The Penumbra of the Great Tang: Poetry from the Margins of the Empire at the Turn of the Eighth Century

The turn of the eighth century witnessed, for the first time in Chinese history, a concentration of poems written by exiled courtiers. In an era when mobility was limited by curfews, passes, and vehicular technologies, banishment to faraway places, accomplished
by a decreed use of exclusionary post-station horses, ironically became a sanctioned and expedited means of traversing new territories. Through the poetic texts circulated via the highly developed post-station system, the empire’s center in the north became more connected to its distant margins than ever before. This article argues that these poems, characterized by centripetalism and constituting a petitionary genre,
contributed to a new way of envisioning the empire as a whole and in its totality, and if we define “court” as a field of dynamic power relations, then these poems are court poetry, whose definition must be expanded to reflect the catholic nature of the term “court” itself.

公元七、八世紀之交，我們看到中國歷史上首次集中出現的一批由流貶朝臣創作的詩歌。在一個行動受到宵禁、關卡、以及車輛技術限制的時代，借由特別批准使用的驛站馬匹而完成的流貶非常具有諷刺意味地成了見識帝國邊遠之地的至為快捷而且獲得官方首肯的方式。通過高度發達的驛站系統而流佈的詩歌文本，位於北方的帝國中心與其遙遠邊疆之間的聯結也變得前所未有的緊密。本文提出，這種詩歌以向心主義為特征，而且構成了一種請願文體，提供了一種新的想象帝國的方式，也就是說，將帝國視爲一個整體，對之作出全方位的構想。本文還提出，如果我們將「宮廷」定義為一個充滿動態的權力關係場域，那麼這些寫於貶謫期間的詩歌就確乎也是「宮廷詩」，事實上「宮廷詩」的定義必須加以擴展，以反映「宮廷」一詞本身的寬泛性。