In Chinese history, the Yuan Dynasty was the first unified dynasty ruled by non-Han people. Therefore, during the Yuan Dynasty, Chinese society also faced a completely different social state from before. However, the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty knew that if they wanted to rule the Central Plains for a long time, they had to adopt the political theory of the Central Plains, so Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism made great progress in the Yuan Dynasty.
However, the development of this kind of Neo-Confucianism did not bring prosperity to the literary world of the Yuan Dynasty like the Southern Song Dynasty. Although Yuan Zaju, one of the earliest dramas in China, was born in the Yuan Dynasty, Yuan opera also became an important literary form after poetry. However, the development of poetry, the most traditional literary genre in China, fell into a certain stagnation during the Yuan Dynasty.
Logically speaking, the status of Confucian scholars in the Yuan Dynasty was not low, and some of them could hold important positions in the Yuan Dynasty government. This should be a catalyst for cultural development, but the development of poetry in the Yuan Dynasty Instead, it has stagnated. What is the reason for this?
The development of Yuan Dynasty has restricted the style of poetry
In the Southern Song Dynasty before the Yuan Dynasty, Chinese poetry and literature had developed to a very high level. However, similar to the previous Southern Dynasties, the literary circles in the late Southern Song Dynasty paid more attention to rhythm in their poems and tried to create a quiet artistic conception, but paid little attention to the content of the poems. This made most of the works at that time lack vitality.
According to the rules of previous dynasties, the literati in the early Yuan Dynasty should have launched an antiquity movement, using the poetry of the Tang Dynasty as a template to try to put the content of poetry into a more important civil service and use it as a template. This enhances the literary value of the poem. Such a movement did appear in the Yuan Dynasty, but it appeared in the late Yuan Dynasty and did not have much impact. The reason why the Yuan Dynasty had a different situation than before is that the author believes that this has to do with the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty's admiration for Neo-Confucianism. related.
We know that during the Southern Song Dynasty, Neo-Confucianism gradually defeated the new learning proposed by Wang Anshi and became the most important school of Confucianism. In the process of conquering the Southern Song Dynasty, the Mongolian rulers in northern China deliberately placed the Neo-Confucian school in a highly respected position. On the one hand, this was because the development of the Neo-Confucian school was indeed ahead of the northern school. On the other hand, it was also hoped that In this way, he attracted the literati class in the south to work for him.