Those foreigners and their dirty dancing!
Bai Juyi unleashes his inner demagogue
Mongolian Whirling Girl (Why We Should Change Today's Customs)
Bai Juyi
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Dancing girl, dance the Mongolian Whirl!
Her hands move with the drum, her passion follows the strings.
Her sleeves float up the moment the music begins,
Like snowflakes in a vortex, like river weed she spins!
She turns and twirls tirelessly—
No end to revolutions once they start!
No earthly thing can match her circular art:
Cyclones seem slack, and sluggish the wheels on speeding carts.
She thanks the king again, to win his heart,
A smile peels the royal lips apart.
Mongolian Whirlers from the Kazakh Steppe!
You'll waste your time to trek to our domain,
For ever since the whirlers came, the central plain
Gyrates, competes to spin at speeds you can't attain.
In the reign of Xuanzong, the country changed.
The Whirl was learned by every person in the land
In the palace, Yang Guifei; outside, An Lushan—
If anyone can spin then these two can!
The consort plucked from the pear orchard choir,
The general she adopted as a step-son of empire,
Because he gave her a sofa with a golden rooster.
Lushan's Mongolian Whirl bewitched the emperor's eyes,
He couldn't believe those advancing troops had switched sides.
The concubine's Mongolian Whirl bewitched the emperor's mind
He let her die at Mawei, but his love intensified.
The earth has shifted, heaven's very axes rolled,
For fifty years the Whirl has spread uncontrolled—
Dancing girls, stop! Your whirling is old.
Instead, take this song, sing it long—your masters must be told.
The title of this rather xenophobic Bai Juyi poem reminds us of the Confucian belief in the importance of music. Bai Juyi wants to complain about how things aren’t like they were in the good old days, and he chooses to blame the decline on foreign influence. These foreigners infected good old Tang culture through the sneaky effect of their dance.
Usually the problem with dancing is that it’s too sexy, and distracts the monarch from the important business of running the empire. But in this case, Bai seems to suggest that the Emperor Xuanzong was literally hypnotised by the whirling dancers around him! It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but the poem has quite a powerful rhythm (ironically, probably borrowed from music that also came from Central Asia), and makes for an impressive piece of political propaganda.
The Mongolian Whirl (also translated as the “Sogdian Whirl”) was a style of dance that involved spinning around in fast circles. It could be danced by either men or women, but was often performed by women for a male audience. Mongolia did not exist during the Tang, so the Chinese name of this dance is the hu whirl, where hu means “northern barbarians.” This style of dancing probably originated in Central Asia (Sogdia covered parts of Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan), which was the source of many artistic and cultural influences during the Tang Dynasty.
Xuanzong was the emperor who ruled at the height of Tang power, in the middle of the 8th century (reigned 713-756), and who allowed it to all come crashing down, when one of his favourites revolted and briefly took control of the capital, Chang’an.
Yang Guifei (her name was Yang Yuhuan, but she is most often referred to by the title Guifei, “honoured concubine”) was the concubine with whom Xuanzong spent most of his time in the later part of his reign. She was part of a powerful aristocratic family, and was blamed for corruption in the palace.
An Lushan was the general who revolted in 756 and briefly overthrew the Tang Empire.
The pear orchard choir was Xuanzong’s troupe of performing girls.
The gift of a golden rooster sofa was a real event, recorded as one of the ways in which An Lushan curried favour with Yang Guifei.
Mawei was the site of execution of Yang Guifei. When An Lushan finally took the capital and the emperor fled, the army blamed the Yang clan, including the premier Yang Guozhong and his cousin, Yang Guifei. They forced the emperor to have both executed.
白居易 胡旋女－戒近习也
胡旋女，胡旋女。心应弦，手应鼓。
弦鼓一声双袖举，回雪飘飖转蓬舞。
左旋右转不知疲，千匝万周无已时。
人间物类无可比，奔车轮缓旋风迟。
曲终再拜谢天子，天子为之微启齿。
胡旋女，出康居，徒劳东来万里馀。
中原自有胡旋者，斗妙争能尔不如。
天宝季年时欲变，臣妾人人学圜转。
中有太真外禄山，二人最道能胡旋。
梨花园中册作妃，金鸡障下养为儿。
禄山胡旋迷君眼，兵过黄河疑未反。
贵妃胡旋惑君心，死弃马嵬念更深。
从兹地轴天维转，五十年来制不禁。
胡旋女，莫空舞，数唱此歌悟明主。