The descendants of Confucius were known as "holy people" in successive feudal dynasties, and they would have some preferential treatment. These people attach great importance to the honor of the family, so they often study hard, and they have also produced a lot of cultural people.
Kong Shangren was the 64th grandson of Confucius, born in the 5th year of Shunzhi, lived most of the time during the Kangxi period, and was once appreciated by Kangxi.
His dismissal as an official was also somewhat inexplicable because of a chance, and his final frustration was probably related to the fact that he wrote a famous "Peach Blossom Fan" that has been passed down through the ages.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" > Kong Shangren's bumpy career and the reason for the creation of "Peach Blossom Fan"</h1>
Kong Shangren was young and erudite, and in addition to "lifting his profession", he also extensively dabbled in the art of etiquette, music, soldiering, and farming, which shows that his ambition is not small. However, I was frustrated repeatedly in the field of science, and I did not even pass the township examination, that is, I failed to pass the examination.
At this time, he was more than 30 years old, although he had the idea of retreating, but he was unwilling in the end, so he spent money to buy a position for the birth of a country.
So, is it because Kong Shangren's talent is insufficient? Nor is it. Because the reason why he was able to enter the career was precisely because his talent and learning impressed Kangxi.
In 1684, Kangxi made his first tour of the south, and on his way back, he went to Qufu, Shandong Province, to worship Confucius, and Kong Shangren, as a descendant of Confucius, was recommended to preach before the emperor. It was this opportunity that allowed his talent to be affirmed by Kangxi, who appointed him as a doctor of Guozijian and asked him to explain the scriptures to all the students, which showed that his talent and learning had long exceeded the scope of the imperial examination.
Kangxi initially relied heavily on Kong Shangren, and the next year he sent his ministry to Huaiyang to dredge the Yellow River, but unexpectedly encountered a secret struggle between the Governor of Hedao and the Governor of Caoyun, causing him to stay here for three years. It was also at this stage that he knew and got tired of the official deception of the Qing Dynasty, and turned to poetry to make friends with southerners.
Soon after Kong Shangren returned to Beijing, he was promoted to the head of the household department and appointed as the superintendent of the Baoquan Bureau, which was a fat shortage. However, the moral integrity of the literati made Kong Shangren have a clean wind in his sleeves, and his poverty remained, and he lived a life of "official hiding".
It was at this time that Kong Shangren used his leisure time to complete his 20-year-old "Peach Blossom Fan". And the process of its creation is also more interesting, and there is a feeling of "catching ducks on the shelves".
Kong Shangren had plans to write a drama before he left the army, so Fengren said that he was writing a "Peach Blossom Fan" legend, and he often said this on banquet occasions after becoming an official. But the reality is that he has not put this idea into practice, just conceived it, but has not written a word.
However, The Little Priest Ryūka was very interested in this legend, so every time he entered Kyoto, he had to ask Kong Shangren for a visit. Kong Shangren was also forced to have no way, so he could only pick a lamp to fill in the words to meet his requirements.
After five years and three drafts, Kong Shangren's "Peach Blossom Fan" was finally finalized, which was June 1699.
As soon as the "Peach Blossom Fan" came out, it caused a great sensation, and before it was engraved, the princes and nobles rushed to copy it, and even one night, the internal servant actually found Kong Shangren to ask for the whole copy and sent it directly to the palace.
At the Lantern Festival in 1700, Du Yushi Li Nan ordered the artist to rehearse "Peach Blossom Fan". Since then, not a single day has this drama not been staged in the capital and has spread rapidly.
However, the strange thing is that in less than a year after writing "Peach Blossom Fan", Kong Shangren, who had just been promoted for less than a month, was dismissed from his post on the grounds that he was "falsely accused" of delaying poetry and wine and supervising casting.
Everyone at the time understood that it was "Peach Blossom Fan" that became increasingly popular and cut off Kong Shangren's career. He himself said that this was "a thin life and suddenly hated by words."
So, why did the Qing court's attitude toward "Peach Blossom Fan" turn so much? This is to talk about its content, the problem is not big, small but not small.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="25" > the content of "Peach Blossom Fan", testing back and forth on the edge of "word hell"</h1>
This legendary drama created by Kong Shangren is different from previous theatrical works, and it has a very clear historical background.
After the Qing Dynasty entered the Customs, Kong Shangren's brother Kong Shangren served in the Southern Ming Hongguang Dynasty, witnessed and personally experienced many Southern Ming relics, so he repeatedly talked with Kong Shangren after returning to his hometown, and this is also the origin of Kong Shangren's desire to write a historical drama about the Southern Ming Dynasty.
During the three years of his stay in Huaiyang, he had many contacts with the remnants of the Ming Dynasty, and also roamed Nanjing, visiting the Qinhuai River, Yanziji, the Ming Forbidden City and the Ming Xiaoling Tombs, and even visited Zhang Yi, who had become a monk at the end of the Ming Dynasty.
