Frontier Issues Of Han Dynasty In The Eyes Of Poet In Tang Dynasty

Han Dynasty and Tang Dynasty are two representative dynasties in Chinese history and China’s symbolic images as well. Due to the various similarities between the two dynasties, poet in Tang Dynasty always employ events happened in Han Dynasty to express their own feelings. Tang Dynasty is the peak of Chinese history as well as Chinese literature. The poetry of Tang Dynasty is extraordinarily famous and includes a lot of poems which adopt Han style to present Tang’s reality.Han Dynasty lasts over four hundred years and occupies an important place in Chinese history. Since people in Tang Dynasty paid great attention to Han Dynasty since the beginning of the founding of Tang Dynasty, it seems natural for them to adopt Han elements to express themselves. The Full Collection of Tang Poems includes a lot of poems concerning Han Dynasty. Three thousand out of fifty thousands Tang poems center on issues in Han Dynasty, which appears to be a small number but actually holds a critical position in the poem collection. Tang people focused on a wide range of Han elements such as Han women, warlocks, heroes and frontier warfare, but they attached great importance to the frontier issues in Han Dynasty. Poets who focused on Han’s issues were in large numbers and came from various groups ranging from the emperor to the ministers, from the aristocrats to the ordinary gentry, from the ordinary people to the monks and Taoists. Poems concerning ancient times, individual ideals, sceneries and histories were all carriers of Han’s issues presented in The Full Collection of Tang Dynasty. Tang people took advantage of these poems to express their ideas. Undoubtedly, these poems are not histories, but these poems, to some extent, are Tang people’s thinking about history or history processed by Tang people. We can have a general view of Tang people’s ideas about Han and obtain some remarks on Han’s history after the analysis of these poems.The frontier issue in Han Dynasty was one of Tang’s concerns. Han Dynasty ruled millions of square kilometers of land with a long borderline. The frontier in Han Dynasty was mostly distributed in the north and the most important problem was the relationship with the Huns. Besides Huns, problems related to Xiyu, Wuhuan, Xianbei, Xiqiang also existed. Tang poems involved a lot of issues in Han Dynasty and often centered on the major frontier along the Great Wall, Yinshan Mountain, Jvyan and the four counties in Hexi, the bureaucratic system in frontier, the Emperor Wu and outstanding generals like Three Li, Su Wu, Wei Qing and Huo Qubing, marriages with the Huns, and women married the Huns.Han developed for four hundred years before Tang and Chinese history had developed for over two hundred years before Han Dynasty. Tang paid more attention to Han’s history than the history two thousand years ago. None of the previous dynasties before Tang was worth followed by Tang Dynasty except Han. Han Dynasty and Tang Dynasty shared lots of similarities even their destinies were similar. Hence, Tang people were willing to compare Tang Dynasty with the Han Dynasty. The emperor Li Shimin played a key role at that time. It was in Wei and Jin Dynasties when people began to pay attention to issues in Han Dynasty, but Tang Dynasty was more eager to focus on it. After the previous efforts in Wei-Jin Period, the issues of Han were heatedly discussed in Tang Dynasty. Tang people had few accesses to history books and Former Sishi and Han Ji were their major history books. Moreover, Former Sishi was also the main content of the imperial examination, no wonder Tang people were familiar with issues in Han Dynasty and exhibited them in their poems. In Han Dynasty, many brilliant talents appeared on historical stage, providing with a lot of prototypes for Tang people who were proud or frustrated. China cherished the tradition of referring to the experiences of the previous dynasties and taking history as a mirror to guide the present. Tang people hoped to take Han as an example, arouse the attention of the rulers of Tang and provide some suggestions for them.