Abstract: This paper examines the biography of Yang Shen (1488–1559) and how it changed through the writings of five key intellectuals of the late imperial period and the official history of the Ming dynasty. The main argument is that biographers, even when working with similar materials, molded their subject into a person close to their own time and interests, thus transforming the early life story into a much more malleable form. The paper also examines the tropes and means of reading these scholars writings in the analysis of their work.
Abstract: This paper is an exploration of the relation of text and image asseen through the travel poetry of the mid-Ming scholar Yang Shen (1488-1557),who was exiled to southwest China in 1524. Text is understood to refer to theoverall work by which a ‘meaning’ or an interpretation can be produced.Imagery refers to the representation of the outside world as captured throughwords. The relationship of imagery and text is complex – sometimes imageryreinforces the ‘meaning’ of the text; at other times, imagery works against thatmeaning offering alternative readings of the work involved.Travel writing is under examination as it is a unique genre that allowsscholars from a variety of disciplines to define it in very particularistic ways.Travel writing can range from extremely dry non literary accounts of voyages tohighly imaginative created journeys. This allows for a flexibility of handling ofthe topic, particularly as noted above in the distinction between text and image.Chinese travel poetry, unlike its western cousin, is lyrical for the most part.This feature of Chinese poetry strengthens the importance of the image in relationto the text.Four of Yang’s poems are under consideration here. In “Verses onBamboo Branches,” is Yang’s pre-exilic experience of traveling through theThree Gorges on his way home to Xindu, Sichuan. He develops a familiarizedworld, which captures encyclopaedically the world through the imagery. “Songof Gratitude” is a lyrical masterpiece in two-hundred lines that recounts hisjourney into exile from Beijing to Yongchang, Yunnan in 1525. The first halfof the poem deals with the familiar landscape of Eastern China which Yangtraverses in the company of his wife. The second half of the poem follows his independent route through the lesser known roads to his place of exile. Yangrecords a journey that progressively displaces Han cultural norms with the wildfreedom of the peoples who inhabit the mountainous stretches of the land. Thispoem is a tour de force and marks a place in the Chinese poetic tradition of a shiftfrom centre to periphery. “Poem on Baojing” describes a journey to a miningoutpost that straddles the Mian (Burmese) and Ming empires. Intended as acritique of court extravagance, Yang explores the distance between Han andindigenous cultures through images whose overtones may be characterized asorientalist in representation. This feature of the imagery is particularly at oddswith the meaning of the poem. “Songs of Lake Dian,” is in a hybrid format thatcombines travel poetry with the gazetteer, a popular genre that the elite wouldcreate for the glory of the local place (prefecture, province, mountain, river,temple, etc). In it, the meaning of the text is conveyed overwhelmingly throughthe array of disparate images that project a Yunnan culture composed of Hanmilitary and officials, indigenous peoples and a Daoist natural indifference tomeaning in the world. The journeys however are not presented front and centrein this work, but rather undergird the work.
Unpublished conference paper.