The Penumbra of the Great Tang: Poetry from the Margins of the Empire at the Turn of the Eighth Century

Abstract

The turn of the eighth century witnessed, for the first time in Chinese history, a concentration of poems written by exiled courtiers. In an era when mobility was limited by curfews, passes, and vehicular technologies, banishment to faraway places, accomplished by a decreed use of exclusionary post-station horses, ironically became a sanctioned and expedited means of traversing new territories. Through the poetic texts circulated via the highly developed post-station system, the empire’s center in the north became more connected to its distant margins than ever before. This article argues that these poems, characterized by centripetalism and constituting a petitionary genre, contributed to a new way of envisioning the empire as a whole and in its totality, and if we define “court” as a field of dynamic power relations, then these poems are court poetry, whose definition must be expanded to reflect the catholic nature of the term “court” itself.