古柏行 – On the Ancient Cypress

In Chinese, many characters have the ‘wood’ (木) radical on its side. Aside from common words used for things made out of wood – chair (椅), bed (床), shelve (柜) for example – many of them are words for different sorts of trees, such as the pine (松), plum (梅), oak (橡 or 栎), and of course the subject for today, the cypress (柏). 

A long lived tree relatively common in Sichuan, this conifer must have been quite a familiar sight to Du Fu 杜甫 when he lived in Chengdu as a refugee from the chaos in the north caused by the An-Shi Rebellion. (You can read more about this here.)

Before managing to escape, he was in truly hot water in Chang’an, former capital of the Tang Dynasty which had fallen to the rebels. This is because, as a previous minister in the Tang Court, he had submitted advice against An Lushan, warning against giving him enormous military authority over all Tang forces in the northeast. The advice was not heeded; the authority backfired horribly, and Du Fu nearly died for it. 

In comparison to those days, living in peaceful Sichuan must have been a considerable relief. But Du Fu remained outside the mainstream of politics despite his ambitions, and instead became a poor, wandering poet. We are, of course, much the better for it. 

A beautiful rendition of the poem, in the cursive calligraphic style. (Reads from up to down, right to left)

8 Ways to get stuck into the Chinese New Year (part 1)

A bit of pedantry here: some also call it the Lunar New Year, but the Chinese calendar isn’t exactly lunar. It’s lunisolar, which is why the months roughly line up with the Western (solar) months. A fully lunar calendar, like the Muslim one, will have its holidays wandering all over the place on a Western calendar because it goes by its own rhythms.

… what were we talking about again? OH YES. So it’s the day just before the Chinese New Year now, and how remiss it would be of me if I neglected to write something about the biggest day in the Chinese calendar. Here goes!

An Explanation of ‘Lyrics to the form of _______’, along with three translations of 忆江南 ‘Remembering the South’

So far it seems I’ve been straying quite a bit into Song Dynasty territory, which is quite an intriguing place compared to that of the preceding Tang Dynasty. It’s a dangerous land – where the poems have no titles, the lines are not the same length, and the rules for matching character to character have become even more fiendish.

Several of the blog posts so far (here, here, here and here) have been about these irregular poems, which in Chinese are called 宋词 – literally ‘lyrics of the Song’. (Yes, yes, I see that too.) So here I will say something about this sort of poetry itself – why it is, what sorts of ‘forms’ there are, and what are some of the rules.

Translation Thursday: 无题 – Untitled, by Lu Xun

(Argh! Just a little late.)

We’ve had poems from the heyday of Imperial China, and we’ve had poems from the crises of Imperial China. But today, I’d like to do an example of ancient poetry from right after the end of Imperial China, from one of the greatest Chinese writers of the 20th century.

Chinese was once a highly diglossic language. Diglossia refers to a situation where the written form of the language – which is pretty much all I’ve been translating so far, in the poems – is different, often dramatically, from the way the language actually is spoken.

Lu Xun (1881 – 1936), born Zhou Shuren, was one of the pioneering figures in forcing the two to come together, and in promoting the use of Vernacular rather than Classical Chinese as the written standard (which it is today). One of the first short stories written fully in the vernacular was his 1918 Diary of a Madman. He was also an ardent liberal and nationalist, which shows through most of his works, including the below.

We’ve been living in an interesting time of revolutions, to put it mildly – and this poem comes to mind every time I read about another uprising or round of protests. It was also what came to the mind of a lot of the protestors in a certain city square in June, 1989; the final line was a common refrain in the post-Tiananmen crackdown.

On Surnames, Part 2

Right, about time I finally got around to this.

Previously, we talked about the Hundred Family Surnames, and the character for ‘surname’ itself. In this post, what we will discuss are the different appellations and terms which are traditionally attached to surnames – such things as prominent prefectures (郡望) and hall names (堂號). Also, we’ll look at my own surname, Zhou 周 as an example of all these lovely things, because my surname is all very illustrious and grand and awesome!

