楚辞

Between the Yuan and the Xiang rivers, drums and reed-pipes rise together. A shaman dons embroidered robes, becomes a god, and climbs a high altar. This is the Nine Songs — the full cycle of song and dance for Chu's state rites, eleven pieces running from the Great Unity, God of the East, to a closing hymn that sends the gods off.

The Great Unity, God of the East, is the supreme god of Chu belief, a sun god. The Lord of the Clouds rides a dragon chariot on his rounds of the four seas. The Lord and Lady of the Xiang are a divine couple bound to the river, forever looking for each other and forever missing each other — the Lady stands on the north shore of Lake Dongting, straining her eyes into the autumn wind. The Mountain Spirit comes out of the deep woods clad in fig-vine, girdled with dodder, riding a chariot drawn by a red leopard. The Greater Master of Fate descends on a black cloud with a long sword drawn; the Lesser Master of Fate governs the children born to mortals, meets them briefly, and is suddenly gone. The River Earl drives two dragons and a white turtle on his rounds of the Yellow River.

This is not a script one person wrote; it is a complete rite the Chu people offered to heaven, earth, and the spirits. Shamans played the gods, drums and pipes sounded, kingfisher-green banners rose, and the gods were welcomed, entertained, and sent home. Much of the divine imagery, the ritual choreography, and the ascension motifs that later Chinese immortal-lore and mythology would draw on first take textual shape here.

Qu Yuan makes his entrance dressed as a walking botanical garden.

He drapes himself in river rue, pins on angelica, ties autumn orchids at his waist, stitches magnolia into his sleeves — the herbs are not decoration, they are a genealogy of character he is building for himself. Each fragrant plant stands for a virtue; each patch of purity marks a refusal to compromise. Later, in In Praise of the Orange Tree, he writes about the orange, how it takes root where it is told and will not be transplanted, how deep and unmovable its roots run, and ties his own roots to the soil of the south.

Qu Yuan was a Chu aristocrat who served the court as Zuotu, a senior ministerial post, and later as Grand Master of the Three Clans. Slandered by lesser men at court, he was pushed aside and exiled to Hanbei, the borderlands on Chu's northwestern edge, and never again returned to the political center of Ying. He set out on this path of fragrant herbs and walked it for the rest of his life.

Li Sao is the longest lyric poem in the Chinese language — more than 370 lines, over 2,400 characters.

The first half is built on fragrant herbs and a beautiful woman: the fragrant things are himself, the beautiful woman is the ruler he wished his king could be; petty men slander him, the king's heart turns, and he will not go along with the crowd. In the second half he cannot sit still any longer: he yokes eight dragons to a jade chariot, phoenixes spread their wings to follow, he leaves Cangwu at dawn and reaches Xuanpu, the garden terrace of Kunlun, by dusk, knocks at the gates of heaven above, and searches below for a legendary beauty, a stand-in for the ideal companion he cannot find, before ranging on to Kunlun, the Moving Sands, and the western edge of the earth.

He circles the heavens and finds no one who understands him. The poem's last words: since no one in Chu will walk this road with me, then I will go — the way ahead is long, so long, and I will search for it, up and down. That line has been quoted for more than two thousand years.

He asks more than a hundred and seventy questions without stopping for breath — this is Tian Wen, Heavenly Questions.

How did heaven and earth come apart? Why don't the sun and moon appear together? Why was Gun put to death? How did Yu bring order to the nine provinces? Why was King Zhou of Shang besieged at the Deer Terrace, why did King Zhao of Zhou drown in the Han River, where did the ancestors of Chu come from? Qu Yuan stands between heaven and earth like a prosecutor who will not let go, working his way through ancient myth, the rise and fall of dynasties, and the making of the cosmos, one question after another.

Nothing else in Chinese literature is written this way: not lyric, not narrative, but a systematic interrogation of the universe. Two thousand years later, China named its planetary mission Tianwen-1, and sent a Warring States text straight into the history of spaceflight.

The Nine Declarations is a set of nine poems, something like an exile's diary.

