a certain person
Take Zhu Fei primly. Heterogeneous is king.
This is a poem written by Han literati in the early Qing Dynasty to express their anti-Manchu feelings by chanting flowers. There are only two sentences in the poem, which may be an improvisation when the author inscribed the picture, or a residual sentence after the death of the original poem. Judging from the topic, it is chanting purple peony. The first sentence praised its color, saying that purple peony stole the status of vermilion peony, but it was not a "positive color" in itself. The ancients divided various colors into "positive color" and "intermediate color". The so-called "positive color" refers to pure colors, such as cyan, magenta, yellow, white, black and so on. "Intermediate colors" are variegated colors such as green, red, blue, purple and yellow. Confucius said, "Evil purple seizes Zhu Ye, and evil Zheng Sheng confuses elegant music" (The Analects of Yang Huo). Purple and represent abnormal colors and obscene sounds, while vermilion and elegant music represent positive colors and positive sounds. Obviously, the poet used Confucius' words as a symbol of unorthodox. The second sentence praises its position in flowers. Peony is elegant and beautiful, and is known as the "king of flowers". Although purple peony also belongs to peony, it can only be regarded as "heterogeneous" compared with authentic cinnabar peony, so the poet sneered: "You are heterogeneous, and you are also king!" The inscription means criticizing the purple peony for "seizing Zhu" instead of positive color, and mocking it as "the king of different kinds". Its profound meaning lies in satirizing the Qing Dynasty established by Manchu people at that time.
The authors of these two poems, some say yes, some say Xu Shukui or Xu's poetry friend, and some say it's an ancient poem quoted from Random Books. Shen Deqian and Xu Shukui were the same imperial examiners in Qianlong for five or five years. Xu Shukui's poem "One Pillar Building" contains the word "rebellion", which is considered to imply the meaning of prospering the Ming Dynasty and destroying the Qing Dynasty. After his death, he was convicted of a major crime. He wrote "Biography of Xu Shukui" and praised Xu for "the rule of behavior can be regarded as a law", so he was severely punished after his death, such as taking office, beating a shrine, cutting a tombstone and so on. If these two poems were written by Shen Deqian or Xu Shukui, Gan Long and his case-handling minister would never miss such "crazy" poems when enumerating their crimes. However, there is no such record in the Records of the Qing Dynasty, the Draft of the Qing Dynasty, the Biography of the Qing Dynasty and the archives of the Literary Prison in the Qing Dynasty. From the thirty-second year of Kangxi (at the age of twenty-one), Shen Deqian took the exam for nineteen times, which showed that he had recognized the orthodox position of the Qing regime ideologically. He worked as a scholar in Qianlong for three years and was treated by Qianlong until he died in his nineties. He is highly respected and loved, and it is even more impossible to write a poem with such a strong anti-Manchu tendency. These two poems are sharp-edged, and the spearhead is very obvious. They are unlikely to be written by Shen Deqian, a style poet who has always advocated that poetry should be "gentle and sincere". As for Xu Shukui, among the "crazy" poems extracted from Poems on a Tower, the most important ones are two poems praising cranes: "In the Ming Dynasty, I was shocked and went to Beijing in one fell swoop." Qianlong thinks that it is "to prosper the DPRK by taking advantage of the morning and evening, not to say' going to the capital' and going to the capital", obviously referring to prospering the Ming Dynasty and going to the DPRK. "This kind of poem can be regarded as pun, innuendo, and there are indeed many in Zhu Yilou, which are close to the techniques and satirical objects used in these two poems about purple peony. It is said that Xu Shukui wrote a group of peony poems, including dozens, which were thought to have survived the raid that year without being discovered. I wonder if there is a poem about purple peony. Judging from the available data, the authors of these two poems are not sure whether they are Shen Deqian or Xu Shukui.
The outstanding artistic feature of this poem lies in the close combination of things and images. By means of metaphor, symbolism and pun, words such as "Zhu", "Orthochromatic", "Different" and "Wang" in poetry have become symbolic carriers with rich multi-layer meanings, which not only conforms to the characteristics of the object, but also expresses the poet's ironic intention very appropriately. For example, the word "Zhu", the superficial meaning in the poem refers to the peony of Zhu Hong, and because of the Confucian classic "The Analects of Confucius", "Zhu" is also a symbol of orthodoxy; The word "Zhu" also conforms to the surname of the Ming emperor, so it also has a pun meaning, representing the dynasty. On the surface, the two poems are written about purple peony, but in fact they satirize the Manchu Dynasty, saying "Never leave things to chant, not just chant things" (borrowing Huang Sheng's comments on Du Fu's poems), which embodies the traditional characteristics of China's classical poems about objects. As far as its content is concerned, it reflects the general sense of fatigue among Han intellectuals caused by the high-handed policies of the rulers in the early Qing Dynasty. The national oppression and cruel slaughter of the rulers in the early Qing Dynasty is undoubtedly a kind of resistance. But it also showed great nationalism and feudal orthodoxy, which should be criticized today.