The Lyrical Resonance Between Chinese Poets and Painters: The Tra ...

the seventy-five volumes of bamboo slips from the tomb of Emperor Xiang (?-296 BC) of the Wei kingdom (403-225 BC). His tomb was unearthed in Jijun (in Henan Province) in the second year of Taikang (280-289), under the reign of Emperor Wu (Sima Yan, 236-290) of the Western Jin dynasty (265-316).³

Both huaming and huazan are comparable with tihuashi in the sense that these three verbal forms are all interrelated with the visual arts. During the Six Dynasties period (220-589), there appeared the poetic vogue of yongwushi (poetry about material objects or things), which included the practice of writing about paintings on fans and screens. During the Tang period (618-907), poets such as Shangguan Yi (ca. 608-664), Song Zhiwen (ca. 656-712), Chen Ziang (661-702), and Li Bai wrote tihuashi on various occasions of viewing paintings before Du Fu was even born. Shangguan wrote “Written About the Painted Screen”; Song wrote “Prince Shouyang's Wedding”; Chen wrote “Colored Landscape.” Li wrote “Viewing Picture of Mountains and Seas in the Monk Ying's Sanctum” and “Viewing Yuan Danqiu's Screen Painting of Mt. Wu” in the year 734, whereas Du did not write his first tihuashi-“Song of the Recently Painted Screen of Landscape by Lieutenant Prefect Liu from Fengxian [in Shaanxi Province]”-until twenty years later. Despite that, Du Fu's tihuashi still deserve the most credit and attention, for his practice set the fashion for poets of later generations.

In a broader sense, prototypical examples of tihuashi trace back to the Tian wen (Heaven questioned), one of the poems from the Chu ci (Lyrics of Chu), or The Songs of the South,-reputedly composed by the poet Qu Yuan (340?-278 BC) from the Chu Kingdom during the Warring States period (475-221 BC). A “rich mine of information on the cosmogonic beliefs and legendary history of China”;⁴ to this day, this long verse is perhaps one of the most enigmatic texts in classical Chinese poetry. Comprising approximately 374 lines, the Tian wen raises around 172 questions concerning many branches of knowledge, such as astronomy, geography, history, mythology, and philosophy. As one of the earliest poetico-philosophical discourses in classical Chinese literature, it questions mythological or traditional interpretations of cosmological origins, the celestial-terrestrial