Youth|romance|affection|shortness
Zhu Huijun|Emperor Poetry 50 Lectures No. 12:
Lucky prince Liu Yiqing
In the era of feudal autocracy, being a "prince" was a "high-risk position", even if it was a sibling brother and a nephew of the same clan, it was even more dangerous. Liu An, the king of Huainan who invented tofu, is a typical example.
Liu Yilong, the cousin of Liu Yilong, the king of Linchuan, was relatively lucky. Why?
According to the history books, Liu Yiqing "is simple in nature, has little appetite, and loves literary meaning", which made him avoid the cruel palace battles and focus on literature, leaving behind two important collections of works, "Shishuo Xinyu" and "Youminglu". He has also been a stabbing historian in Yuzhou, Jingzhou, Jiangzhou and other places for many years, and it is said that he also has certain political achievements, but he has long been lost in the dust of history. And the prestige brought to him by these two books not only made the unlucky Jiangxia King Liu Yigong unreachable, but also overshadowed Liu Yilong, who was the emperor.
When he was a child, Liu Yiqing was outstanding because of his literary talent, and he was deeply loved by his uncle Liu Yu, Emperor Wu of the Song Dynasty. Judging from one of his existing poems, it is fresh and natural, plain and clear, and has a unique style in the increasingly floating poetry arena.
"Poems of the Peregrine Lake" is written like this:
The scenery turns harmonious, and the grass and trees grow.
The plum blossoms are white, and the peaches and apricots are glorious.
The books "The New Language of the World" and "Youminglu" are important works in the history of Chinese fiction. The former is "Zhiren" and the latter is "Zhiwei", which opened up the two main paths of Chinese novels in the future. It is true that these works are not necessarily created by Liu Yiqing himself, and some are estimated to have been collected from the people, and he and his literary friends have sorted out and processed them. Not to mention that there must be his own creations, it is these finishing and processing works, and he has also put a lot of effort. We look at the 36 articles of "The World Speaks New Words", more than 1,200 articles, although the length is different, but the style is very consistent, and the praise and disapproval attitude is basically clear, which obviously embodies a lot of Liu Yiqing's hard work.
For later generations, Liu Yiqing's greatest contribution is to truly record the demeanor of many famous people from the late Han Dynasty to the Eastern Jin Dynasty. From it, we can not only see the demeanor of Cao Cao, Yang Xiu, Liu Ling, Wang Rong, Wang Xizhi, etc., but also see the ugliness of Shi Chong, Wang Lantian, Hua Xin, etc., which can be described as the "world celebrity map" of the Han and Wei dynasties.
Let's take a few paragraphs to take a look.
The recently popular "Removing the Three Evils Around the World" is from "The World Says New Words":
When Zhou was young, he was fierce and chivalrous, and he was troubled by the township. There are Jiao in the water and white-fronted tigers in the mountains in Yixing (now Yixing, Jiangsu), and they are all violent people. Yixing people are called three horizontal, and they are especially dramatic.
Or to say that killing the tiger and cutting the Jiao is really the only one of the three horizontals. immediately assassinated the tiger, and then entered the water to hit the Jiao. Jiao or float or not, travel dozens of miles, everywhere with it. After three days and three nights, the township was said to be dead, and they celebrated each other.
actually killed Jiao and came out, and when he heard that people celebrated, he knew that he was suffering from human feelings, and he had changed his mind.
It is to enter Wu to find two lands. Pingyuan (Lu Ji) is not there, and he is seeing Qinghe (Lu Yun), with a love report, and Yun: I want to modify myself, and the years have been wasted, and nothing has been achieved. Qinghe said: "The ancients died at night, and the future of the emperor is acceptable." And if people are not upset, why worry about making their names unremarkable?"
Luo Guanzhong's "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" wrote several anecdotes about Cao Cao, most of which also came from here. "The Knife Catcher at the Head of the Bed" wrote:
When Wei Wu saw the Xiongnu envoys, he thought that he was ugly, and he was not enough to be a distant country, so that Cui Jiqi was in charge, and the emperor grabbed his sword and stood at the head of the bed. When it was over, the spy asked, "What is the King of Wei?" The Xiongnu envoy replied: "The king of Wei is very hopeful, but the person who catches the knife at the head of the bed is also a hero." When Wei Wu heard this, he chased and killed this envoy.
Liu Yiqing's account here is simplified, without any superfluous waste, but the side of Cao Cao's "traitor in troubled times" is portrayed very well.
“咏雪”一则，更是广为传颂：
Mrs. Xie Hanxue collected the day and gave a lecture with his children. The snow suddenly fell, and the public happily said: "What does the snow look like?" and the brother Hu Er said: "The difference between the salt and the air can be compared." The brother and daughter said: "If the catkins are raised by the wind." Gong laughed. That is, the eldest brother has no daughter, and the wife of General Zuo Wang Ning is also.
