Lacquer trees always make me think of that old rogue

Wang River Collection no. 19

A lacquer plantation

The Lacquer Plantation
Wang Wei

Pride was not why Zhuangzi spurned high office,
He simply knew he lacked the skill to lead.
As lowly master of the lacquer coppice,
He lived lush days among decadent trees.

王维  漆园 
古人非傲吏，自阙经世务。
偶寄一微官，婆娑数株树。

---

Zhuangzi was one of the great Daoist philosophers. As a Daoist, he had little interest in a political career, so he refused offers of a job in government, and chose to manage his family's orchard of lacquer trees instead.

The historian Guo Pu had written a poem on great historical figures nearly 500 years earlier, and commented critically on Zhuangzi for this decision: "In a lacquer plantation, there was an arrogant manager." Wang Wei does not think this is a fair description, though his own view is also mixed.

The word for lush in the last line has caused no end of interpretive difficulties, because it has can mean verdant and decaying. The original sense of the word was “whirling and dancing;” applied to trees and plants it came to mean dense of foliage and bursting with life; but then in a well-known reference, the Jin Histories, it was used to refer to a tree that had gone too far, and was now over the hill, rotten, and lacking in life force. Wang is almost certainly playing on both of these meanings. His Zhuangzi is living out his best life in a beautiful coppice; but there’s also something decadent about that, when Zhuangzi, one of the greatest minds of the Warring States period, had been offered the chance to serve his country.

And of course, that Zhuangzi is a stand-in for Wang Wei himself, as Pei Di’s poem makes even more clear.

---

Pei Di's poem at the same site (prose translation):

A love of leisure is formed early;/and now he done what he always said he'd do./ Today we visit the lacquer plantation;/and return to the same pleasures as old Zhuangzi.