Circling the Void: Memory in the Life and Poetry of the Manchu Prince Yihuan (1840-1891)

         Memory is a kind
   of accomplishment
     a sort of renewal
       even
   an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
   places
     inhabited by hordes
       heretofore unrealized

William Carlos Williams, Paterson¹

What can poets teach historians about memory? Perhaps simply that it is a broken, dangerous terrain. The American poet William Carlos Williams maps the ground of his remembered native town, Paterson, New Jersey, in oddly patterned verses to show what is involved in the arc of return. Memory, according to Williams, is a strategy for creating new places in the mind while exploring spaces left behind long ago. To historians this may sound convoluted, and rather unmanageable. Yet with a little effort and imagination, we may find ourselves enriched by accompanying poets in their distinctive journeys backward in time.

The Manchu poet Yihuan wrote about the traumatized landscape of nineteenth-century Beijing with the kind of passion that Williams lavished on Paterson. He, too, believed that memory is a kind of accomplishment, a way to generate inner spaciousness when outer places become subject to destruction and ruination. Both men lived by the same credo: if you take the act of remembrance seriously, and if you cling to the discipline of poetry, even the darkest corners of history acquire vividness undreamt of in conventional narratives.

It may seem easy for poets to assert that remembrance is an act of renewal. Researchers in psychology have tested this assertion by wrestling with large samples of difficult evidence. David Pillemer's work, Momentous Events, Vivid Memories, shows how an individual's mental universe is affected by dramatic events, and Dori Laub (founder of the Yale Holocaust Video Archives) has probed the impact of memory upon survivors of historical trauma.² Both researchers emphasize the tenacious hold of memory traces on subjects willing to revisit the landscape of the past. "Willing" is perhaps too gentle a word for the powerful pull backward in time documented by Pillemer and Laub. Drawing upon their work, this essay uses poems to document an obsessive search to retrieve some fragment from a world ever vanishing under the passage of time.

Yihuan was a Manchu prince who knew the pull of vanishing worlds firsthand. A great-grandson of the Qianlong emperor (1711-95), he was also the father of the Guangxu emperor (1871-1908), as well as the grandfather of the last Chinese emperor, Puyi (1906-67). All the events that marked, and marred, the fate of the Qing dynasty in the nineteenth century affected or were affected by Yihuan. Known as Prince Chun, this imperial scion witnessed the destruction of the Summer Palace in Beijing in October 1860 by a joint expedition of British and French troops. Not quite twenty years old and only recently married, Yihuan was flung into the cauldron of history early on. In the decades after 1860, he became an articulate witness to disaster. The seventeen volumes of poetry compiled before his death in 1891 reveal a man for whom historical memory was a difficult, ongoing project.³

Unlike Zhang Maozi, the subject of Lynn Struve's study in this volume, Yihuan did not face the threat of death directly. He was not on the run from invading forces and did not have to deal with the trauma of suicide in his extended family. In fact, he was at the apex of the political regime that had created so much suffering in the Ming-Qing transition (see Peter Zarrow's article below). Yihuan's extremely privileged status, however, did not cushion him from personal or public grief. In fact, as his verses reveal, he experienced these two as inseparable. To write about the ruined landscape of northwest Beijing was for him an act of almost literal re-collection: he tried to piece together in words a world that had been rent by the fiery vengeance of the...