The Characteristics and Development of Court Poetry in the Yuan Dynasty 元代宮廷詩的特色與發展

Court poetry is a unique literary form. Its most distinctive feature is “having its own rules of sentences” (the Song critic Ge Lifang’s comment on Song court poetry) associated with cultural characteristics in each period representing the writing of panegyric tradition since the Han dynasty. The modern edition Quan Yuan shi (The Complete Collection of Yuan Poetry) preserves 130,200 poems by 5000 authors, in which, there are around 1000 extant poems related to courtly writing, and most of them receive prominent recognition. This project aims at researching these court poems in the following sections: (1) the background of panegyric tradition and the rise of Yuan court poems, (2) the development of Yuan court poems against the backdrop of emperors with less proficiency in Chinese and the absence of exchange poems between emperors and ministers, (3) the formation of the distinctive characteristics of Yuan poems in the course of the cultural exchange of Mongol Yuan and Han Chinese, and (4) the development, phases, diachronic language change of Yuan court poems spanning hundred years from 1271 to 1368. Under Mongol rule, the production of Yuan court poems, which is part of the panegyric tradition in Han culture, was growing in terms of its distinctive content and language and is comparable to the standard of Tang and Song court poems, suggesting that Yuan court poets had continued tradition by going back to its origin and recreating something new on it. This project will study around 1000 extant Yuan court poems, examining the poetic background, court culture, social life, historical circumstances related to these poems, describing their diversification and complexity of literary production connecting with contemporary social and political issues, and exploring the literary significance and the culture value of these poems in Yuan times. What I hope to demonstrate is both why Yuan court poets produced such poems and how they presented the poems to their superiors and the court. The findings would be illuminating on studies of Yuan court poems, which have been generally neglected in the modern scholarship of Yuan literature.