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55 C H A P T E R T WO Wang Yi and the Woman Who Commissioned the Chu ci zhangju The official history of the Later Han dynasty (Hou Han shu 後漢書) records precious few details about the life and career of Wang Yi.1 He was from Yicheng 宜城 in Nanjun 南郡 (or South Commandery, modern Jiangling in Hubei), site of one of the old Chu capitals and the reputed home of the Chu poet Song Yu 宋玉. Sometime during the Yuanchu 元初 (114‒119) reign period of Emperor An 安 (r. 107‒126) he was promoted to the office of shang jili 上計吏, or High Official in Charge of Accounts, in which capacity he served the Governor of Nanjun. One of the duties of the jili was to go to the imperial capital at year’s end to report to the emperor on the state of the commandery , especially its finances. Moreover, he was to bring to the capital local persons selected for their extraordinary virtue or talent and present them to the emperor, after which they were very likely chosen for service.2 It was in the course of performing that duty, probably around the year 115, that Wang Yi himself was chosen for service. It was an unexpected piece of good fortune for Wang Yi that at that time many scholars were being “detained for appointment (liubai 留拜),” as these unexpected calls to service were called, to work on the large scale renovation, editing, and cataloguing that had been taking place since 110 in the imperial library known as the Dongguan 東觀, or Eastern Pavilion. Fifty or so scholars had already been commissioned to work on this project—among them Ma Rong 馬融 (79‒166), the prominent classical scholar, and Xu Shen 許慎 (ca. 56‒ca.147), author of the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字, one of the earliest Chinese dictionaries. Wang Yi was appointed to the position of jiaoshulang 校書郎, or Collator of Writings.3 All of those who worked on the imperial library were technically in the service of Emperor An 安, but the real initiator of the project, as well as the actual wielder of political power at the time, was the Empress Dowager Deng 鄧 (81‒121). There are reasons to believe that Wang Yi wrote the Chu ci 56 The Shaman and the Heresiarch zhangju (Chu ci Commentary) during this time and that she was the one who commissioned him to write it.4 Of course the Commentary was formally presented to the emperor, but the emperor, history tells us, bore a strong antipathy to literature. The empress dowager on the other hand was famous for being highly literate and a champion of scholarship. These are the most obvious reasons to believe that she in fact commissioned Wang Yi’s Commentary. Subtler, but more compelling, evidence that she was Wang Yi’s intended audience is to be found in the Commentary itself. Most of that evidence is in the postface (xu 敘) to the Li sao where Wang Yi answers the question many might have asked at the time: why write a new commentary on the Songs of Chu and the Li sao in particular? The traditional reason given for why the task of commenting on the Chu ci fell to Wang Yi is that he had special knowledge of the culture of the old state of Chu.5 But there are reasons for questioning that conclusion. Knowledge about Chu culture would, of course, have been especially pertinent in explicating the Li sao and the Nine Songs, the central texts of the Songs of Chu. Wang Yi’s commentary mentions two commentaries on the Li sao that had been written relatively recently; these were by Ban Gu and Jia Kui 賈逵 (30‒101). Wang Yi’s colleague Ma Rong also worked on the Li sao. One of these scholars, Ban Gu, probably equalled or outranked Wang Yi in his knowledge of pertinent aspects of Chu culture. Ban Gu was from an old aristocratic Chu family, which traced its ancestors back to the same ones that the persona of the Li sao, Ling Jun (靈均, Hawkes’ “Divine Balance”), claimed as his own at the beginning of the poem. The Ban family appears to have retained some knowledge of the Chu language , for, according to the histories, they could still explain the Chu meanings of their names. The family name Ban in Chu meant tiger.6 Moreover, Ban Gu was very much a poet in the Chu mode, using imagery, themes, and prosody derived from the Chu ci. If anyone could be...

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