The famous Wang Xizhi, Liu Yiqing did not describe it directly, but indirectly expressed it through the eyes and mouth of the messenger:
In Jingkou (now Zhenjiang), Mrs. Xi sent his protégé to Wang Cheng to ask for a son-in-law. Prime Minister Xi messenger: "You go to the east chamber and choose it at will." The protégé returned to Bai Xi and said: "The princes of the Wang family are also commendable, and they are salty and reserved. Only Ichiro, lying on the east bed with his bare belly, as if he didn't smell. Xi Gongyun: "That's good." "Visiting it is Yi Shao, because of marrying a daughter.
From the above articles, you can basically get a glimpse of the "whole leopard" of "The World Speaks New Words". They are cleverly conceived, well-tailored, and concise. Speaking of "Xi Taifu's choice of son-in-law" nearby, it adopts a combination of positive description (bright line) and side confession (dark line): Xi Gong sent a messenger to "ask for a son-in-law", Wang Gongyu messenger "optional", and the messenger reported on the selection of a son-in-law. Such a light and dark structure can better highlight the extraordinary vision and extraordinary insight of Xi Gong's son-in-law, and Wang Xizhi's unconventional law, special demeanor and noble temperament in dealing with things also left a deep impression on people.
Liu Yiqing is also particularly good at using contrasting techniques to highlight the image characteristics of important figures. For example, in this article, when the other children of the Wang family heard that someone was looking for a son-in-law, they all paid attention to their appearance, and the atmosphere was quite tense; In "Yongxue", the boy actually used "sprinkling salt in the air" as a metaphor for "white snow"? Wang Ning's wife replied easily: "The catkins rise because of the wind", and the high and low judgments are also made. This is a gap in cultural literacy. In "Guan Ning Cutting the Seat", the contrast between Guan Ning and Hua Xin's behavior is the disparity between personality and inferiority!
Reading these anecdotes that used to be "people" or even "big people", we should be touched and reflected. Nearly 2,000 years have passed, and our quality, mentality, etc., must be improved no matter what.
Liu Yiqing worked hard and fell ill after completing "The New Language of the World". He died soon after returning to the age of 41, and it seems that he has not yet enjoyed his old age. But looking at Cao Pi and Cao Zhi's brothers, they only lived to their early 40s, so the average life expectancy in that era should not be high. The most important thing is that Liu Yiqing is really timely, he will live for another nine years (453 AD), and he will be cruelly abused by Liu Jun's father and son, like all the brothers of the "righteous" generation. In this sense, Liu Yiqing can be regarded as lucky.
As the king of Linchuan, if Liu Yiqing has a spirit in the sky, he will definitely be able to see: Linchuan is a land boundary, and there are many talents later. In the past 2,000 years, his works have attracted more and more attention from later generations, and some of them have become idioms, known to women and children. Even Mr. Lu Xun looked at him differently and dabbled in his works many times. In his books "A Brief History of Chinese Novels" (1923) and "Changes in the History of Chinese Novels" (1924), he devoted a special chapter to "The New Sayings of the World" and called it "a textbook of famous scholars." Since then, "The New Language of the World" has not only become an important center for the study of Chinese literary history and novel history, but also an important object for the study of scholar culture, spiritual history and spiritual history.
This can be said to be Liu Yiqing's luckier.
Writer's Archive
Zhu Huijun, born in July 1961, is from Hunan. The first generation of the Republic of China Master of Arts, senior editor, famous literary critic.
From February 2000 to February 2014, he successively served as the deputy editor-in-chief of China Art Newspaper and China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing House. He has successively served as the operation and management officer of the commune, the head of the Party School Office of the County Party Committee, the deputy director of the editorial department of "Literature and Art Study", and the director of the Periodicals Division and the Propaganda Department of the Research Office of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles. He has also served as the president and editor-in-chief of the magazine "Chinese Literary and Artist".
He is the author of more than 10 books, including The Theory of the Juche of Artistic Creation (1988), and has published more than 1,000 articles. He has won more than 100 awards. Among them, "Following the Footsteps of Marxism-Leninism: Scientific Interpretation of Literature and Art and China's Contribution" (2018, 2019) is a national key book publishing planning project of the 13th Five-Year Plan and a project funded by the National Publishing Fund.
He has successively lectured on "Marxist-Leninist Literature" at the Lu Xun Academy of Literature of the China Writers Association and the Chinese Writers Century Forum, and served as a judge for the "Lu Xun Literature Award", "Golden Eagle Award", and "Literature and Art Criticism Award of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles".