9—
Wang Wei (701–761)

Wang Wei personified the ideal of Confucian public service combined with personal spiritual and aesthetic cultivation. His official career followed a common pattern among many later travel writers: a succession of positions interspersed with periods of disgrace and exile. Despite disillusionment with politics, he never renounced public life; after the age of forty, though, he increasingly pursued his private interests of poetry, painting, and Buddhism. Born in Ch'i District, T'ai-yüan (modern T'ai-yüan, Shan-hsi), he passed the Presented Scholar examination in 721 and began his career as an official. Briefly exiled, he was rescued from oblivion in 733 by the influential writer and statesman Chang Chiu-ling (678–740), then prime minister. Chang's subsequent fall from power in the face of aristocratic opposition to his Confucian administration was the beginning of Wang's disillusionment with politics, and he began to search for more personal means of fulfillment. During the An Lu-shan Rebellion (755–763) he was captured by the rebels and eventually accepted a position in their regime. Upon the return of the T'ang court to Ch'ang-an, Wang was charged with treason but pardoned through the influence of his older brother. At the end of his life he held the office of assistant director of the right in the Department of State Affairs, which supervised the Ministries of War, Punishments, and Works.

Wang Wei left almost four hundred poems, most of which express a self-effacing contemplation of Nature characterized by transcendental perceptions, ambiguity, and emotional quietude. He had obtained an estate in Lan-t'ien by the Wheel River (Wang-ch'uan) not far from Ch'ang-an. This became the setting of a famous cycle of twenty poems written in response to ones by a close friend, P'ei Ti (716-?), a frequent

Fig. 16.
After Wang Wei (late Ming dynasty),  Bird's Eye View of Wang-ch'uan (Wheel River)  (detail). The Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Eugene
Fuller Memorial Collection, 47. 142. These sections of the handscroll depict the Wheel River (right) and Hua-tzu Hill (left of center).

traveling companion and later a minor official, who at that time held only the first degree of Cultivated Talent. The estate, the poems, and a much-copied handscroll attributed to Wang created an ethos that became the archetypal ideal of the literati's life of retirement from the world. Wang Wei was subsequently canonized as one of the great landscape poets and regarded, mistakenly, as the originator of the "Southern school" of painting. It was about Wang that Su Shih later made his famous remark that "there are poems m his paintings and paintings in his poems." One early form of travel writing, which arose during the Six Dynasties period, was the letter containing brief descriptions of journeys in Nature. The following short letter written by Wang Wei to P'ei Ti is a rare surviving example of this practice, m which Wang expresses his lyric sensibility in prose.

A Letter from the Mountains to the "Cultivated Talent" P'ei Ti

It is growing close to the end of the year, yet the scenery and weather remain pleasantly inviting. Many spots are especially worth visiting among these familiar mountains. You, sir, are in the midst of studying the classics, and I feared to disturb you. So I went myself into the mountains, stopping to rest at the Proselytizing Temple^[1] where I dined with the monks before departing. I went north, crossing the "murky Pa";^[2] under the clear moon, the countryside was reflected in it. I climbed Hua-tzu Hill^[3] at night; on the Wheel River, wind-blown ripples together with the moon's image surged up and down. Distant lights on the wintry mountains flickered beyond the forest. In deep alleyways, freezing dogs howled like wildcats. In the village, nighttime rice pounding played a duet with the distant bells. During all this, I sat alone while my servants remained silent. I thought mostly of the

past when we traveled here together and wrote poems, and when we strolled along a narrow path over to the clear river.

We ought to wait until springtime when the plants and trees sprout forth, when the springtime mountains are worth gazing at, the young mullets leap out of the water, and the white seagulls flaunt their wings; when dew moistens greened river banks and pheasants chirp in the morning among the patches of barley. This is not far off at all. Could you possibly travel with me? Were you not someone endowed with a pure and remarkable character, how could I ever invite you to enjoy such leisurely pursuits? And yet, there is a deep fascination to be gotten from all this. By no means neglect to come!

I have entrusted this to a carrier of huang-nieh^[4] on his way, so this letter is brief.

THE MOUNTAIN DWELLER, WANG WEI^[5]