Study On The Song-to-Jin Emissary Poems And Articles

The emissary literature of Song Dynasty refers to the poems,ci,articles written by emissaries of Song Dynasty during their diplomatic missions.In the narrow sense,it is limited to the literary works written by emissaries when they succeed in their missions,for example,the poems written by Fan Chengda when he is on his diplomatic journey to the Jin Dynasty.In the broad sense,it also includes literary works written by emissaries when they are detained by the enemy country or even being an official in that country,which is often seen in the Song-Jin diplomatic relations.The literary works written by Yuwen Xuzhong,Hong Hao and Zhu Bian belong to this case.The emissary literature can be divided into two parts based on the diplomatic destination.In the Northern Song Dynasty,it is Song-to-Liao emissary literature while in the Southern Song Dynasty it is Song-to-Jin emissary literature.Due to the different circumstances and historical backgrounds,the emissaries of Northern Song Dynasty and of Southern Song Dynasty differ greatly in the ways they are treated and their fundamental emotions.The Song-to-Jin emissary literature is more passionate and more touching.For most people,it has a higher artistic value and it is the research object of this thesis.Compared to the former emissary literary works,the literary works of Song-to-Jin emissary literature improved significantly both in quantity and quality.There are mainly three reasons for this.First of all,there is a formal diplomatic institution between Song and Jin Dynasty,which makes the writing team expand greatly.Second,most of the emissaries to Jin succeed in passing the imperial examinations.Among them,there are many politic-library scholars who possess good literary and political qualities.On the one hand,these good scholars guarantee the artistic quality of the works of Song-to-Jin emissary literature.On the other hand,similar routes,similar social status,similar mission objectives make the literary works of diplomatic missions to Jin have a certain content and artistic style.Finally,facing the situation of national secession,the emissaries’ awareness of national crisis has surpassed its previous counterpart greatly.Because of the weak national strength of Song Dynasty,the emissaries to Jin are often humiliated and abused during their diplomatic missions.Sometimes they are even starved to death.All of the above makes the emissary literature inspiring and touching.The introduction of this thesis gives a brief review of the history of the ancient Chinese emissary literature,analyzes why the emissary literature of Song Dynasty is so flourished and summarizes the present research findings on our research topic.We think the present researches are mainly focused on poems and Ci while little attention is paid to the Song-to-Jin emissary articles.Even if there are some researches focused on emissary articles,they emphasize on emissary articles’value as historical works rather than literary works.However,we think the emissary poems and articles are connected with each other.Therefore,our research object are emissary poems and articles.What’s more,the present researches seldom relate the mental state of Southern Song Dynasty Scholars under the unequal relationship between Song and Jin with their literary works.Therefore,we first analyze the Song people’s nationalism and psychological vulnerability under the unequal diplomatic relations,which is the historical background and psychological foundation of the emissary literature.Then,we focus on the topics and artistic characteristics of poems of emissary literature.There are mainly five topics:the reminiscence of northern homeland,the attention to the adherents of the Song Dynasty in Central Plains,missing relatives and Southern Song Dynasty,the uglification of Jin Dynasty,the description of local customs and practices in Jin Dynasty.The artistic characteristics of emissary poems are as follow.These poems are mainly quatrains and have a strong narrativity.They also have a unique literary allusion and image system.As for the emissary articles,we mainly focus on their historical values but we also analyze their artistic value.The last part is about the value and significance of the Song-to-Jin diplomatic experiences and emissary literature.The value includes the patriotism motivated by these literary works,the promotion of cultural exchange between Han people and minority people,literary value,historical value,geographic value,folklore value and so on.