The Indiana companion to traditional Chinese literature

An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation (Version 1) From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315759470/anthology-chinese-discourse-translation-version-1-martha-pui-yiu-cheung-lin-wusun?refId=c0ca06d1-6d7e-4c5b-9d83-46e5a53eb21d&context=ubx








This is the initial title of what has now grown into a two-volume anthology on the subject of translation in China, from earliest times to the first decade of the twentieth century. This book offers readers a journey of the imagination, especially in the entries making up the second part. It covers a time-frame from roughly the fifth century BCE to the twelfth century CE, deals with what can loosely be called government translation, and with the monumental project, lasting some ten centuries, of Buddhist sutra translation. As far as an anthology of Chinese discourse on translation is concerned, achieving 'thick translation' entails several main considerations. The risks and the manoeuvres of thick translation are discussed in this chapter, which focus on Volume One of this anthology. The classical Chinese texts selected for translation in this volume have been taken mainly from A First Edition of the Four Categories of Books published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai.

Chinese sketches by Giles, Herbert, (1845-1935)

The Mind Landscape of Xie Youyu

 https://some-landscapes.blogspot.com/2011/01/mind-landscape-of-xie-youyu.html?m=1

Xie Youyu (or Xie Kun) was a Jin Dynasty scholar-official.  One day, the story goes, Emperor Ming asked him how he thought he compared with another official, Yu Liang.  Xie replied that he was no match for Yu Liang when it came to official duties, but he was superior when it came to 'a hill and stream' - imagining himself away from court and finding repose in nature.

About a century later, Gu Kaizhi (ca. 345 - ca.406) is said to have painted a portrait of Xie Youyu which was innovative in its use of a landscape setting.  Gu explained this in relation to Xie's statement and said "this gentleman should be placed among hills and streams."  Gu's painting (now lost) may have survived long enough to influence the handscroll painted by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) which is now in Princeton University's Art Museum.  Zhao was himself an official who would have empathised with Xie - though his family were descended from Song  Dynasty emperors, he reluctantly accepted various roles as an official at the new Mongol court. 

James Cahill explains in Three Thousand Years of Chinese Paintings (1997) that Zhao 'reconciled his career with his conscience by adopting the stance of chaoyin, "recluse at court," and expressing it in poems and paintings.  The concept of chaoyin was based on the belief that someone could be engaged in a political career in the outside world while preserving internally the mentality of the recluse, spiritually remote from the contamination of public life.'  Like Xie he could work for the government whilst inwardly inhabiting a 'mind landscape' where it was possible to sit alone and at peace, on a river bank among the trees.

Behind the scenes in Peking, being experiences during the siege of the legations

Mid-Autumn,

Su Dongpo

Mid-Autumn,
I stayed up till dawn drinking,
and wrote this thinking of my brother

To the tune ‘Water Song’

When did such a bright moon ever shine?
Raising my goblet, I question the dark firmament:
What year is it tonight
in the Bright Palace of Heaven?
How I wish I could return home to the moon,
That I could ride the wind there,
but I fear that the cold,
high in those jade towers, in that crystal world,
might be too intense to bear.
So I’ll dance here instead
down in the mortal world,
I’ll play with my bright moonlit shadow.

Here it comes again,
moving round the vermilion mansion,
shining through the fretted casement,
in on the sleepless.
What right does it have
to be so cruel?
What right to choose
To shine so full,
So bright,
when we’re so far apart?
Mankind has its
Sorrows and joys,
Meetings and partings.
The moon waxes and wanes
in clear or cloudy skies.

Things were ever imperfect.
May we all live long,
May we all share,
though a myriad miles apart,
the same fair moon.

Explorations in South-Eastern Tibet

Mid-Autumn Festival 2023

 

The Ch'un Ts'ew, With The Tso Chuen

Summer 1933, Lu Xun and Uchiyama Kanzo in Shanghai

 

Palace of Established Happiness

The conflagration that consumed the Qianlong-era Palace of Established Happiness (Jianfu Gong) in the Forbidden City on 26 June 1923 was the penultimate dramatic episode in the living history of China's imperial palace. Untold antiquities were said to have been lost as a result of the connivance of duplicitous eunuchs and the corrupt dealings of the Imperial Household Department (Neiwu Fu). In the aftermath, a feckless dethroned emperor, Puyi, ordered the expulsion of most of the palace servants before both he and the rump of the Qing court were themselves sent packing the following year. In this lavish and highly readable account, May Holdsworth recounts the story (and conflicting truths) of the destruction of the Palace of Established Happiness, as well as the drawn-out process involved in its recent rebuilding.

