The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron: A Contribution to the Flowering Plum Imagery in the in the Song and Yuan Dynasties

Abstract

The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron:A Contribution to the Flowering Plum Imagery in the in the Song and Yuan Dynasties Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman Appreciation by Ronald Egan New Appreciation Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman, "The Purloined Plum and the Heart of Iron: A Contribution to the History of Flowering-Plum Imagery in the Song and Yuan Dynasties," JSYS 26 (1996): 1–54. It is good to be reminded that history exists and even that it matters. In the case of Chinese cultural history, because the time span is so long and the native reverence for the past is so strong, historical change may be difficult to spot. Genuine innovation is often packaged as a "return to ancient times." The situation is further complicated by the persistence of the practice of forging artifacts that claim to be from centuries earlier but actually embody the values and tastes of their own later time. Insight into a case involving emergent aesthetic values superimposed upon dubious older chronology is one of the contributions made by this lengthy article by Maggie Bickford and Charles Hartman. An elaborate literary exposition, a fu 賦 on the flowering plum, which is attributed to the Tang figure Song Jing 宋璟 (663–737), is shown to embody elements that are inconsistent with literary work of his time and suggest a much later date, that of the twelfth or thirteenth century, a period that happens to coincide with a new vogue of enthusiasm for the flowering plum in poetry and painting. There are technical components of this new understanding of the real date of Song Jing's fu (e.g., the rhyme scheme in the piece does not match eighth-century practice). But what is of greater interest for historians of culture and aesthetics is that the qualities for which the pseudo-Song Jing poem celebrates the plum blossom—delicate sensual beauty combined, surprisingly enough, with tenacity and a "heart of iron"—is at odds with early Tang writings about the flower but is a fine match with those in the Southern Song. The Song period fervor among literati for the plum blossom (sometimes called a cult) manifested itself as much in painting as it did in poetry, and the later part of the article delves into the images and aesthetics of plum blossom painting, explaining their underlying values, as it follows the fame of Song Jing and the plum blossom associated with him through the late Southern Song and into the Yuan. This is the other major contribution of this article, its demonstration of the advantages of bringing specialists in the two fields together (Bickford in painting, Hartman in poetry) to examine such cultural [End Page 33] phenomena. As we know, many literati in the Song and later periods of Chinese history were conversant in both of those fields and moved back and forth readily between them, as producers and critics. Today, our training in Chinese studies tends to draw a sharp division between literary and art historical acumen. Few of us are qualified to undertake studies of this kind that benefit from looking across that division. This situation is not likely to change any time soon. This study, then, may serve as a model for future collaborative research projects by literary and art historians. The article evinces prodigious learning in the original materials (textual and pictorial), close reading of difficult poems and meticulous translation, a keen eye for dubious claims about textual provenance, and above all a deep understanding of the rather peculiar aesthetic associated with the flowering plum in nature and, even more, in the arts that matured during the Southern Song and lived on thereafter. ronald egan stanford university [End Page 34] Among the most striking features of Chinese artistic expression is the incessant manipulation of a limited set of rhetorical epithets—fixed adjectives, metaphors, conceits, allusions—to describe the same topic. As early as the Six Dynasties period, literary handbooks and encyclopedias collected descriptive snippets and arranged them under the appropriate related themes. Both inspired and insipid writers drew upon these rhetorical stocks to compose the relentless stream of text that now comprises the canon of traditional Chinese literature, especially poetry. So too...