Anyway.

Introduction

The Chinese have this saying to illustrate a tough, upright man:

行不改名，坐不改姓

‘Travels without changing name, sits without changing surname’

Of course, this isn’t strictly true – surnames do change, and new surnames do pop up all the time (while old surnames fade into extinction). Whereas the Hundred Family Surnames recorded 600 or so, it is estimated that there are about 3,000 or so surnames in use these days. Considering there are about a billion Chinese, that’s really not very many, and yet people still manage to identify each other not just as being of the same surname, but also of the same clan.

How is that done? That’s where traditional tools like clan prefectures come in.

By (one) Popular Demand: On Surnames, Part 1

For a society as family- and clan-oriented as the Chinese, it’s not much surprise that surnames carry considerable significance to us. Sure, some surnames are funnier than others – Hu is the president of China, eh – but still! Srs Bznss!

As the interview with Mo Yan’s brother (part 1 and part 2) shows, the cultural DNA he was talking about not only includes literature, but also familial legacies – the clan claims a statesman from 2,700 years ago as an ancestor. Trustworthy? I don’t know, though the two are from the same part of China. But there you are.

The character

The word for ‘surname’ in Chinese is 姓 Xing4; the left component is the ‘female’ radical, 女, while the right, phonetic component is for ‘life’, ‘birth’ or ‘growth’, 生. (Which makes sense, of course). The female component needs a little explanation, though; it is there because the current word is actually one of two words for surname, the other being 氏 Shi4. 

These days, either 姓 or 姓氏 would mean the same thing, since people only have one surname inherited from the paternal line. Three and a half thousand years ago, though, Chinese society was actually matrilineal, so surnames came down the maternal line. Later, when both lines of descent were considered, 姓 referred to the  surname taken from mom, while 氏 referred to the surname from dad. This is also why some of the most ancient Chinese surnames, including those of legendary historical figures, tended to have the female radical – 姚 Yao2, 妫 Gui1, 姜 Jiang1 (the female radical is at the bottom), 姬 Ji1 and 姒 Si4 for instance. All these surnames still exist, in fact; Yao and Jiang are relatively common, while the other two are rare.

The Hundred Family Surnames

So, as can be seen, Chinese surnames hang around a long time, and as with any society there are common and less common surnames. Some of the most common were compiled into a rhyming, mnemonic text – itself a literary tradition in classical Chinese – which we know these days as the Hundred Family Surnames, 百家姓 Bai3 Jia1 Xing4.

The text was compiled during the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279), the same dynasty that produced Su Shi and many, many other writers, and groups the surnames into lines of four, beginning with the one-word, and then the two-word surnames. All in all, a mere 504 surnames were collected, 444 of which have one word and 60 have two. This accounted for – and, to be honest, still accounts for – the vast majority of the Chinese population.

Interesting fact: the first four surnames in that little collection are all royal or imperial surnames, reflecting the political conditions of the time. The first, 赵 Zhao4, is the imperial surname of the Song Dynasty; the second, 钱 Qian2 (which means money, and isn’t anywhere near being a common surname) is the royal surname of the Kingdom of Wuyue – a small state in the southeast of China which was lauded for surrendering peacefully to the Song to avoid a bloody war.

Uninteresting fact: besides recording the surnames in an easy to remember format – and to be honest it’s not even that easy to remember – the Hundred Family Surnames tells us practically nothing about the surnames. I intend to do exactly that, though, in the next post – where we will talk about things like Hall Names, Origins, and the like.

The Mid-Autumn Festival (and a little bit on Calendars)

I know this is very Western-centric, but I like how, back in Singapore – where there were technically two public holidays catering for each religious/ethnic group – each community’s festival reflected how time itself flowed and was notarised differently for each of us.

The Western festivals, Good Friday and Christmas (and National Day, things like that) stood firmly in one spot in every list, rooted like trees. But there were other grounds, other completely different bases to count the days. For the Muslims, from a land without seasons, the purely lunar festivals wandered endlessly around the solar months, following their very own compass.

