Some books seem misplaced in time: of these some are late, some are far ahead of their time, and yet others are timeless. This book by a pundit of Chinese literature and Sinologist in the best sense of that word, Glen Dudbridge of Oxford, falls into the last category. A Portrait of Five Dynasties China takes its reader into the Lebenswelt (live world) of Wang Renyu 王仁裕 (880–956), a scholar-official who lived through one of China's most turbulent eras, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms 五代十國 (907–960).
Wang was born under the Tang 唐 Dynasty (618–907) and spent his youth in Qinzhou 秦州, a prefecture in the Southeast of modern Gansu 甘肅, a frontier zone between the pastoralist cultures of Central Asia and a sedentary culture to its Southeast. Putting aside the simplistic dichotomy of pastoralists and farmers, this region has always been a place where religions and cultures met. This was the place where, in the fifth and sixth centuries, the mingling of Xianbei 鮮卑 (sometimes called Särbi in the past) and Chinese had given birth to the ruling elite of the Tang. It had fallen into Tibetan hands in the wake of the Rebellion of An Lushan 安祿山 (755–763), and in Wang's time, its inhabitants were still considered ‘barbarian’ or tainted by non-Chinese culture. Wang himself relates that, while there was substantial agriculture in its East, farmers often supplemented their diet with yak hunted in the prefecture's ‘Wild West’, and he may well have ended up as a local ruffian, observing camel trains and hunting yaks for the rest of his days, had he not discovered the joys of learning at the rather mature age of 25 (before, Dudbridge describes him as ‘educational dysfunctional’, p. 12). By that age he had an epiphany in a dream, and within a year could recite several of the Confucian classics and had made a name as a prolific writer. It is difficult to ascertain the truth in such an account, which falls squarely into the pattern of ‘precocious child stories’ well know from Chinese historical biography.
What we can learn from such an account is that his meteoric rise from the rank and file was owed to the collapse of the Tang and its ‘great clans’. A century earlier, such a rise would have been unthinkable, and what a vagarious one it was, during which he shifted loyalty more than once from one dynast to another, often to save his own neck, and always hoping to be lifted to the apex of power. The grave moral dilemmas Wang and his peers faced are best exemplified in an episode recounted by Wang's pupil and author of his ‘spirit road epitaph’ (shendao bei 神道碑), the early Song 宋 (960–1279) scholar-official Li Fang 李昉 (925–996): in 934, according to Li, Wang convinced his superior, Wang Sitong 王思同 (885–934), to defend the heir to the Later Tang (923–936) throne, Li Conghou 李從厚, against a coup by Li Congke 李從珂 (885–937). Sitong is killed in the attempt to suppress Congke's rebellion, while Renyu – though only after publically declaring his life forfeited for the miscarried advice to Sitong – found himself well-received into Congke's fold after the latter's usurpation.
Dudbridge revives Wang through his own words, that is, a contextual reading of 214 surviving anecdotes (or ‘memoirs,’ as he calls them) from Yu tang xian hua 玉堂閒話 and Wang shi jian wen lu 王氏見聞錄. Those two works by Wang do not survive on their own, but in the Song collections Lei shuo 類說 and Taiping guangji 太平廣記. His massive output, once compared with that of the Tang poet Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846) and totalling 685 chapters, is almost completely lost today. What survives are a few miscellanies or ‘brush notes’ (biji 筆記). The main sources for Wang's life are his two biographies in Old and New History of the Five Dynasties (Jiu/Xin Wudai shi 舊/新五代史), both dating to the Song, and the epitaph, translated in full in Appendix A (pp. 192–199). Supplemented are two lists, one of the 214 memoirs, giving sources and an abstract for each (App. B, pp. 200–253), and one of works attributed to Wang in Song catalogues (App. C, pp. 254–256). Appendix D (pp. 257–258) gives a brief account of Wang's theory of musical modes.
The memoirs are not presented chronologically or in the order in which they appear in the two collections; instead, Dudbridge extracts them and arranges them along topical lines. The first chapter (pp. 1–38) is the most chronological one, since it is devoted to Wang's life, dividing it into chunks that follow the succession of regimes Wang lived under: the Former Shu 蜀 (903–925), Later Tang, Later Jin 晉 (936–947), Later Han 漢 (947–950), and Later Zhou 周 (951–960). Chapter Two (pp. 39–57), ‘Oral History’, deals with events before and early in Wang's lifetime, and on which he therefore had limited or no influence. It might as well have been entitled ‘Cultural Memories’. The third chapter (pp. 58–85), on ‘signs and symbols’, is about portents that derived their political meaning from cosmology and mythology (Dudbridge seem to avoid the term ‘religion’) and influenced not only Wang's mind-set, but also the mind-set of his time. The memoirs of Chapter Four (pp. 86–104) reflect Wang's concern with the impact that the unending warfare of his times and its repercussions – looting, banditry, and the abuse of power – had on ordinary peoples’ lives, and how class distinctions collapse under such conditions. Chapter Five, ‘Personalities of Shu,’ (pp. 105–123) dubbed ‘a social pathology’ by Dudbridge (p. 123), presents gossip about people Wang met or heard of in Sichuan 四川 between 916 and 926, when he came fresh from his provincial home in Qinzhou, after it had fallen to the Former Shu, to Chengdu 成都. That first exposure to metropolitan life left a deep mark on Wang's mind. Chapter Six (pp. 124–143) is on the fall of Shu in 925, which brought about that defining moment of truth for Wang's sense of loyalty recounted above, when he surrendered to the ruler of the Later Tang. Chapter Seven (pp. 144–160) is on what it meant to be Chinese versus ‘barbarian’ in the face of alien regimes of the Shatuo Turks and Khitan-Liao 遼 (916–1125), which entrenched themselves in the North and seemed evermore determined to stay. Wang's ‘ethnographic’ observations, for which his adolescence in Qinzhou had prepared him, betray an open mind toward alien culture and even language. The eighth chapter (pp. 161–174) deals with the importance of music both for Wang, who seems to have had absolute pitch, and for the culture surrounding him. Chapter Nine (pp. 175–188) offers an insight into Wang's view on nature and environment and shows that his sentiments towards his fellow creatures were not too far removed from our own attitudes.
It is difficult to summarise the variety of memoires treated in the individual chapters, which is due to the diversity of the material, and here is not the place to try and give a comprehensive account. Instead, I shall limit myself to one memoir that struck me as extraordinary – the untameable pet ape ‘Wild Guest’ of the very last chapter: Early in his career, while he served in Hanzhong 漢中, then a part of Shu, a trapper presented Wang with a baby ape. He is taken in by the beast's ‘sly intelligence’ immediately (p. 186), but shows himself incapable of controlling it. After the ape has vandalised the commissioner's kitchen (there is a certain premonition of the – much later – monkey king of Journey to the West in this), Wang regretfully returns him to the wild. After completing his tenure in Hanzhong, on his way to Chengdu, Wang encounters a troop of apes, among them Wild Guest. The ape recognises Wang and sheds tears of despair when he departs. It appears that, during the Five Dynasties, a new and keener sense of commiseration with one's fellow creatures emerges, which reaches full blossom in the Song, e.g., in Zhou Qufei's 周去非 (fl. ~1163) Lingnan daida 嶺南代答.
To sum up, Glen Dudbridge's A Portrait is a valuable complement to the incomplete picture we have of Five Dynasties’ China. If I were forced to offer criticism, then it would be that the page references in the index are not always correct, and the author's experimental approach could have been supported by a more coherent definition of ‘memoir’, but this criticism comes from someone who has yet to achieve Professor Dudbridge's mastery of the sources.