As a result, Kong Shangren not only collected a lot of hidden things and anecdotes of the Southern Ming Dynasty, but also was greatly influenced by the remnants of the Ming Dynasty spiritually. His status as a descendant of Confucius made him have more feelings about the "rise and fall of the world", and even his attitude towards the Qing Dynasty has changed slightly.
These contents were placed by Kong Shangren in "Peach Blossom Fan", and even listed the plot sources, and the sense of the rise and fall of the world was also filled in the words.
This drama uses the division and combination of The scholar Hou Fangyu and the famous prostitute Li Xiangjun to show the absurdity and chaos within the Southern Ming Dynasty, which contains the fainting of the monarch, the power of the traitors, and the infighting in the army, and profoundly reveals the reasons for the demise of the Southern Ming Dynasty.
Therefore, Kong Shangren said: The rise and fall of the Southern Dynasty, the peach blossom fan bottom.
In previous dramas, the love between talented women and beautiful people often twisted and turned due to the chaos of the world, but "Peach Blossom Fan" is just the opposite, writing about the clutch of Hou Fangyu and Li Xiangjun in the chaos of war, the purpose of which is to show the sense of rise and fall. The storytelling of the story is secondary, and everything serves lyricism.
As the clue of the whole article, "Peach Blossom Fan", it was originally an ordinary folding fan that Hou and Li had made love, but it became unusual because it was splashed with blood.
Hou Fangyu, out of patriotic enthusiasm, became increasingly at odds with the traitors Ruan Dacheng and Ma Shiying, and had to run away to Shi Kefa. However, Li Xiangjun was persecuted by Ruan Dacheng and other traitors in the rear, and she scolded the traitors at the banquet as a civilian, preferring to die unyieldingly, and finally wanted to kill herself by hitting the wall, and the blood between her foreheads burst onto this folding fan.
Hou Fangyu's friend Yang Longyou, based on the blood on the folding fan, dotted out peach blossoms one by one, which is the origin of "peach blossom fan".
When the Southern Ming Dynasty faced the Qing Dynasty's iron horse, it did not think about self-improvement, but instead "the literature was in contention inside, and the military was in contention outside", believing that "the national hatred is still forgivable, and the private grudge is the most difficult to eliminate", and finally the Qing Dynasty iron horse drove straight into Yangzhou, attacked Yangzhou, Shi Ke's mana was exhausted, and the Southern Ming was destroyed.
However, the story is not over, Hou Fangyu and Li Xiangjun reunited again after the war, according to the general plot description, the two should live in seclusion between the rivers and lakes, not to ask about the world, but "Peach Blossom Fan" arranged a disillusioned ending.
In the first play of "Entering the Tao", the Taoist priest Zhang Yaoxing advised Hou and Li to break the root of love, and Hou Fangyu responded with the family of men and women, and the dalun of the people, but Zhang Yaoxing directly scolded:
Woohoo! Two idiots, where do you see the country? Where is home? Where is Jun? Where is the Father? Is this bit of a flower moon love root, cutting him continuously?
A few words made Hou and Li sweat coldly, like a dream to wake up, so broken, where can you find a clean land to live in? Renunciation, far from mortal dust, can only seek a peace of mind.
This ending was deliberately arranged by Kong Shangren in "Peach Blossom Fan", whether it is historical records or other artistic fictions, there is no similar plot. The reason why Kong Shangren wrote such an ending for the story was to show the disillusionment of the "subjugation of the country", and even contained a helpless sigh about the decline of the feudal system.
Kong Shangren is different from the Ming Dynasty widows he befriended in the Huainan region, although he is a descendant of Confucius, he is an authentic Qing Dynasty man, and the emotions he shows in the poems and the legend of "Peach Blossom Fan" are not resentment against the Qing Dynasty, let alone nostalgia and regret for the Ming Dynasty.
Therefore, the emotion conveyed by "Peach Blossom Fan" is not the thought of the remnants, but to be precise, the sigh of "the rise and fall of the world" that is higher.
In the last play of "Afterglow", Kong Shang appointed eight "Lamentation Jiangnan" suite to express this feeling to a deeper point, "watching him rise up the Zhu Lou, watching him feast on guests, watching his building collapse", not only singing the decline of the Southern Ming, nor just showing the lament for the 300-year-old Daming, which also contains the disillusionment and distress of the literati at the end of the feudal era.
On the one hand, because legendary drama belongs to popular literature and cannot be valued as "poetry", on the other hand, it is also because although "Peach Blossom Fan" shows sympathy for Nanming, it does not have resentment against the Qing Dynasty at its root, but turns into an aria of "rise and fall", which makes it not included in the "word prison".
But even so, the world-famous "Peach Blossom Fan" from the completion of creation to the first publication, there is a gap of nearly 10 years, and Kong Shangren's rest of his life until his death, lived nearly 20 years of cold and lonely, poor and sad life.
The future is hidden in the night, waiting for the dawn here.
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