Chinese festivals, based on a lunisolar calendar, were a little different; the days wandered within fences in an alien system, but were not nomadic. Everyone knew roughly when the festival was going to be – Chinese New Year was not that far off from the ‘real’ one, and it was the same with the Mid-Autumn Festival – it would be somewhere in September. Ish. Only my grandma, flipping through her arcane almanac (I loved those texts and miss them), would ever know exactly which day it was.

It’s a bit easier now; there are ways to just check the date online, which is how I knew it was tomorrow. (The fact that a massive, gibbous moon has peeked over my neighbour’s roof also helps; as does experience, watching the tide, things like that.) But mystique is always a terrible thing to lose, I think, and as with many other things age and technology has taken some of the mystique out of this (ostensibly) arcane calculation. Well, can’t stop progress…

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There is a story about mooncakes.

The Mid-Autumn Festival was a day for family union, and so in settlements all around China on that year – probably 1358 or 1359 AD – people gathered to enjoy the confections, not to mention the moon itself.

Packed with lotus seed paste, laboriously cooked and then laboriously baked, the cakes travelled through a China devastated by Mongol misrule – a small pleasure magnified by bad times. They were precious, so everyone got merely a small slice; and it would have to be someone overeager to get his share of sweetness, perhaps even before the moon was visible, to cut into a mooncake bought from somewhere and see the little note curled inside.

‘On the 15th day of the 8th month, take up arms and fight the Tartars…’

It would be ten years to the end, but here under the full moon (so the legend goes) was the beginning.

A No-Longer-So-Little note on Chinese names – Part 2, courtesy names, pseudonyms, and names you’ll never use

The previous names we talked about – surname and given name – are, sadly, pretty much the only names that Chinese people have these days. You can say it’s not sad in that it’s simplified, but look at the examples of terrible names in the earlier post.

Of course, just as someone whose parents named him Havelock might just choose to go by, say, Avy (Locky?), and someone whose parents named him Socrates might hold symposia and get some deep thinking done (or drink hemlock, and yes I know a Socrates, and he’s ethnically Chinese), there are – well, were – ways of getting around such nominative messes in historical China. These are the courtesy names, and the pseudonyms.

Also, if one has gone far enough up the mortal coil before being eased off it, they would also be given names, or more accurately, posthumous titles. Which is, of course, a nice gesture – most of the time, anyway. People recognise that, if you’re highly-ranked enough, your non-existence is no reason for people to not gossip about you.

Courtesy names (字, zi4)

Courtesy names exist because, according to the 2,700-year-old Classics of Rites, it is impolite to call people by their given names. The name people get at birth are for the ones who gave or suggested it – the parents, their aunt who thought it might be nice to call them Erectile Dysfunction or Shaking All-About, those people.

This is naturally a drag once you are old enough to have plenty of friends, so traditionally most literate Chinese would, on maturity, give themselves a courtesy name. And this is why, in many texts like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, keeping track of names often becomes a nightmare by Chapter 10 – on top of figuring who’s been hacked and who’s not, many people have two or even three names by which they are addressed. Some examples from that period (184 – 280):

曹操 Cao2 Cao1, courtesy name 孟德 Meng4 De2

劉備 Liu2 Bei4, courtesy name 玄德 Xuan2 De2

諸葛亮 Zhu1 Ge3 Liang4, courtesy name 孔明 Kong3 Ming2

孫權 Sun1 Quan2, courtesy name 仲謀 Zhong4 Mou2

The name is self-given, and so you are free to call yourself what you want. General rules do tend to apply, however. For one, there is the question of birth order; quite often one of the two words would be used to denote the birth order of the person, from oldest to youngest: 伯 bo2, 仲 zhong4, 叔 shu1, 季 ji4, and sometimes 幼 you4. Indeed, even now, 伯 is used to address one’s father’s older brothers (older uncles), while 叔 is for paternal younger uncles. Another option for the oldest chlid is 孟 meng4, though I’m not sure what the derivation for that is.

