Qu Yuan

Chinese statesman and poet

• Born: c. 343 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Chu, central China
• Died: 278 b.c.e.
• Place of death: In the Miluo River, China

Early Life

Qu Yuan (chew ywahn) was born about 343 b.c.e. in the southern Chinese state of Chu (Ch’u), which was centered in what is the modern province of Hubei. The Warring States period (475-221 b.c.e.) was characterized by China’s fragmentation into a multitude of rival kingdoms, of which Chu was one of the major powers. Although little is known of Qu Yuan’s childhood, tradition holds that his father’s name was Boyong (Po-yung) and that he was related to Chu’s royal family. Qu Yuan is also reputed to have achieved great distinction as a student and to have been marked for high government service from an early age.

In his late twenties, Qu Yuan was appointed to the important post of zuodu, or “left counselor,” in his country’s bureaucracy. He became the most influential confidant of the reigning King Huai Wang, and his advice was sought on all significant matters of both foreign and domestic policy. As a young man who believed in the ethical ideals inculcated by Confucianism, Qu Yuan tried to convince the king that he should look for these qualities in his new officials and cease the automatic preferment of the nobly born that had been the traditional way of doing things.

The king’s son, Ze Lan (Tse Lan), successfully argued that to do so was obviously not in the interest of the aristocracy; Qu Yuan fell out of favor, his counsels were disregarded, and eventually, he was banished to a remote area in Chu’s northern hinterlands. In the years to come, Qu Yuan’s star would rise and fall several times as his country changed rulers and policies, but he never again would wield the kind of influence he had with Huai Wang. It was the disappointment of these youthful hopes for thorough reform that turned Qu Yuan toward literature, in which he was destined for far greater fame than he could ever have achieved in his homeland’s civil service.

Life’s Work

Qu Yuan’s political aspirations had received a crushing blow, but his profoundly idealistic nature was not much affected by his being sent away from court. His poem “In Praise of the Orange Tree,” which was written about this time, articulated his confidence in what the future would have to say about his unwillingness to play partisan politics with his country’s future:

Oh, your young resolution has something different from the rest.Alone and unmoving you stand. How can one not admire you!Deep-rooted, hard to shift: truly you have no peer!

The rural region north of the Han River to which Qu Yuan was banished proved to be a rich source of myths and folktales, many of them related to the shamanistic cults that still flourished in the area. A set of poems known as Jiu ge (third century b.c.e.; The Nine Songs, 1955), thought to be among his earliest literary works, includes many references to such deities as the River God and the Mountain Spirit, and it is possible that the songs were originally sacred hymns that Qu Yuan used as a basis for poetic composition.

Whatever their origin, The Nine Songs combined religious and romantic impulses in a manner completely new to Chinese poetry. Just as the Greek poet Homer (ninth century b.c.e.) described a world in which gods and men were akin in terms of psychology if not in their respective powers, so Qu Yuan envisaged crossing the barriers that divided humanity from the deities it worshiped. This excerpt from “The Princess of the Xiang” depicts a god waiting for his human lover:

I look for my queen, but she comes not yet:Of Whom do I think as I play my reed-pipes?North I go, drawn by flying dragons . . .And over the great River waft my spirit:Waft, but my spirit does not reach her;And the maiden many a sigh heaves for me.

The Nine Songs immediately established Qu Yuan as the foremost literary figure of his time.

During the first of what would prove to be several periods of banishment for Qu Yuan, Huai Wang was murdered in 297 b.c.e. while participating in a supposed peace conference—which Qu Yuan had warned him against attending—in the neighboring state of Qin (Ch’in). This shocking event sparked one of Qu Yuan’s most fervently emotional poems, “Great Summons”; the refrain “O soul, come back!” expresses both general fear of death and specific anxiety as to what would now become of the poet. For the moment, however, his fortunes took a turn for the better: The new king of Chu, Jing Xiang (Ching Hsiang), remembering that Qu Yuan had argued against the visit to Qin, recalled him to the court and at first followed his adviser’s policy of breaking off relations with those who had executed his father. For the next two or three years, Qu Yuan was once again his country’s most respected political adviser.

Despite this esteem, Jing Xiang’s younger brother Ze Lan, who had engineered Qu Yuan’s first downfall, worked unremittingly to bring about his second. The crisis came when Qin attacked and subdued one of Chu’s neighbors in 293 b.c.e. and threatened to invade Chu unless normal relations were restored. Qu Yuan counseled against this, but Ze Lan’s opposing faction won the day: Jing Xiang married a Qin princess, Chu and Qin reestablished diplomatic contact, and Qu Yuan was once more banished, this time to another remote province south of the Yangtze River.

In the remaining fifteen years of his life, Qu Yuan was several times recalled to court when Qin aggression seemed imminent, but his refusal to compromise with Ze Lan’s pro-Qin faction led to his swift dismissal each time. After one of these disappointments, he considered emigrating to some other country but finally decided that it was his destiny to set an example for those who would come after him. He now wrote the autobiographical poem that is considered his finest achievement: Li Sao (c. 293-278 b.c.e.; The Li Sao, 1895), literally “encountering sorrow,” offers a moving account of the agonies and ecstasies of his turbulent career as poet and politician.

