My Lady!

You're lovely! Give us a job...

Cartoon from A Comic History of Greece from the earliest times to the death of Alexander the Great by Charles M.Snyder

Song of Princess Jade-Truth
Gao Shi

(1)
We know the dragon nature shines
In those who spring from Faerie lines,
Who says immortals all must start
Apprenticed in the Faerie art?

Lord Laozi chose the plum tree, li,
Which name passed to our dynasty,
The peaches of immortality,
Have not so long a history.

(2)
Immortal palace, Faerie ground!
Here a true Faerie may be found.
Heavenly Treasure, let none guess
Our Faerie, Heavenly princess!

The Yellow Emperor, Xuanyuan,
Three hundred years our sovereign,
Cannot compare with what will come：
The Great Dao for a millennium!

高适  玉真公主歌
常言龙德本天仙，谁谓仙人每学仙。
更道玄元指李日，多于王母种桃年。
仙宫仙府有真仙，天宝天仙秘莫传。
为问轩皇三百岁，何如大道一千年。

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The next installment in our Princess Yuzhen/Jade-Truth adventure is this rather forced pair of rhymes from Gao Shi. ChatGPT tells me that so far as anyone can tell, Gao wrote these when he was away from the capital, so they might have been sent in from the city, hoping someone would notice him and call him in to take on some juicy sinecure.

What can we tell about the Princess from these? First, that she was important enough and interesting enough for a prospective courtier to write about. Second, that it was safe enough to write about her, so her public conduct must have been beyond reproach. Third, that she had, and was known to have, a sense of humour. These poems are largely doggerel, light on meaning and heavy on absurdity and wordplay. Gao Shi could have knocked together a deeper quatrain in his sleep, so he was choosing to write in this courtly comic tone, presumably in the knowledge that it would be well-received.

Notes:

Dragon nature: The moral power of the emperor, which shapes and bolsters the conduct of his people.

Faerie: I’m using this old English word to represent how the Chinese thought about their immortal beings. Half-believed in, half-not, respected and loved, possessing a connection to nature and the land, the immortals shared a lot with how the English thought of the Faerie (thinking of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in particular). Of course, there were differences, as we shall see.

Apprenticed: The immortals in China were mainly mortal men who took themselves into the mountains, lived pure lives, pleased the gods, and used Daoist elixirs to extend their lifespans. Here Gao cheekily suggests that Yuzhen was born a faerie, and didn’t have to bother with all that hard work.

Laozi…li: Laozi apparently chose his own surname by pointing to the plum tree, which is Li 李 in Chinese. That Li was also the name of the Tang Dynasty ruling house, and in fact they claimed Laozi as an ancestor.

Peaches of immortality: Planted by the Queen Mother of the West, these peach trees only bore fruit every 3,000 years. Gao is definitely wrong about the relative lengths of time here, so we are to read him as making a buffoonish exaggeration.

Immortal palace: A common hyperbole for describing the palaces of the royal family.

True Faerie: A play on Jade-Truth’s name.

Let none guess: I think the cat’s already out of the bag on this one, isn’t it? Again, Gao is simply hamming it up.

Xuanyuan: The name of the Yellow Emperor.

Three hundred years: The Yellow Emperor was traditionally said to have reigned for three centuries, but the histories specify that this really means 100 years of living reign, plus two more centuries of cultural influence.

Millennium: Does not refer to any particular prediction, so far as I can tell, so must count as an exaggerated wish for the future.

Great Dao: The Way sought by Daoists. Even though Gao says she didn’t need to mess with any of that, Yuzhen was a practicing Daoist, so all of these Daoist references to the immortals and the Great Dao would have been very much on target.