So, for instance, Sun Quan’s courtesy name is 仲謀 Zhong4 Mou2, and that’s because he’s the second son in the family – his older brother Sun Ce 孫策’s courtesy name is 伯符, Bo2 Fu2.

Another general rule is that the courtesy name tends to reflect, in some way, the actual given name, often by using a related word. Cao Cao’s given name, 操 cao1, roughly translates to ‘virtue, purity’ (yeah, the irony is not lost on me); and so his courtesy name, 孟德 meng4 de2, refers both to him being the first son of his father, and to 德 or virtue.

None of these are absolute rules, of course. There are some literati who much prefer to have their names oppose rather than support each other. The great essayist and poet of the Tang Dynasty, Han Yu 韓愈 (768 – 824), has a given name 愈 yu4 which means ‘to advance‘; his courtesy name, however, is 退之 tui4 zhi1, which means ‘retreating’. I bet he was a great wit. (Judging by the essays, he wasn’t. Sorry to spoil. I might translate some later and you decide.)

Pseudonyms (號, hao4)

So the courtesy name is there for friends, and not unlike the given name there is also some element of aspiration in it – except, perhaps, from a more adult, mature perspective. But aspiration is so mainstream, so what you want if you actually want a unique name that really says who you are, you get a pseudonym.

Pseudonyms tend, in Chinese culture, to be the preserve of poets and writers, and are often associated with geographical features, or some of their particularly witty sayings and beliefs. Many of the geographical feature pseudonyms are in turn derived from the places where they live – at least, where they live when they were poor and lived in interesting places, or got exiled from court into interesting places. You wouldn’t call yourself the Resident Scholar of Canary Wharf, and nor do the Chinese.

Indeed, there are some historical writers who are more commonly referred to by their pseudonyms; one example is the great Song Dynasty (961 – 1279) poet, painter, statesman etc. Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037 – 1101), pseudonym 東坡居士 dong1 po1, literally Resident Scholar of the East Slope, who in Chinese is often called Su Dongpo 蘇東坡, East Slope Su.

Some examples of pseudonyms are below:

諸葛亮 Zhu1 gee Liang4 (again), pseudonym 臥龍 Wo4 Long2 ‘Reclining Dragon’, named after Reclining Dragon Ridge where he lived

李白 Li3 Bai2, pseudonym 青蓮居士 Qing1 lian2 ju1 shi4, literally ‘Resident Scholar of the Blue-green Lotus’

Posthumous Names (謚號, shi4 hao4)

We Chinese people are seriously into history (it’s not just me, I swear!), and also quite bitchy (also not just me), and so we have this ancient tradition of posthumous names. We’re never going to hear our own, so that’s not much to worry about, but of the different sorts of names, this is perhaps the most formalised one, with the most rules. If given and courtesy names are aspirational, and pseudonyms are so hipster and ‘just the way I am’, then the posthumous name is a committee sitting over your coffin evaluating your life performance.

Nice image, eh?

Posthumous names are reserved for emperors and officials, and especially for emperors they are the main form of address – the emperor’s personal name is far too sacrosanct to be mentioned, and that is why we have titles like Emperor Wu of Han (156 BC – 87 BC, r. 141 BC – 87 BC), Emperor Wen of Wei (187 – 226, r. 220 – 226) and so on. In their cases, 武 Wu3 means ‘martial’, and 文 Wen2 means ‘civil’; some other common and complimentary posthumous titles include 明 Ming2 ‘bright, discerning’, 景 Jing3 ‘decisive, admirable’ and 穆 Mu4 ‘amicable, harmonious’.

There are derogatory posthumous names, though these are much rarer; Emperor Ling of Han (156 – 189, r. 168 – 189) has the title 靈 Ling2, which means ‘inattentive, lazy’.

For officials, posthumous titles are often given by the imperial court on their death, in order to commemorate their public service. This, in turn, means it is often possible to tell which writers and scholars have been high-ranking officials, and which ones either never joined imperial service (not very common) or got exiled due to political struggles at court (very common).

