Poetic Reflections on Sustainability at the Peak of the Tang Empire

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Abstract

During the first half of the eighth century, about a hundred years after the Mayan Golden Age (300-600), a hundred and eighty years before Basil I began to expand the Byzantine Empire, and as Charles Martel, “The Hammer,” stopped the expansion of the Muslim Arab Empire in France, the Tang Empire in central China rose to its apogee to include what is now Inner-Mongolia in the north, Vietnam in the south, the coast in the east and Tajikistan in the west. As one of the two super powers of the time, the Tang Empire became ambitious in territorial expansion, confident in diplomacy, active in international trade, innovative in technology, and creative in artistic expression. The poetry of this “High Tang” period has always been celebrated as free and original, reflecting the bursting vitality of the prosperous empire (Du Xiaoqin, Sui Tang Wudai Wenxue Yanjiu, Beijing, Beijing Publishing Company, 2001, p. 288). Yet, as I reviewed ten thousand and translated two hundred poems from this “High Tang” period, I noticed in the diverse subject matters of the High Tang Poetry a ubiquitous concern about the sustainability of the empire and the non-human environment that had made any human society sustainable in the first place. With the rise of the Tang Empire, poets sensed the polarization between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the downtrodden, the successful and the unfortunate. They read far back into a thousand years of Chinese history, and the classics that had accumulated during that long history, in search of practicable life styles that would offer an alternative to the imperial value of domination that they had reason to believe to be unsustainable. Some of these poets were high officials in the imperial court, such as Wang Wei and his younger brother Wang Jin; some had never entered the court, such as Meng Haoran; some tried hard yet were unable to receive or maintain an official position in the court, such as Li Bai (Li Po); and some after painstaking efforts got only a petty office in the remote south somewhere in what is now Vietnam, such as Du Shenyan, and some, such as Han Shan, never bothered their mind with the thought of court but found a home in his alter ego, the cold mountains in Zhejiang Province. Disappointed by the imperial court for various reasons, they found their alternative ways of life in the countryside, in wild mountains, in voluntary or involuntary poverty. The common denominator for these poets is the advocacy for living small. A materialistically moderate yet culturally rich and satisfying life style is the ideal they share. In this paper, I’ll review the reflections on and practice of sustainability by the poets of the “High Tang” period, their responses to the rise and fall of the empire and to the environmental disasters the empire builders had caused. The poetic imagination of the Tang Empire twelve centuries ago may shed some light to our own time. Is living small necessarily irrelevant in the time of big, global economy? Isn’t the love of the cold mountain more understandable in the age of global warming, a problem shared by the pre-industrial and post industrial countries alike?