Introduction

In this special issue devoted to Song Dynasty literature and culture, it hardly comes as a surprise that three of the eight articles take the indomitable Su Shi as their subject. To say that Su Shi is a towering figure of the age seems almost an understatement. That three of our authors chose to write about him was not, incidentally, something arranged by this guest editor, or even anticipated. It is simply something that happened. But that it “just happened” without prior arrangement points nicely to Su’s special place in Song literature and culture as we now think of it.

Yet the three articles on Su Shi are not ordinary contributions to the vast field of Su Shi studies. They may also be thought of in a different way. To begin with, none of them addresses the most obvious topics in that field, which are Su Shi’s literary works in several different genres. Nor are they contributions to scholarship on the circumstances of Su Shi’s life. So we know immediately that these three articles stand apart from the large number of Su Shi studies in recent decades. Two of the three concern Su Shi’s involvement with calligraphy. Neither of these articles is a stylistic analysis of his calligraphy itself. One of them, by Xiaoshan Yang, concerns not Su Shi’s calligraphic art but rather the meaning and implications of calligraphy scrolls that Su Shi produced during his Lingnan exile (to Huizhou and Hainan Island) and presented as gifts to men who had traveled hundreds of miles to visit him there. (A detail of one of these, Su’s gift to Zhuo Qishun, is reproduced on the cover of this volume.) What was the significance of the texts that Su Shi chose to write out as parting gifts to these devoted admirers, and indeed, what was the significance of calligraphy as a gift at all? Professor Yang delves into such questions and comes up with answers that will surprise most readers. The second article, by I Lo-fen, focuses on a single calligraphy scroll by Su Shi held today in the Jilin Provincial Museum. This is an unusual scroll, one in which Su Shi copied out two different fu “rhapsodies” he had composed in recent years. It too was presented to a friend, and it too has a connection to his distant southern exile because it was produced when Su Shi was on his way to that exile. This scroll has a long and complicated history of ownership, through the centuries, before it came into the Qianlong emperor’s collection in the eighteenth century. Professor I traces that history and analyzes the several colophons that the scroll inspired through the centuries for what they tell us about the scroll’s reception history. But before that long history began, the scroll already had a peculiar identity and provenance. The article explores the special meaning that the very act of copying out earlier compositions implicitly conveyed (in this case, it was his own works that Su Shi wrote out, rather than canonical texts from a distant time), without the author/calligrapher ever explaining what he was doing or why.

We know that Su Shi was an important calligrapher of his time, but what can we do with that knowledge, beyond viewing and appreciating the relatively few surviving works of his that are probably authentic productions of his hand? These two articles by Xiaoshan Yang and I Lo-fen help us to move past aesthetic appreciation, to see something of the role the art form played in Su Shi’s life as an act that could be deeply embedded in tumultuous circumstances of his career and the ways he reacted to them. Previously, we may have supposed that such a use of calligraphy in Su Shi’s life was probably limited to rare occasions when brilliant literary composition by the great poet and calligraphic production coincided (e.g., the famous Cold Food Festival poems scroll, or the Red Cliff Rhapsody scroll). But these articles show that calligraphy could be a highly significant act of self-expression even when Su Shi was writing out someone...