Sima Xiangru

Sima Xiangru a Han dynasty poet and court official (c. 179-117 BC) regarded as the greatest master of the fu, the elaborately descriptive rhapsody that was the characteristic literary form of his age. His vast compositions on the imperial parks and hunts set the standard for the genre, and his stormy career as a courtier made him a lasting emblem of literary genius in imperial China.

Life and Career at Court

Sima Xiangru was born around 179 BC in Shu commandery, the region of modern Sichuan, into a family of modest means. He was reputed in youth for his skill in fencing and for his love of books, and he took a minor official post before travelling east to the capital, where he entered the service of the imperial court and began to attract attention for his literary gifts.

His early career was unsettled. He left the capital to serve as a retainer to a prince, in whose household he composed some of his first fu, and after the death of that patron he returned to Shu, where he lived in poverty for a time. His personal life was transformed by his elopement with Zhuo Wenjun, a young widow of a wealthy family, whom he married against the wishes of her relatives and then supported by keeping a tavern, a story that became one of the most famous romances in Chinese literature.

His fortunes revived when his literary work came to the attention of the Emperor Wu of Han, who admired his compositions and summoned him to court. From that time he held a series of positions in the imperial administration and wrote on commission for the throne, producing the grand fu that made his reputation.

The Art of the Fu

The fu, or rhapsody, was a form of composition that combined the features of poetry and prose, using elaborate parallelism, enumeration and description to present a subject in exhaustive detail. It descended in part from the earlier Songs of Chu, and in the hands of the Han court poets it grew into a magnificent and demanding vehicle for the display of learning, imagination and verbal resource.

Sima Xiangru was the supreme practitioner of the grand fu, the long rhapsody on an imperial subject. His most celebrated works describe the parks, palaces and hunts of the emperor in language of extraordinary richness, piling up imagery of plants, animals, mountains, waters and buildings until the poem becomes a kind of verbal map of the world. The effect is one of overwhelming abundance, and it reflects the grandeur that the Han court wished to claim for itself.

He was also a careful theorist of his art, and later writers attributed to him reflections on the proper method of composition. Whether or not these accounts are reliable, they associate him with the idea that the fu should move from description to moral instruction, presenting the splendours of empire in such a way as to counsel moderation in the ruler who enjoyed them.

Major Works

Among the works attributed to Sima Xiangru, several have remained central to the Chinese literary canon. The Rhapsody on Sir Vacuous and Master Fantasy and the Rhapsody on the Imperial Park are great panoramic compositions in which the delights of hunting and of the royal preserves are set out at immense length and then brought to a moral close in which the extravagances described are gently criticised.

The Rhapsody on the Tall Poplars and other shorter pieces show a different and more lyrical side of his talent, and his fu on the great expanse of the Shanglin park is one of the longest and most elaborate poems in the classical tradition. He also wrote prose and memorials for the court, and a number of his letters and short pieces survive.

A distinctive feature of his writing is its ambition to catalogue the whole extent of the natural and artificial world, from the smallest plants to the greatest mountains, and to arrange this material in ordered and resonant patterns. This all-embracing impulse gave the fu its characteristic texture and made Sima Xiangru the model that later poets of the form sought to equal.

Style and Influence

Sima Xiangru's style was imitated so widely that the grand fu became the dominant literary form of the Han court, and his name was invoked for centuries whenever a poet wished to claim affinity with the great tradition. Later critics, however, came to regard the excesses of the fu with some suspicion, and they debated whether its ornamental magnificence concealed an underlying moral purpose or merely delighted in display.

His influence extended beyond the fu itself. The vocabulary and imagery of his rhapsodies entered the common stock of Chinese poetic language, and the conventions he established for describing landscapes and buildings shaped the way later writers represented the world. In the Tang and Song dynasties poets and critics looked back to him as the founder of a great style.

He is also remembered as a figure of legend, the brilliant and improvident poet who won his wife by elopement and charmed the emperor with his verses. The stories told about him, many of them embellished by later tradition, made him a symbol of the power of literary talent and of the precarious position of the artist at court.

Legacy

Sima Xiangru died around 117 BC, leaving a body of work that has been transmitted through the anthologies and histories of later ages. He is universally ranked among the greatest of the Han writers, and his name is permanently attached to the fu as its supreme master. The imperial anthology of later centuries preserved his major compositions as classics of the tradition.

His elopement with Zhuo Wenjun became one of the most famous love stories of Chinese culture, retold in poetry, drama and opera and honoured by a tradition of commemoration in Sichuan. Both figures were celebrated as poets, and their story illustrates the close connection between literature and social life in the Han period.

The critical assessment of his work has varied with changing literary taste, but his historical importance is undisputed. He forged the grand fu into a vehicle capable of describing the whole world of the Han empire, and in doing so he established a mode of writing whose ambition and richness continued to resound throughout Chinese poetry for two thousand years.

See also

• Fu (rhapsody)
• Emperor Wu of Han
• Songs of Chu
• Classical Chinese poetry