Gladding Jody - Wild geese returning : Chinese reversible poems

As if a Ring

The moon is round and so is the poem

Zhou Mengdie (19212014)

It is a love story that has survived the centuries, through embellishment and expansion, rhetorical invocation, literary allusion, emotive fictionalization, and illustrative depictions in paintings. Glancing references to it appear in poems dating back to the fifth and sixth centuries. By the first half of the seventh century, the storys narrative begins to take shape with the appearance of a brief biography in a history of the Jin (265420). As recorded in the chapter on Exemplary Women, Su Hui (style name Su Ruolan), a gifted poet native of Shiping (a town located in present-day Shaanxi), wove a brocade of a reversible circular-picture poem (huiwen xuantu shi ) for her husband Dou Tao, the prefect of Qingzhou who had been exiled to the place of flowing sands. This mournful poem of loves longing consisted of 840 characters and could be read circularly, in any direction.

A gloss on the poet Jiang Yans fifth-century Rhapsody on Separation, also written in the early Tang dynasty, added a scandalous spin: although Dou Tao swore not to marry again, soon after his banishment to the desert wastes he married another woman. Only then did Su Hui weave her circular poem for him, as an attempt to win back his heart.

The most renowned version of the love story is attributed to Wu Zetian and officially dated 692 AD . During the Ming and Qing dynasties it circulated as a preface to Su Huis reconstructed poem. While its authenticity cannot be proven (the compilers of an eighteenth century descriptive catalogue of the imperial collection, for one, deemed it a forgery), its not hard to see why Su Hui would appeal to Wu Zetian or to someone pretending to be her. Wellversed in the classics and accomplished in music and poetry, Imperial Majesty Wu was the only woman in Chinese history to establish her own dynasty (the Second Zhou) and rule as Emperor. She practiced Daoist rituals and exalted Buddhism above Confucianism as an intellectual and spiritual pursuit, while supporting all three belief systems in different ways to maintain peace in the realm. A prophecy in a canonical commentary pointed to her as being an incarnation of Maitreya, reborn to rule over the island of the terrestrial world,