Chen Zi'ang was relatively old when he came to Chang'an to take the imperial examinations toward the end of the 7th century, already 24; he was wealthy, and perhaps on that account not so anxious to start on his career as civil servant. But he was eager to start his career as a poet.
However he was unable to attract any attention from connoisseurs until one day in a market when he saw a man selling a "barbarian" string instrument—possibly a xiqin, the two-string fiddle played with a bamboo stick for a bow, made by the Kumo Xi people of what is now Manchuria, which was the first bowed instrument ever played at the imperial court and the earliest ancestor of the modern erhu. At any rate it was a rare and advanced instrument with a high price and nobody wanted to buy it, and Chen may have identified with its plight; he "looked left and right" and bought the thing for a thousand strings of cash. "I'm good at this," he said.
That got people interested: "Ooh, can we hear?" "Come to my place tomorrow," said Chen.
When they arrived the next day, Chen had laid out a feast, with the foreign instrument in a place of honor, and after they had eaten and drunk, he took the fiddle in his hands and addressed them all: "I am Chen Zi'ang from Shu state, I have read a lot of books and come to the capital and written my things in obscurity, a mediocrity, like dust. This instrument is merely for entertainers to earn their living, why should anyone pay attention to that?" After which he smashed the fiddle on the ground, and then distributed copies of his poems to the assembled crowd. From that day onwards his reputation began to spread through the Tang capital.
He eventually became a minister in the court of China's only female emperor, Wu Zetian, and was drawn into court intrigues that brought him to prison and and early death, in 705. In poetry he is remembered as the most important pioneer of the characteristic Tang dynasty style, which took inspiration from the folklike manner of China's most archaic poetry to create its own spare modernism. He is represented in the anthology
300 Tang Poems by the quatrain
Deng Youzhou tai ge (Song on climbing a Youzhou gate-tower). This poem was written in 696, when Chen was serving as a civilian advisor in General Wang Xiaojie's campaign against a rebellion of Khitan people in China's far northeast, and suffering bitterly from Wang's inability to follow his advice. Youzhou was the first city built around the site of modern Beijing, in those days a frontier outpost, and one may imagine the gate-tower being one of those gatehouses in the Great Wall to which tourists in Beijing are always taken, though artists have seen it entirely differently (see below). This is my translation:
In the fore, in the past, no old ones show themselves,
behind, in the afterwards, no new generation arrives;
one studies heaven and earth, endlessly, endlessly, and
being alone is sad, and yet tears fall.
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| The traditional image of the poet on the gate-tower. |
The Chinese text, in simplified characters, is as follows:
登幽州台歌
前不见古人， 后不见来者；
念天地之悠悠， 独怆然而涕下。
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