The last poet of classical Chinese literature, Gong Zizhen
Gong Zizhen's poetry was very unrestrained, completely different from the Tongcheng school that was obsessed with imitation at that time, so he was attacked by the corrupt Confucians and apologists at that time. However, during the Tongzhi and Guangxu years, his works were widely circulated. His poetry connects the classical with the modern, and he is known as the last poet of classical Chinese literature, compared with Dante, the last poet of the European Middle Ages. Anticipating the decline of the world, he raised many social ills, and his worries became a reality after the Opium War, and it turned out that he was not alarmist, but had more insight and foresight than ordinary people.
Gong Zizhen's life can be divided into three stages, before the age of nineteen, he studied scripture and literature at home. Gong Zizhen was born in a typical family of officials and eunuchs, his grandfather and father were both officials in the imperial court or localities, and both had anthologies or academic works. Her mother, Duan Tao, was the daughter of the famous philologist Duan Yujie, who was good at writing poetry and had poetry collections passed down through the generations. Gong Zizhen recited poetry under the guidance of his mother in his childhood; at the age of twelve, he studied the "Explanation of Words and Characters" with his maternal grandfather Duan Yujie; and at the age of sixteen, he read the "Outline of the Four Libraries". Under the influence of the family's good learning atmosphere, Gong Zizhen showed a gratifying creative talent when he was a teenager. Nineteen to twenty-seven years old is the development period of Gong Zizhen's thought. Gong Zizhen participated in the township examination twice, but both failed, until jiaqing twenty-three years (1818) when he was twenty-seven years old. This experience allowed him to gradually deepen his understanding of the true face of society and life, and experienced the darkness of politics and the corruption of the system from his own frustration in the field. From the age of twenty-eight to his death at the age of fifty is the third stage of Gong Zizhen's life and the maturity of his thoughts. During this period, he wrote a number of articles and proposed a series of reforms. For example, the "Provincial Council of the Western Regions", "The Discussion of the Southeast Strike Banban", "The First Order of the Annals of Ruan Shangshu", and "The Order of sending the Minister of Qincha, Hou Guan Lin Gong", etc., show from different aspects that he has an increasingly profound understanding of realpolitik.
In the second period of his life, he studied "Ram Spring and Autumn" with Liu Fenglu, a modern scholar of modern literature and classics, accepted the evolutionary historical concepts of "three dynasties" and "three unifications", and realized that the Qing Dynasty had entered a decadent world. Faced with the smuggling of the northwest frontier and the downward trend of the country's continuous economic aggression by the British with opium, he struggled to shout, "The military is desperate, and the southeast is full of hate." One Xiao and one sword leveled the business, and lost the reputation of the madman for fifteen years. His patriotic poems are full of high passion and blood, and in the poem "Another Confession of the Heart", Yun said: "The Buddha's words are destroyed when the fire is destroyed, and what is the thousand-year-old anger?" His poems in feudal society are like a loud sound, reverberating in the sunset of the Western Mountains, the Qing Dynasty with heavy ills, stirring for a long time, but it has never been able to stir up greater waves.
During the Jiaqing period, Gong Zizhen wrote the "Western Regions Provincial Council" suggesting that the state should set up provinces in the Xinjiang region to stabilize the frontier. Although it advocates the consolidation of frontier works, gong Zizhen in the whole article conducts a more comprehensive analysis of the internal situation of the country, and it seems that he is seeking a domain but actually has the world in mind. Gong Zizhen saw that the contradictions within the country were intensifying, and the Yellow River was becoming more and more troubled, but the officials were not worried, the people were gradually infected with various abuses, and the whole country showed a trend of decline.