The writers who do manage to get posthumous names tend to have their collected writings published under that posthumous name – another literary tradition in China. Partly because of this tradition, there are also writers who are often known by their posthumous names; perhaps the most famous is the Song Dynasty minister and scholar Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹 (989 – 1052), whose posthumous title was Wenzheng 文正 ‘civil and righteous’; he is often known as Fan Wenzheng Gong 范文正公, ‘Lord Fan, civil and righteous’.

So that’s about it (for now) for names. I’m not going to go into too many examples, partly because I will be going into a lot of those writers – in fact, writing this is making me recall all these other writers I need to post about! Well, no end of material for the blog then…

A little note on Chinese names – Part 1, Surnames and Generations

Chinese names are funny. Inherently so.

I can’t speak for everyone, of course, when I say I’m not particularly offended at people slagging off Chinese names; but I simply am not. The point is, given the multiplicity of Chinese words with exactly or almost the same pronunciation, differing only by tone, it is far easier to come up with a name that sounds funny – in Chinese – than an English name that sounds funny in English.

(NB: the numbers after each pinyin word refers to their tone – of which there are four in Mandarin.)

My cousin, for example, had a classmate in her primary school whose surname was 馬, ma3 ‘Horse’ – which already has some comedic potential right there. Clearly not very well versed in Mandarin (or probably any dialect), his parents named him 壮強, zhuang4 qiang2 ‘Strong’ – except that zhuang4 qiang2 could also be written 撞牆, or ‘running headfirst into a wall’. Horse Running Headfirst into Wall – brill!

Some other badly-conceived (ah, haha, hahaha) names are rather more unfortunate, like 揚偉 yang2 wei3 ‘displaying greatness’, which sounds exactly the same as 陽痿 – or the nemesis of many a man, erectile dysfunction. And yes, it’s a guy’s name.

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Aaaanyway. What I actually wanted to do here was to give a tiny little primer on the mysterious subject of Chinese names – what they’re all about, and how they work. In modern times, names have gotten a lot simpler (which if you ask me is a sad thing); but since there’s going to be plenty of history in this blog, I figure there ought to be a bit more depth.

Chinese names always come surname first. As for the surnames themselves, they can have all sorts of origins, which actually should sound familiar to Western audiences. Many surnames are derived from ancient place names and fiefdoms in China; some probably come from occupations, and yet others might derive from the periodic invaders, mostly from the northern steppes, who often took up Chinese surnames once they started settling in China proper.

I could write another article about surnames themselves, and probably will at some time; but that’s for a brief introduction. The second component of a Chinese name, and the only part which has survived into modern times, is simply the given name. This name, naturally, is given at birth by the parents, and so aspirational names are very common; but in many families, especially more traditional ones – like mine – there is a system of generational words.

These generational words are characters within the given name which indicate which generation in the family tree a given person belongs to; some families have separate words for male and female offspring while others have the same word. This is a handy feature for a culture as family-oriented as the Chinese, where one might be expected to deal with distant relatives every now and then – a quick glance at the name would suffice to know if someone is an uncle, a cousin or a nephew (or aunt/niece), allowing one to adjust behaviour accordingly.

Even more lovely, many seriously traditional families – this is pretty much a preserve of the literati – have actually got their generational words linked up into poems. For a very very noble example, this is the generational word poem for the families of the Prince of Qin, a branch of the imperial family of the Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644):

尚志公诚秉，

High in aspiration, bearing public trust,

惟怀敬谊存，

Preserving and keeping respect and amity in mind,

辅嗣资廉直，

Aiding honesty and continuing righteousness,

匡时永信敦。

A support of the age, ever trustworthy and humble.

So the first generation would be named ‘尚-something’ (the ‘high/pure generation’), followed by ‘志-something’ (the ‘aspiring generation’), and so on. Nice sentiments, of course – and also quite unduly optimistic, given it would take 20 generations to finish the poem. As it happens the Ming Dynasty never made it past 12 generations in the emperor’s line. Such is life – and history…

(Part 2 is right here.)