawns had become long in Fairy-Mountain Palace.

But when she turned her face and looked down toward the earth

And tried to see the capital, there were only fog and dust.

So she took out, with emotion, the pledges he had given

And, through his envoy, sent him back a shell box and gold hairpin,

But kept one branch of the hairpin and one side of the box,

Breaking the gold of the hairpin, breaking the shell of the box;

"Our souls belong together," she said, " like this gold and this shell --

Somewhere, sometime, on earth or in heaven, we shall surely

And she sent him, by his messenger, a sentence reminding him

Of vows which had been known only to their two hearts:

"On the seventh day of the Seventh-month, in the Palace of Long Life,

We told each other secretly in the quiet midnight world

That we wished to fly in heaven, two birds with the wings of one,

And to grow together on the earth, two branches of one tree."

Earth endures, heaven endures; some time both shall end,

While this unending sorrow goes on and on for ever.

Bai Juyi

There are reportedly as many as 100 versions of the poem. Many as there are, they tell a beautiful tale of unending love as much as unending sorrow. This story also inspired a classic work of Japanese literature- Tale of Genji, written in the early 11th Century by Murasaki Shikibu declared to be the world's first novel.

At the end of it, my take is that for any dynasty, nation or society to prosper and thrive, it must nurture and promote their art and culture. For without them, people are merely roaming the earth in pursuit of material well being. Material well being cannot be sustained with just hard power alone. Soft power is as important if not more powerful, as has been demonstrated by the soft, beautiful and irresistible Yang GuiFei.