This last week I’ve been contemplating the cumulative effects of decisions I make about what sources, stories, and perspectives to include in my dissertation. These questions came up for me last week when discussing a draft of the chapter I described in my last post. This chapter touches on how warfare in the mid-nineteenth century affected both men and women and the affective mix of anxiety, martiality, loyalty, and grief that characterized life this period. Gender is a pretty natural lens for analyzing these problems. It’s also relevant to my project’s over-arching interest in place, but relating it to some of the specific arguments of the chapter is, in practice, a bit challenging, and I was grateful for some of the feedback I got on how I could approach this.

This reminded me of my first chapter, where I encountered a similar problem. This chapter should also be able to say something about the relationship between gender and place, but it’s not the primary focus. That constraint, plus the fact that my draft was already far too long, led me to cut out a section that I really enjoyed. But if I had worked harder to include it, then maybe that would have opened up some new avenues for writing in later chapters.

This section focused on a poem written by the Ming (1368-1644) poet Guang Lu, a native of Jinan. This poem, titled, “Baotu Spring’s White Snow Tower” (趵突泉白雪樓), is a reminiscence of Li Panlong (1514-1570). Li had constructed two residences named White Snow Tower, but both fell into disrepair after his death, and a third White Snow Tower was built next to Baotu Spring in 1588 or 1589 in honor of his death. In this way, Baotu Spring became associated with commemorating Li and the literary heritage he bequeathed to his home city.

Here is my translation of Guang’s poem:

The man has left, the tower is empty at the head of the Ji River.
Leaning everywhere on the balcony railing, I remember his ease and style.
Into the white clouds a yellow crane – without a trace, where is he?
The color of mountains the sounds of streams, together in a single building.

The long night, slowly, slowly – an eternity of regret.
My intimate friends fall away, fall away – worry up to today.
The refined scholar from the south – we are like-minded.
The calling, calling of the birds of spring – naturally we can seek them.

人去樓空濟水頭，欄桿倚遍憶風流。
白雲黃鶴杳何處，山色溪聲共一樓。

長夜漫漫千古恨，知音落落到今愁。
嶺南大雅關同調，春鳥嚶嚶自可求。
(Ren Hongyuan 77-78)

In theory, I was going to include this poem in my chapter because of the opening line’s reference to the Ji River, which some writers claimed flowed underground from the west and provided the source of Baotu Spring. However, what really caught my eye were the poem’s rich allusions, evocative language, and clever word play. Take for instance the opening phrase: “The man has left the tower is empty.” This is actually a Chinese idiom that means that a place has been deserted. However, Guang is also using it in a literal sense to describe the lonely surroundings of White Snow Tower. In the third line, he also alludes to the origin of this idiom, a Tang Dynasty poem written by Cui Hao (704-754) about Yellow Crane Tower. Guang uses the yellow crane to symbolize the deceased Li Panlong. Thus, even as Guang ruminates on his loneliness, Baotu Spring’s White Snow Tower becomes a place to engage with a rich literary and physical landscape stretching across time and space.

The allusions don’t stop there. The second and third lines of Guang’s poem bear a striking resemblance to parts of a poem attributed to Li Qingzhao (1084-ca. 1155), a woman born near Jinan and one of China’s most famous poets. Ronald Egan translates this poem, titled “To the Tune ‘Dabbing Crimson Lips'”:

Lonely, in the secluded women’s quarters,
Every inch of my fragile innards has a thousand threads of sorrow.
I cherish spring, but spring departs,
Amid a few droplets of rain that hasten the blossoms.
Having leaned everywhere on the balcony’s railing,
I have no enthusiasm for anything.
Where is he now?
Fragrant trees stretch to the horizon,
I gaze to the end of the road back home.
(Egan 367-368)

In this poem, the speaker, like Guang, describes her longing for a companion who has departed. In this case, though, the object of her pining is a husband/lover who has been absent for a long time. As the title and first line intimate, the speaker’s identity as a woman shapes both her affective state and her physical surroundings: her proper place is to wait patiently for her lover to return, gazing out at the road from her balcony.

Two phrases from this poem appear in Guang’s as well. The first is the reference to leaning on the balcony’s railing, which conveys a sense of languid helplessness. (Guang’s poem reverses the two two-character compounds that make up this phrase.) The second is the exclamatory question, “Where is he?” (Egan has added ‘now’ for emphasis.)

Statue of Li Qingzhao at memorial hall in Baotu Spring Park

These admittedly small parallels deserve attention for several reasons. First, this was a well-known piece of poetry in the Ming and Qing dynasties and, among other things, inspired poet Wang Shizhen to write a matching poem. It is far from unlikely that Guang, especially as a Jinan native, would have been familiar with and thinking about it as he composed his own poem. Second, it is not at all certain that Li Qingzhao actually wrote this poem. As Egan describes, one of the problems with Li’s corpus is that many men tried to imitate her style and attached her name to their poems. Based on the bluntness of this poem’s emotive expression and several other word choices, Egan suggests that this is one such interloper. If that is the case, then in Guang’s poem there is a double appropriation: one man is using another man’s imagination of a woman’s feelings to describe his own.

In this way, White Snow Tower seems to become a site for Guang to imaginatively transcend the limits of space, time, and gender. However, the end of Guang’s poem strikes a very different note from the one attributed to Li. Guang’s poem ends with a reference to his newfound companion, a refined scholar from the south, who I believe is Ye Mengxiong, a native of Guangdong and the official who arranged the construction of this new White Snow Tower in honor of Li Panlong. There is no new companionship in the poem attributed to Li Qingzhao, though. Instead, the speaker is left waiting longingly and loyally for her lover to return, a theme particularly associated with Li Qingzhao because of her happy marriage to Zhao Mingcheng and his tragic death (and Li’s subsequent controversial – and sometimes denied – remarriage and divorce). Unlike marriage, which bound a woman to a single man for his entire life and, ideally, even beyond, literary friendships among men could be wholesomely promiscuous.

Those who have read this chapter on Baotu Spring might recognize this theme of social and spatial capaciousness as one of its central motifs. The intertwined stories of Li Qingzhao, Li Panlong, Guang Lu, and Ye Mengxiong are thus by no means peripheral to this chapter. They also open up new possibilities for threads to weave throughout the dissertation. During post-war reconstruction in the nineteenth century, grieving and honoring both women who died and were left as widows would become a way for elite men in Jinan to forge bonds between their experiences during this period, other places around the empire that endured similar (and much greater) violence, and the imperial state.

It’s a thread that’s well worth weaving, even if I can’t quite imagine how it fits into the larger tapestry of what I’ve written and need to write. Writing it out here has been a way to help me work through the challenge of keeping things in my head that aren’t in the “official” draft without the stress of thinking through what would need to be re-arranged, re-written, or, alas, cut out to make room for this line of thought. I’m grateful for this venue, which is a small reminder that my dissertation isn’t the entirety of my work, and for colleagues who prod and pull me towards new ways of thinking about my project.

Works Cited:

Ren Hongyuan 任弘远. Baotuquan zhi jiaozhu 趵突泉志校注 [Baotu Spring Gazetteer, Annotated and Punctuated]. Edited by Liu Zesheng 刘泽生 and Qiao Yue 乔岳. Jinan: Jinan chubanshe, 1991.