The Li Sao opens with the birth of Qu Yuan, who is given the names “True Exemplar” and “Divine Balance” by his father. His youthful enthusiasm is soon quenched by a sobering dash of political reality: He learns that “All others press forward in greed and gluttony” while he alone seems to care about leaving behind “an enduring name.” His greatest disappointment comes when he learns that even the king is subject to an all-too-human inconstancy of mind, but Qu Yuan is nevertheless determined to continue campaigning for what he believes is right: “But I would rather quickly die and meet dissolution/Before I ever would consent to ape their behaviour.”

Qu Yuan presents his love of beauty and poetry as a kind of contrapuntal relief from his political misfortunes, and it is these passages that make The Li Sao such a landmark in Chinese verse. Just as he had combined religion and romanticism in his early poetry, so this later work merges the conduct of contemporary affairs with the more permanent consolations offered by aesthetic accomplishment and appreciation. In a world where most people are too busy seeking power to care about either art or morality, Qu Yuan argues that a sensitive soul must protect its natural heritage of grace and good conduct against the constant temptation to conform.

The implications of the conclusion of The Li Sao, which announces that the author intends to “go and join P’eng Hsien [Peng Xian] in the place where he abides,” are still a matter of some disagreement among students of Chinese literature. The statement has been interpreted as a decision to become a hermit as well as a desire to commit suicide; since nothing is known about Peng Xian, it seems unlikely that the issue will ever be resolved. This ongoing debate demonstrates how timelessly relevant The Li Sao is to questions of individual and social morality and of the artist’s role in the world, and it helps to explain why Qu Yuan is so important a figure in Chinese literature.

After years of gradual encroachment, the Qin armies sacked Chu’s capital in 278 b.c.e. and threw the country into turmoil. This final disaster was too much for Qu Yuan to bear: He drowned himself in the Miluo River, a tributary of the Yangtze, shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, his name lived on as a symbol of selfless dedication to both the highest standards of morality and the good of his country; in addition, he was commemorated by a national holiday. On the day of the annual Dragon Boat Festival, small boats are raced as an expression of the desire to rescue him from drowning, while specially prepared rice balls are thrown into the water so that his spirit will not go hungry.

Significance

Very few people have been accorded the degree of respect given to Qu Yuan in traditional Chinese culture. He exemplified the ideal Confucian official, so loyal to the state that he would not compromise his opinions even when aware that they would be negatively received; his development of his literary talents exemplified the Renaissance-man wholeness that Confucius had advocated but which was often neglected by bureaucrats who found it easier to conform to tradition than attempt to expand it.

Even the People’s Republic of China, which has discouraged the respect paid to many traditional historical figures on the grounds that they were reactionary influences, considers Qu Yuan’s exemplary loyalty to the state a model of correct social behavior. This esteem has had the important incidental effect of maintaining his status as one of the founding fathers of Chinese literature, and his work has thus been preserved as an important element of his country’s cultural heritage. Many poets of subsequent generations, among them Song Yu (Sung Yü; 298-265 b.c.e.), Tao Qian (T’ao Ch’ien; 365-427 c.e.), and Li Bo (Li Po; 701-762 c.e.), were deeply affected by Qu Yuan’s energetic defense of the highest ethical and aesthetic standards. Even today he is often acknowledged as an influence by writers striving for a balance between imaginative idealism and moral realism. Wherever Chinese is spoken, his name remains synonymous with personal integrity above and beyond worldly success.

Bibliography

Hawkes, David, trans. Ch’u tz’u: The Songs of the South, an Ancient Chinese Anthology. 1959. Reprint. New York: Penguin, 1995. Hawkes’s versions of the poems, which are accompanied by excellent notes, are somewhat different from those of earlier translators and are generally considered more accurate by his fellow scholars.

Hawkes, David. “The Quest of the Goddess.” In Studies in Chinese Literary Genres, edited by Cyril Birch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. This essay places Qu Yuan’s work in its cultural perspective, compares it with that of his predecessors and successors, and argues that he represents the victory of a written, secular approach to literature over earlier oral and religious modes of expression. A seminal discussion by Qu Yuan’s foremost modern interpreter.

Qu Yuan. Li Sao: And Other Poems of Qu Yuan. Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2001. A translation of the complete corpus of Qu Yuan’s poems.

Schneider, Laurence A. A Madman of Ch’u: The Chinese Myth of Loyalty and Dissent. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. A well-researched account of the development of Qu Yuan’s reputation into a synonym for political rectitude. The treatment is basically historical and culminates in a convincing demonstration of how he became the patron saint of modern Chinese intellectuals. The poetry is used merely as thematic evidence, but even those more interested in Qu Yuan as a poet will find the book a useful source for social and cultural insights.

Waley, Arthur. The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China. 2d ed. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1973. Waley stresses the religious origins of Qu Yuan’s verse, suggesting that its depth of feeling may be an indication of the author’s madness. Although his grasp of the historical context is second to none and makes the book still worth consulting, Waley was not a very sophisticated literary critic; his diagnosis has been disregarded by most subsequent commentators.

Watson, Burton. Early Chinese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Includes a detailed discussion of Qu Yuan’s work in its historical and textual aspects. A descriptive rather than interpretive approach that occasionally ventures opinions regarding symbolic or thematic significances; a good introduction for the general reader.

Watson, Burton, trans. Records of the Grand Historians of China: Translated from the Shih Chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien. 2 vols. 3d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Includes the original historical evidence on which all subsequent research about Qu Yuan is based. Its biographies of his era’s political contemporaries provide a vivid sense of what life was like during the Warring States period.