“Still Holding the Pipa to Hide Half Her Face”: Visions of Bai Juyi’s ‘Song of the Pipa’ in Republican China

Abstract

Abstract A recurring subject of manhua (comics) in Republican-era China was the pipa player, a woman whose genealogy can be traced back to the disgraced and displaced subject of Bai Juyi’s ninth-century poem Pipa xing (Song of the pipa). This paper traces this woman’s development from her conception in Pipa xing and follows her as she is re-imagined by modern poets and manhua artists into a variety of figures, from scorned politicians to modern feminine archetypes. This paper argues that these artists leverage her precarity and anachronism to portray contemporary political turmoil and national insecurity, as they look back at China’s imperial past and towards its uncertain future. And instead of reifying the distinction between the prosody of classical and New Poetry, this paper finds classical poetics not only in poems themselves, but also in tropes and images that reveal how poets and poetry reckoned with the rise of new media.