Just as the fire of 1923 was regarded as a symbolic moment in the Republican-era history of the Forbidden City, so the reconstruction of the Palace of Established Happiness has been taken by some, not least of all Ronnie Chan, the Hong Kong businessman and supporter of the China Heritage Fund that financed an ambitious project of reconstruction, to be a mark of the re-emergence of the grandeur of China itself.

The Palace of Established Happiness is located in the northwest precinct of the Forbidden City, or more precisely at the northern end of the outer western corridor (Wai Xi Lu) of the city. It was built by order of the Qianlong Emperor (r.1736-95) in 1742, during the early flourishing of his rule. It was only one of a number of garden retreats that he would have constructed, both in the formal centre of Qing power, the Forbidden City, and in the garden palaces outside the city. That emperor (and indeed his predecessors as well as his successors) believed that an attention to gardens, and the lavishing of imperial largesse on them, were integral to the art of rulership. As Qianlong observed:


An emperor or king, when he has time before holding an audience or attending to the affairs of state, should have extensive grounds to stroll in, and lovely vistas to enjoy. If he has such a place, he will be able to cultivate his mind and refine his emotions; otherwise, he may take pleasure in trivial things and that will only sap his energies and willpower.

Shanghai-born May Holdsworth has written a number of works on the Forbidden City. The present book is a study of the Palace of Established Happiness and a chronicle of its rebuilding from the late 1990s. Richly illustrated and elegantly written, Holdsworth's account also offers an often chatty diary of the trials and tribulations of the reconstruction team, in particular of its tenacious and devoted onsite manager, Happy Harun (she is the daughter of a Shanghainese mother and a Jakarta-born Hakka father who changed the family name from Qiu to Harun during the Sukarno era). A geologist by training, Happy was a personal assistant to Ronnie Chan before finding herself involved in, and them obsessed with, this fascinating rebuilding project.

Restoring a Garden in the Forbidden City follows the history of this extraordinary venture. Offering some detail of the various bureaucratic claims on the site, and allowing the reader some rare insights into the workings of China's leading museum, the book also offers crucial details of the actual rebuilding: the sourcing and manufacture of the thousands of liuli glaze tiles for the roofs of the buildings, the making of the 'gold bricks' (jinzhuan) used for flooring, the ornate painting of eves, the elaborate process involved in creating the 'painted ground' (dizhang) of columns, the reconstruction of the mosaic-like 'tiger-skin walls' (hupi qiang), and so on. It also introduces us to the delicate skein of relationships that brings traditionally trained craftsmen into a major project that itself showcases the fragile heritage of Chinese material culture, and its tenuous maintenance. For, in the process of rebuilding the Garden of Established Happiness, those who initiated and have overseen the project also discovered the need to preserve techniques that themselves are as endangered as many of the old structures in the Forbidden City itself.

The author gives us insights into how the team working on the reconstruction went about determining the style, extent, use and decoration of the structures in the compound of the Palace of Established Happiness. It is an account that tells us much about other aspects of the Forbidden City. For all of the archival riches related to imperial rule during the Qing era, actual details of palace buildings, their evolution and information on the lives lived therein are quite elusive. Often it is only through poems from the imperial hand, or a careful reading of the Imperial Ledgers—the accounts of the imperial day—that some sense of how buildings were used, and how they changed in function, can be appreciated.

The Pavilion of Prolonged Spring (left) and the Pavilion of Tranquil Ease (right), with Prospect Hill visible in the distance. Photo: GRB. Published with the permission of the China Heritage Fund.