"Since the end of the Qianlong Dynasty, officials, soldiers, and people, wolves and wolves, and those who are not soldiers, peasants, workers, and merchants, have been five or six out of ten; or they have eaten tobacco, practiced cults, taken curses, or frozen to death; in the end, they have refused to cure every inch of silk and a grain of rice to benefit people." The people were still intoxicated by the prosperity of Qianlong's sixty years, and gradually stopped thinking of making progress. Starting from the capital, "the rich become poor, the poor become hungry, the head of the four people, running to the lowly", the country has a vast territory, but every year it loses money and wages. "The land is thousands of miles long, there are dozens of tribes, except for the sand moraine, the total number of tuntian is only 238,630 mu in the north and 49,476 mu in the south, for a total of only 288,108 mu; Tian Ding, the total number of north and south is only 103,905, plus the latent criminals, two hundred and four." Taking Guizhou as an example, Guizhou has no heavy troops, no official food, no taste, and the state has to lose 50,000 to 60,000 to 890,000 taels every year. This is true in Guizhou, not to mention the Xinjiang region.
For the governance of Xinjiang, Gong Zizhen put forward his own governance recipe. The state should send officials to administer the Xinjiang region, strengthen the management of the border areas, and combine military strength with local agricultural strength. Twenty years later, the fortunes of the country will surely be prosperous and prosperous, and the people of the four seas will be benefited. Unfortunately, Gong Zizhen's reform proposals were not taken seriously by the rulers, but when Zuo Zongtang regained Xinjiang sixty years later, he put Gong Zizhen's suggestions for governing Xinjiang into practice. Li Hongzhang once commented on this: "The greatness of ancient and modern times is very important, and it is often created in the income of students' troubles. The Gong clan set up a province in the Daoguang Dynasty from the Western Regions, while the Great Facilities of the Gong Dynasty are established today. "
Do not lose the heart of the classics, looking for the rule of the world. Gong Zizhen believed that there must be a generation of people to rule the policy, and there must be a generation of talents to appoint it, and the ruler should follow emperor Yao's appointment of Gao, 夔, 稷, and Qixunchen. He also pointed out that the reason why the later generations were inferior to the predecessors was that they focused on useless learning all day long, indulged in the struggle between fame and fortune, rather than practicing self-cultivation, and the ancients learned to enter politics, and future generations learned from politics. Gong Zizhen believes that these systems have consumed the hearts and minds of intellectuals, subjecting them to many restrictions, so that the country gradually has no available talents.
Gong Zizhen struggled all his life, and his shout was a constant alarm bell for the Qing Dynasty, and he eventually "moved the time taboo" because of his strong advocacy of innovation, and used his father's old age as an excuse to resign and return to the south. On his way home, he wrote a large group of poems in the form of seven sentences, "Miscellaneous Poems of the Sea". Most people are familiar with the fifth poem of the group poem, "The vastness is away from the melancholy day, and the chanting of the whip refers to the end of the world." Falling red is not a merciless thing, turning into spring mud is more protective of flowers", Gong Zizhen compared himself with falling red, realizing his sense of social responsibility that he is willing to fight for the country for life. The group poem 129 "Tao Qianshi likes to say Jing Ke, want to see "Stop the Clouds" to send a hao song. In the poem "Gong Zizhen borrowed Tao Qian to show his patriotic spirit, he believed that although Tao Yuanming lived in seclusion in the countryside, he had love and hatred, and the heroic spirit was not transcendent, like "Yong Jingke" and "Stopping clouds" poems showed Tao Yuanming's pride and ambition and indignation, indicating that he did not forget his feelings for the social state. Gong Zizhen himself was on the way back to seclusion, but his heart, like Tao Qian,did not forget the country at all. He was also worried that when the country was in crisis, there were not many patriots like Jing Ke, but people like himself who were patriotic and had the wisdom to serve the country were ostracized by the current dynasty, and the indignation and bitterness in his heart jumped out of the paper.
Gong Zizhen's poems and prose creations are sad and compassionate, grateful for the lack of encounters with scholars, cynical, he has become a proud and majestic Gaoshi in the long river of classical poetry, singing classical poetry while shouting for change. Liang Qichao said in "Introduction to Qing Dynasty Scholarship" that "the liberation of late Qing thought is indeed self-cherishing and meritorious." The so-called new scholars in Guangxujian led everyone through a period of worship of the Gong clan. "Gong Zizhen influenced generations of people, and he indisputably showed his existence in the process of Chinese society moving from classical to modern.