The historical story "Luoyang Paper Gui" and Zuo Si

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There is an idiom in China, called "Luoyang Paper Gui", which comes from such a story: During the Western Jin Dynasty, there was a literati who did not look good, who spent more than ten years of hard work and wrote a group of articles called "Three Capitals". Fu is an independent literary genre in ancient times, with forms between poetry and prose. Because this literati collected and mastered a wealth of information, the article was repeatedly deliberated and carefully revised, so after its appearance, it caused a sensation in Luoyang, Kyoto at that time. People liked this group of articles very much, and they scrambled to copy them, which made the price of luoyang paper suddenly increase.

This literary scholar is Zuo Si of Linzi.

Zuo Si (左思), also spelled Taichong, was born around 250 AD. His family belonged to the Hansu family in the society at that time. His father Zuo Yong (also known as Zuo Xi (左熹, literally Yan Yong), served as a low-ranking official in the last years of the Three Kingdoms; in the early years of the Western Jin Dynasty, he served as a palace attendant, mainly as an inspector. When Zuo Si was young, he couldn't read or learn the piano. Zuo Yong was disappointed and once said to his friends: "Zuo Si's ability to understand problems is not as good as when I was younger." His father's words actually inspired Zuo Si's self-motivation. Since then, he has studied diligently and begun to grow. Because he has an ugly face and is not good at talking, he reads behind closed doors and does not associate with others. At the age of twenty, he was very good at writing articles, and he was well-read and excelled.

Zuosi's mother died early. His sister Zuo Fen, who did not look good, but from an early age, she liked to study, was good at writing poetry and composition, and became a very famous female poet. Zuo Fen was elected to the imperial palace by Emperor Wu of Jin because of his high talent; in the eighth year of the Tai Dynasty (272 AD), he was given the title of Xiuyi; and later he was promoted to nobleman. At this time, Zuo Si's family had moved from Linzi to Luoyang, Kyoto. In 303, Zhang Fang, a subordinate of king hejian, raised an army near Luoyang, and Zuo Si's family moved to Jizhou (冀州, in modern Hebei). Around 305 AD, Zuo Si died of illness in Jizhou.

Zuo Si was an erudite and ambitious man. But he came from a humble background and had to be relegated to a lower position, at best as a petty official named Secretary Lang. Suffering from this repression, Zuo Si was indignant. This mood is strongly expressed in his poems.

Only fourteen of Zuo Si's poems have survived, of which eight are the best in the History of Yong. These eight poems were written by him around the decade between 270 and 280 AD. Although there is a "history" in the title of the poem, it is not dedicated to the ancient events of the ancients, but to satirize the past and the present, and to express his own grievances through the ancients. "Lush and pine at the bottom, away from the seedlings on the mountain, with the diameter of the stem, shade this hundred feet", which mainly reflects the contradiction between intellectuals born in the cold door and the landlords of the scholar clan, exposing the irrationality of the door valve system that can occupy a high position by virtue of the merits of the ancestors. Meritorious achievements are not knighted, and the long yang returns to Tian Lu", expressing his ambition to make meritorious achievements; "Zhenyi Qianlinggang, Mao Yu Li Liu", with heroic spirit, showed his great contempt for the Door Valve Clan at that time. These poems, full of emotion and majestic penmanship; they have fallen into a posture and become everyone in their own right, contrary to the beautiful and gorgeous poetic style of the time, and have been praised as "ancient and modern songs".

Zuo Sishi is well written and is also a master of composition.

His process of creating "Three Capitals" is not simple. It is said that he moved his family to Luoyang in order to visit more people and prepare materials for the writing of the "Three Capitals". In the process of writing, Zuo Si had a pen and paper in the doorway, fence, and even the toilet, and when he accidentally got one or two good sentences, he quickly wrote them down. This hard work, bit by bit, took more than ten years to complete. After the advent of the "Three Capitals", because the printing of woodblocks had not been invented at that time, people rushed to copy them, resulting in the high price of Luoyang paper. It is conceivable how big the impact should have been at that time.

The Three Capitals are written about Shu, Wu, and Wei. This type of endowment is not only a description of the establishment of a capital city, but also includes the historical deeds, geographical location, terroir, and character customs of these regions, which is equivalent to a local history written in compression. If there is no rich information and profound tempering, it will not be outstanding. Legend has it that when the famous literary scholar Lu Ji first arrived in Luoyang, he heard that Zuo Si was going to write "Three Capitals", so he wrote to his brother Lu Yun and said: "There is a nerd here, what "Three Capitals" is going to be, and when he makes it, take it to build a wine jar! However, when Zuo Si's "Three Capitals" was completed, Lu Ji admired it when he saw it, and he said that he could not catch up with him.

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