Wangchuan ji.

About Wangchuan ji

The Wangchuan ji is an 8th-century collection of Tang poetry written by the two poets Wang Wei and Pei Di, also known by other names, such as the Wheel River Collection or Wang River Collection Note that the "Wang" in Wang Wei and the "Wang" in Wang River are different words from each other and written with different characters. Wang Wei had acquired a retirement location away from the busy capitol city, in what is now Lantian County, in China. The verses are based on a series of twenty scenes, inspired in part by the sights available at Wang Wei's retirement estate and in part by imaginary allusion: each one forms the topic for a pair of one five-character quatrains, one by each of the poetic pair. Besides the long-term interest in these verses in China, this anthology has created much interest around the world, including numerous translations, especially Wang's version of what has been translated as "Deer Park", among other versions of the title. Several complete translations of the whole work have been done, in English, although the concentration has been on Wang's contributions. A series of "Twenty Scenes" of Wangchuan were done as a set series of paintings. The Wangchuan poems form an important part of traditional Chinese Shan shui landscape painting and Shanshui poetry development. There are clear indications of the influence of the Six Dynasties poet early exemplar of landscape genre poetry Xie Lingyun's poems on topics, partly inspired by his family estate, in what is today Zhejiang. The considerable influence of Pei Di and Wang Wei's Wangchuan ji shows in much subsequent painting, music, and poetry.