A Study On The Poetry About "Eight Sceneries Of Yenching"

The “Eight Scenery” or “Eight Views” is a widely popular regional cultural phenomenon since the Song Dynasty,represented by the writing of poems on the “Eight Scenery”.After the “Eight Sceneries of Xiaoxiang” and the “Ten Sceneries of West Lake",poetry based on the “Eight Sceneries of Yenching” emerged in the Yuan Dynasty and reached its peak in Ming and Qing periods.Poems about “Eight Sceneries of Yenching” inherited the writing tradition of the eight-scenic series of poems,with a neat structure and a rich variety of contents,showing the grandeur and magnificence of Beijing as the capital of a unified empire,and reflecting the political consciousness and creation intention of “Embellishing the Empire Order” by rulers in Ming and Qing.It is a highly distinctive genre of Ming and Qing court literature.This paper is divided into four chapters to expound the origins,evolution,text-image relationship and artistic characteristics of poems about “Eight Sceneries of Yenching”.Chapter Ⅰ provides a preliminary definition of the style of the poems.In the aspects of title,content and structure,the “eight chants” style of poetry began with the emergence of the genre of landscape series of poetry in the mid-Tang period,and most of the eight-scenic poems of later times,including the “Eight Sceneries of Xiaoxiang” poems,are groups of eight scenes,each chanted in a single chapter.Among them,Chen Fu’s “Chant on Eight Sceneries of the Holy Capital”,from the Yuan Dynasty,is the earliest extant poems on the “Eight Sceneries of Yenching”,which had laid down the basic form and style of the “Eight Sceneries of Yenching” poems for later generations.Chapter Ⅱ discusses the development of the poems in chronological order.There is a universal series form of genres including poetry,Ci poetry and Sanqu songs,which was written until the Qing Dynasty.In the early Ming period,the Yongle dynasty when poets and courtiers wrote and sang together,was the first time that the poetry of “Eight Sceneries of Yenching” was composed on a large scale,and later poems were mostly based on the standard of this series of eight-line sevensyllable rhymes;in the reigns of Renzong and Xuanzong,the poems of “Eight Sceneries of Yenching”included both the works of ministers in response to monarchs and the pioneering of various literary styles by Zhu Zhanji,Emperor Xuanzong of Ming.In the Qing dynasty,the writing of “Eight Sceneries of Yenching” was represented by the Qianlong Emperor,which finally fell into decline in the late Qing.Chapter Ⅲ discusses the pictorial significance and function of the “Eight Sceneries of Yenching”.Wang Fu’s “Eight Sceneries of Beijing” in the early Ming dynasty is the earliest extant complete painting of the subject,which is still considered to be a traditional literati painting,as it is connected with the elegant gathering of courtiers during the Yongle dynasty.Some texts of art history also suggests there remained some other images about the “Eight Sceneries of Yenching” in Ming Dynasty,which might be more realistic in style.The eight-scenic images in the Qing Dynasty are more abundant,including traditional painting forms as well as material forms such as porcelain,during which Qianlong period was the heyday of the production of images.However,from Jiaqing and Daoguang periods to the modern era,knowledge of the “Eight Sceneries of Yenching” was more widely spread,and its status in tourist culture was mainly reflected in the engravings and cartography.Chapter Ⅳ provides a comprehensive analysis of the literary function and artistic characteristics of poems of “Eight Sceneries of Yenching”.The tone of the poems is mostly based on the traditional political and moralizing function of “Embellishing the Empire Order” and“Persuading Hundreds with Satirizing One”,while the writing of the eight sceneries follows various traditions,covering both harmony and worship towards the palace feasts and the clear and silky rhythms of the landscape poetry,and show the evolution of the land Yan and Ji from the frontier to the centre of the empire.