Changsha sits at the confluence of mountain and river, with Yuelu Mountain rising to its west and the Xiang River curling through its center. For more than 2,500 years, poets, scholars, and craftsmen passed through it, stayed in it, or were exiled to it, and each left a mark. Two names above all others define that tradition: Qu Yuan, the great poet of the Warring States period, and Jia Yi, the Han dynasty statesman and writer, both sent to Changsha under political duress, both producing work there that would be read for centuries after.
Changsha’s Tang dynasty kilns pioneered a new art of painted porcelain
Long before Changsha became famous as a literary city, its kilns were producing something the Chinese ceramic world had never seen: glazed porcelain decorated with multiple colors applied beneath the glaze before firing. The Changsha kilns rose to prominence during the middle Tang dynasty, roughly the eighth and ninth centuries, absorbing techniques from both the northern and southern ceramic traditions while drawing on the visual vocabulary of foreign cultures encountered through trade.
Potters applied painted images, running calligraphy, and lines of verse directly onto the clay body before it went into the kiln, so that poems and pictures became permanent features of the finished vessel rather than surface additions. Bowls and ewers carried the handwriting of poets; jars bore painted birds and flowers alongside snatches of Tang verse. The ware traveled widely. Changsha porcelain was among the most actively exported ceramics of the Tang period, carried by sea routes to Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa, bringing this decorative tradition to the medieval world and laying groundwork for the polychrome ceramic traditions that later flourished across Chinese history.
Yuelu Academy — founded a thousand years ago, still standing
Few visitors who come to Changsha leave without climbing Yuelu Mountain, and almost none who climb Yuelu Mountain skip the academy at its foot. The mountain gave the academy its name; the academy made the mountain famous.
Yuelu Academy was founded in 976 AD, during the early Song dynasty, and within a generation had become one of the four great academies of the Song period. The signboard above its main gate, reading “Yuelu Academy” in four characters, was written by the Song emperor Zhenzong, a mark of imperial favor that the institution has worn ever since. Flanking the gate is a couplet whose two lines have become perhaps the most quoted inscription in Chinese academic history:
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Hunan alone produces talent; here it flourishes most abundantly.
During a major renovation of the academy in the Jiaqing reign period of the Qing dynasty, the academy’s director, Yuan Mingao, was asked by his students to compose a new couplet for the gate. He wrote the upper line — “Hunan alone produces talent” — and then ran dry. He put the problem to his students, but none of them could produce a satisfactory response. When a scholar named Zhang Zhongjie arrived at the academy, he completed the couplet on the spot: “here it flourishes most abundantly.” Zhang’s later life has faded from the historical record, but his seven characters have not.
How two exiled poet-officials gave Changsha its enduring literary identity
Qu Yuan and Jia Yi were both sent to the Changsha region under political duress, and both produced work there that outlasted the courts that exiled them. Their overlapping presence in the same streets eventually gave Changsha an epithet it has carried ever since: the homeland of Qu and Jia.
Jia Yi arrived in Changsha in 174 BC, appointed as tutor to the king of Changsha, a post that, whatever its formal dignity, amounted to a comfortable exile from the capital. He lived there for three years. The Northern Wei dynasty geographer Li Daoyuan, writing in his landmark work Commentary on the Water Classic, recorded that Jia Yi used his time in Changsha to build a stone sleeping platform, dig a well, and plant tangerine trees in the courtyard of his residence. He also wrote two of his most celebrated works there: the “Lament for Qu Yuan,” a prose poem mourning his predecessor’s fate, and the “Owl Rhapsody,” written after an owl flew into his room, an omen he interpreted as a sign of his own impending death.
The residence where Jia Yi lived had an earlier history. Before it was associated with him, it was known as Zhuojin Alley, a name meaning “the alley where brocade is washed.” According to local tradition, Qu Yuan, during his years of exile from the Chu court, lived in this neighborhood and spoke with ordinary people there. At a well in the alley, he washed dust from his silk robes, an act of deliberate self-purification, the kind of moral gesture that runs through his poetry. The alley was named for the washing of that brocade.
By Shao Yurou, Vision Times