Xi Song is about a man with nowhere left to say what he needs to say. Crossing the River records his journey south from Hanbei, his boat passing Ezhu, the Yuan, Chenyang. Lament for Ying mourns the fall of Ying — the walls of the old capital he would never see again. Embracing Sand is said to be Qu Yuan's last poem, and its lines already carry the intent to die.

From Hanbei to the Yuan and the Xiang, from north to south, Qu Yuan walked the whole distance a Chu aristocrat could fall, from trust to exile. There is no grand narrative in the Nine Declarations, only one man walking, remembering, and refusing to bow his head.

After Qu Yuan, Song Yu picked up the pen of Chu poetry.

His Jiu Bian opens with a line that has echoed for two thousand years: how sad, the breath of autumn. That single line set the key for how later Chinese literature would grieve over autumn — the season stopped being just weather and became a state of mind: defeat, drifting, time that will not come again. From Song Yu on, autumn sorrow became a shared mood among Chinese writers.

He is also credited with the Gaotang Fu and the Rhapsody on the Goddess, which tell of a King of Chu dreaming of the goddess of Mount Wu: at dawn she is the morning cloud, at dusk the driving rain. The goddess is the oldest beautiful-woman motif in Chinese literature — Cao Zhi's Rhapsody on the Goddess of the Luo River and the goddess figures in the Tang song-lyrics found at Dunhuang all trace back to her.

In 278 BCE, the Qin general Bai Qi broke through the walls of Ying.

Ying was the political heart of Chu, and the place Qu Yuan could never go back to. That same year, he drowned himself in the Miluo River.

More than two thousand years later, that death grew into a festival: Duanwu, the Dragon Boat Festival. Eating zongzi, racing dragon boats, hanging sprigs of mugwort, wearing scented sachets — customs practiced by Chinese communities the world over, all grown out of one poet's death in a river. It is one of the most vital examples in Chinese culture of literature and custom generating each other, and it still echoes through hundreds of millions of lives today.

The Songs of Chu is not the work of Qu Yuan alone. The Western Han scholar Liu Xiang, ordered to organize the palace library, gathered the poems of Qu Yuan and Song Yu together with verse by early Han imitators and gave the collection its name. From then on, Chu Ci stood as a fixed literary category, paired with the Book of Songs under the joint name Feng and Sao, feng for the Book of Songs and sao for the Li Sao, one of the two fountainheads of Chinese literature.

The Book of Songs is the realism of the Yellow River basin: marriage, labor, grievance, ancestral rites. The Songs of Chu is the romanticism of the Yangtze basin: gods, fragrant herbs, journeys of the spirit, unanswered questions. One writes the smoke of human kitchens; the other writes heaven and earth giving no reply.

Its themes come down to a few threads: the full drama of gods and ritual (the Nine Songs); a system of herb-and-beauty imagery standing in for virtue and ideal (river rue, angelica, autumn orchid, magnolia); the motif of the spirit journey, seeking without end (dragon chariots, phoenixes, the far reaches of Kunlun); the interrogation of cosmos and myth (Tian Wen); and the grief of a fallen state bound to the integrity of one man (the fate of Qu Yuan). Strung together, these themes hold up the entire root system of Chinese romantic literature.

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A guide like this can give you the storyline, the cast of gods and men, the themes sorted into categories. All of that is skeleton.

What the skeleton cannot give you: the way the scent of river rue and angelica actually rises off Qu Yuan's body; the way drums and reed-pipes echo between the Yuan and the Xiang while the shaman becomes a god; the sheer refusal to stop behind a hundred and seventy questions landing one after another in Tian Wen; the pride in the second half of Li Sao, yoking eight dragons and knocking at the gates of heaven, of a man saying Chu has no room for me, so I will go find a bigger place.

Read the Songs of Chu slowly, line by line. It is written in the literary language of Warring States Chu, denser in rhythm than the Book of Songs, its herb-imagery layered one image inside another. Read it once you already know the plot, and you find another book altogether — you start to smell the orchid and angelica, see the cloud-patterns swirling around the dragon chariot, feel the unbending spine of the exiled minister.