Tang poetry is a precious spiritual wealth of the Chinese nation, and the beauty contained in Tang poetry has made countless Chinese people intoxicated. Even today, a thousand years later, Tang poetry is still recited from generation to generation. Whether it is a young child who has not yet shed his childish spirit, or an old man with white hair, he can carry a few popular Tang poems.
What most people don't know, however, is that the Tang poems we read today are only a very small part of the Tang poems. In the long time, a large part of the beautiful poems written by those poets have been difficult to trace.
The poem "Du Fu" "has a collection of sixty volumes", but most of it has been lost. In the second year of the Northern Song Dynasty (1039), when Wang Su re-edited Du Fu's poems, he only had 1405 poems, which were compiled into 18 volumes. It is regrettable that most of the poems handed down by Du Fu are works after the age of forty; before the age of forty, what the young Du Fu experienced, what kind of scenery he walked, what he thought, and what poems he wrote, we have no way of knowing today.
Li Bai was even more miserable, and it is said that he handed down only one-tenth of his actual poetry. His famous "Hongyou Wen" was forever left in the long river of history, and Li Bai entrusted his uncle Li Yangbing to compile a collection of poems for him before his death. Li Yangbing also sorted it out very carefully and compiled it into the "Caotang Collection". However, the "Caotang Collection" was also unfortunately lost. "Poetry Immortal" Li Bai also has a large number of great poems lying quietly in the depths of the long river of history, and we modern people can only sigh that we cannot recite his magnificent poems.
Not to mention that Zhang Ruoxuan, the author of "Spring River Flowers and Moonlit Nights", has only two poems passed down, and All forty volumes of poetry written by Li Shangyin himself have been lost... There are too many beautiful verses that we have no chance to see. If it were not for a man named Hu Zhenheng in the Ming Dynasty, we would see fewer Tang poems today.
Hu Zhenheng, a native of Wuyuan Town, Haiyan, Zhejiang province in the Ming Dynasty, called himself Chicheng Shanren (赤城山人), and later known as Shu Shu (遯叟). The Hu family "has a family lineage as a master," and Hu Zhenheng's ancestors were all ordinary people except for his grandfather, who had passed the entrance examination. However, the Hu family was known as "passing on poetry and books to the family", and when Hu Zhenheng's great-grandfather was critically ill at the age of eighty-five, he also asked his grandson to help him go to the new building to "pre-titled ascending poems". Hu Zhenheng's father "has a good sex book, see different books to, and the classics are not jin. Wu Xingshu Jia gladly gave him food and drink every time he came. After several generations of hard work, when Hu Zhenheng's father arrived, the family already had "tens of thousands of volumes", which also laid the foundation for Hu Zhenheng. 【1】
Hu Zhenheng was knowledgeable and agile since childhood, and was called "the first reading seed of Wuyi" by posterity. In the twenty-fifth year of the Ming Dynasty (1597), he was later appointed as the Zhi County of Hefei. According to records, during his 5 years in Hefei Zhi County, Hu Zhenheng had a lot of good governance. However, the Ming Dynasty at that time was already terminally ill, just like a dying patient waiting to perish.
Hu Zhenheng loves to read, but he is not a simple nerd. He loved to study military books, and he often studied military affairs with the famous general Liu Kui at that time, and was regarded as a confidant by Liu Kai.
However, after years of running and playing in the official field, when he reached middle age, Hu Zhenheng lost interest and confidence in the official field and chose to return to his hometown to live a leisurely retirement life.
In the leisurely retirement life, Hu Zhenheng spent all day flipping through the books in his family' collection. Suddenly, one day he found that the most complete Tang poetry work at that time, "Tang Shiji", had missed a poem by Tang Gaozu at the beginning. This made Hu Zhenheng, a reader, intolerable, and Hu Zhenheng, who had been more than half a hundred years old, decided to compile the most comprehensive and complete collection of Tang poems in the true sense.
Hu Zhenheng single-handedly compiled and collected poems from various periods of the Tang Dynasty, and even included five generations of poems. In addition to the complete poems, Hu Zhenheng has also sorted out and included broken sentences such as ballads, proverbs, and wine orders. Not only that, Hu Zhenheng also did his best to sort out personal biographies and literary reviews for each poet.
If this thing is placed in modern times, it must be a project that requires the cooperation of many people, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In Hu Zhenheng's era, there was no modern scientific and technological equipment, no network, and this was a vast project. And Hu Zhenheng actually completed the compilation of this poetry collection completely by himself.
10 years later, when Hu Zhenheng put down his pen, he had changed from a middle-aged man to an old man. Hu Zhenheng named this collection of poems "Tang Yin Tong Signature", a total of 1033 volumes, divided into ten signatures according to the number of Heavenly Stems, not only the most complete Tang poems at that time, but also extremely precious literary criticism and biographical historical materials. This set of "Tang Yin Tong signature" also laid the foundation for his position among the Ming Dynasty scholars who studied Tang poetry, and the "Quan Tang Poems" we see today are based on Hu Zhenheng's "Tang Yin Tong Signature" as the model for compilation, it can be said that without Hu Zhenheng, there would be no Quan Tang poems that we see today, and the Tang poems we can see now are likely to be even less.
After compiling the "Tang Yin Tongzhi", Hu Zhenheng did not stop there, and spent seven years to write two big books to study Li Bai Dufu's "Li Shitong" and "Du Shitong", and it was from Hu Zhenheng that the world began to regard Li Du and Du as the two greatest poets of the Tang Dynasty.
In 1645, Hu Zhenheng died, and before his death, he specially explained to future generations that these manuscripts and books must be cherished and preserved to avoid being burned by war. Fortunately, after the changes of the times, this "Tang Yin Tong Signature" has finally been handed down, and future generations can know that there is an old man who has done such a lonely but great thing.
It is precisely because Hu Zhenheng has been working tirelessly for 10 years that we have the privilege of reading the Tang poems that are either feminine, or exciting, or tragic, or comfortable and self-satisfied, and we are fortunate to see the poets' thousands of miles of Tang Dynasty, and we have the privilege of enjoying the all-round spiritual impact brought to us by Tang poetry. And all this is thanks to Hu Zhenheng, a hero who inherits Tang poetry.
Heroes don't just exist between the iron horse glaciers; heroes are not just the zhengzheng boys who fight in the rain of bullets. Heroes can also be literati who inherit the flame of national culture. Hu Zhenheng saved the fate of Tang poetry with the strength of only one person, so that the precious cultural heritage of the Chinese nation can be passed on to this day, and he deserves the word "hero".
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Resources
[1] Hu Zhenheng's family life and his writings