Research On Inscribed Poems Of Northern Sung Dynasty

Literature inscribed on stone is one of the most important part of the Chinese ancient Culture.It's also the important supplement to the paper documents.It can help the researchers to proof the text,compile the ancient books and do some textual criticism.In a word,it can offer us lots of information to help us doing research on Chinese history,traditional culture and classic literature.In China,the history of using stones as writing material is very long.It can be dated back to the prehistoric time.Along with the maturity of the character,the development of the society and the prosperity of art,both the content and the form of the stone inscriptions are more and more perfect.There are three great developments:first,writing material enlarged from natural cliffs to man-made steles.Second,the form of stone inscriptions became more and more exquisite.Third,the content of the stone inscriptions increased quikly.In the other hand,NorthernSung Dynasty is one of the disputed period.In the beginning,Sung poets carded forward the traditions of the Five Dynasties.Then,they learn from Bai Juyi,Li Shangyin,Li Bai and Du Fu.Mei Yaochen,Ou Yangxiu,Su Shi and Huang Tingjian are all masters.The most famous genre of NorthernSung poems is Xi Kun.People who considered Sung poems as good say they have abstruse philosophy and different from the style of Tang poems.People who don't like Sung poems say they are hard to understand.Wang Yirou wrote in the preface of Sung Minqiu's book The Collection of the Precious Stone Inscriptions:the most difficult culture style is poem,and the poems carved on stones are either the best articles the poets thought,or the favorite peoms the readers thought.So we have to pay attention to them.In this paper,I use Yang Dianxun's The Inadex of the Stone Inscriptions of All Dynasties as my original version,use other epigraphy work as my reference to sort out all the inscribed poems of NorthernSung Dynasty which are distributed in south and north China.There are two types of the inscribed poems of the NorthernSung Dynasty:one is that the poet didn't considered to carve his work onto the stone,the other is that he wrote the poem for carving. In this paper,I sort the poems according to its writing time,areal distribution and its form. The number of the poems is increasing as the time goes by and most of them concentrated in Hu Nan Province which is one of the most important relegate area in Sung Dynasty,including Wuxi River,Dan Montain,Zhaoyang Cliff,Yanghua Cliff,Huayan Cliff and Shijiao Mountain.The percentage of total sum is 24%.And the other poems are distributed in Hebei,Shandong,Henan,Shanxi and Shanxi Province,which percentage of total sum is 38.2%.In a word,the feature is:there are more inscribed poems in south China and most of them are carved on cliffs.In north China,most of the inscribed poems are in temples.Because of political factor,poems in south and north China are usually different. Although all of them described beautiful landscapes and historical stories,poets in relegate area always expressed their upset feelings about their official career and determined to live in seclusion.On the other hand,poets in political center always expressed their ambition.But they are not as good as the poems in south.Also,in the inscribed poems of NorthernSung Dynasty,there are two kinds of subjects we should pay attention to.One is poems on hydrology,such as the inscribed poems of Bai heliang in Sichuan Province.One is poems recording actual events in Sung Dynasty,such as poems on the development of Mei Mountain.They are all very helpful to our research.