As is the case with other projects of tangible heritage recuperation, those involved in the rebuilding of the palace and its attendant gardens were inevitably faced with deciding on the optimal moment to which the restoration would aspire. With the Palace of Established Happiness there were various choices: should it be rebuilt so that it reflected the presumed condition that it had attained (or had been reduced to) on the eve of its destruction on the summer night in 1923? Or would a moment in the nineteenth century, when it was still a part of a thriving palace, be more appropriate? In the event, it was decided that the buildings and gardens should recover the idealized state of the High-Qing era, some point at the zenith of the Qianlong reign in the mid-eighteenth century. It is an imaginative moment that bespeaks China's last blossoming as a strong, prosperous and unified empire. It is a time that appeals now to ambitious bureaucrats, Qing specialists and patriotic compatriots alike.

While this choice might have been the right one for a range of reasons—it certainly resulted in a sumptuous recreation—it is also one that aligns seamlessly with the general 'Qing revivalist style' evident throughout Beijing today. After nearly a century of excoriation, since the late 1990s the Qing era has enjoyed a posthumous renaissance, and it is celebrated in the most lavish and kitsch cultural extrusions. Now it is fashionable to vaunt the age of the Three Emperors (Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong), the acceptable mien of Manchu-Qing China. In terms of the tangible heritage of the former imperial capital, however, the cumulative effect is that a certain dull conformity has descended on the city's complex and layered past. Today, the authorities, the media, specialists in numerous fields and business people tirelessly celebrate the 'gold and jade resplendence' (jinbi huihuang) of the Qing. Not surprisingly, this chimes all too harmoniously with the nouveau-riche temper of the recent reform era.

The 'pall of splendour' that Qing-period buildings now cast over Beijing, especially those that enjoyed the munificence of Olympic-era refurbishment, means that quirky historical moments are thoughtlessly (or pointedly) obliterated in favour of an imagined era of glory. The tennis court that Puyi had built in the destroyed garden, or other renovations of the area during the post-Qinglong century and a half of the Mid and Late Qing were excluded from the discussion about the restoration of the Palace of Established Happiness and its garden. The tasteless acts of the legitimate occupants of the palace were nugatory in comparison to the need to let the past serve the present. Anyway, as Holdsworth notes, 'There was no debate about leaving the Garden a picturesque ruin—that wasn't an option.' There was money from the China Heritage Fund to rebuild, and that meant that the devastated remains of the fire, a key site reflecting the Forbidden City's sorry fate in the first half of the twentieth century, would itself be destroyed in favour of restoration.

While heritage specialists and historians might like to debate the point, for the patriotic revivalist, however, there are other contemporary dimensions to the recuperation of the past. As Ronnie Chan of the China Heritage Fund and a man of ebullience put it, 'Culture flourishes in times of prosperity and withers in times of turmoil or war. Isn't it appropriate that as China finally re-enters the family of great nations, and as China rises economically and politically on the world scene, that somebody should come along and restore the Garden?'

Stories from a Burning House

 https://burninghouse.substack.com/

One's Company A Journey To China by Peter Fleming Publication date 1934

The Road To Oxiana by Robert Byron Publication date 1937

Chinese Personal Names

Mooncake alignments

 

"Lu Xun Combat Team" with the stamp of "Fushun No. 37 Middle School Red Guard"

 

Cao’an temple 草庵

The most remarkable Manichaean relic in the temple is the statue of Manichaeism's founder Mani, commonly referred to in the Chinese Manichaean tradition as the "Buddha of Light". According to an inscription, the statue was donated to the temple by a local adherent in 1339.

While the statue may look like any other Buddha to a casual observer, experts note a number of peculiarities which distinguish it from a typical portrayal of the Buddha. Instead of being curly-haired and clean-shaven, as most other Buddha statues, this Buddha of Light is depicted having straight hair draped over his shoulders, and sporting a beard. The facial features of the prophet (arched eyebrows, fleshy jowls) are somewhat different from a traditional Chinese stone Buddha as well. It is even said that the stone Mani the Buddha of Light used to have a mustache or sideburns, but they were removed by a 20th-century Buddhist monk, trying to make the statue more like a traditional Buddha.

Instead of looking down, as Buddha statues usually do, the Mani statue looks straight at the worshipers. Instead of being held in a typical Buddhist mudrā, Mani's hands rest on his belly, with both palms facing upward.

In order to give the statue an overall luminous impression, the sculptor carved its head, body, and hands from stones of different hues.

Chairman Mao's 4 Minute Workout

Burying Autumn - Poetry, Friendship, and Loss