Huang Zunxian Goes to Hong Kong

Huang Zunxian, a diplomat and revolutionary of poetry in the late Qing Dynasty, visited Hong Kong when he was only twenty-two. His experience in the British colony was his first real encounter with foriegners, and it sparked an abiding interest in issues outside of China. In this episode, we take a look at two of the poems from his 10 poem cycle, “Ten Poems on Remembering Hong Kong. “

Poem #8:

Beyond the incessant stream of Hong Kong’s traffic,

painted boats skim smoothly over the ocean’s surface. 

The British live here as if they were Buddhas in heaven, 

even their Chinese servants take pride in their barbarian masters

People ride hydrogen balloons a thousand feet into the air

A hundred horses dash around the race tracks, fast as the wind. 

Only when the police patrol the streets with their red billy sticks 

does the racket of the market drop to a hush. 

Original:

流水游龙外，平波又画桡。

佛犹夸国乐，奴亦挟天骄。

御气毬千尺，驰风马百骁。

街弹巡赤棒，独少市声嚣。

Poem #9:

Ships pointed towards north China

Arrive from the West just as when, of old, the horses from Central Asia came

Propellers beating the waves 

Each day their cannon’s ring like thunder

Hong Kong is the point at which China and the outside world meet

Merch and money pile up in 

Climb up the Peak and look out at the ocean

See how far away is the Chinese mainland. 

Original:

指北黄龙饮，从西天马来。

飞轮齐鼓浪，祝炮日鸣雷。

中外通喉舌，纵横积货财。

登高遥望海，大地故恢恢。

Also, for those who want to learn more about the poem, here is an

Also, I am trying something new. I am putting a transcript of my podcast online. The transcript is generated by AI, and it gets somethings wrong. Please bear that in mind when you take a look at it:

 My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese Literature Podcast. Today, way back in October of 2020, Rob and I discussed a poem that Huang Zunxian wrote on the 1884 election that he observed while he was working as the Qing general counsel in San Francisco. He observed this American election. He wasn’t satisfied with it.

Today, we’re looking at a completely different poem from a much earlier era in Huang’s life. Huang Zunxian is a. Poetic revolutionary, he helped change the topics Chinese poetry was written about. Let’s get into his bio. Huang Zunxian was born in 1848 to a Hakka family at that center of Hakka culture, May County in Guangdong.

And he died in 1905. He was from a family of scholar officials. He himself was a bit of a Confucian bad mama jama by Sansui and I should say this Chinese age, at least in the pre modern time period, is judged differently from how age is measured in the Western world. The reason I’m using Sui rather than the Western dating system is just because I was looking at some Chinese sources, so I don’t actually know how old he was in the Western age system.

In traditional Chinese, dating systems. You would measure a person’s sway, not their, the years that they’re born, but you would measure their sway from the day that they are conceived, which was understood to be about a year before they were born. And everyone grew a sway. Yeah, on New Year’s. So by the time that he was san sui, by the time that he was around two years old, he had encountered a poem called Qianjia Shi, the Thousand Family Poem, and by the time that he was probably around three years old, Huang Zunxian had actually memorized that poem.

Now, having had a three year old, I’m a bit skeptical of this claim that Huang was able to memorize a poem at the age of A three, but that’s the info that I’m getting from Baidu Baike. So whether or not it’s true, it is the accepted textbook version of Huang Zunxian’s life. That typifies one aspect of Huang Zunxian.

He was very much carved out of the standard Confucian mold in a lot of ways. But, and this is a big, but there was one very un Confucian aspect of his personality. He was very open to foreign things and foreign cultures. I want to make sure I’m not saying anything that’s, that’s too offensive. So I would argue that Confucian tradition itself is not inherently Antifa.

They’re very different readings of Confucianism that one can have, you can have a centric reading of Confucianism that it’s this. Very China centric religion, philosophy, whatever you want to call Confucianism. And then there are actually some ways that you can read Confucianism as very much open to foreign influence, open to thinking about foreigners and people outside of China.

in a way that’s not particularly jingoistic. But the thing is, the way that the Confucian tradition has developed, it has often been understood to be fairly anti foreign. And the way that Chinese folks have Embrace Confucianism has often been in a very jingoistic, pro China, xenophobic manner. So, there are different ways to interpret Confucianism, but the way that it is most commonly manifested is a bit xenophobic.

Therefore, throughout Chinese history, Confucians are often more resistant to foreigners, to foreign ideas, and they often justify this by pointing to Confucian texts. That’s not to say that Confucianism itself is inherently. Xenophobic. That’s just to say that the way it has manifested has often been xenophobic.

In other words, like any religion, dogma, whatever you want to call Confucianism, Confucianism can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but it does have this tendency toward sealing itself off from the world outside of East Asia. And I oftentimes have to remind people Confucianism is not just a Chinese phenomenon.

It’s something that is very important in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Back to Huang Zunxian. So, in the Spring of 1867, he passes the first level of the imperial examination, that is the local level. He’s not even 20. That’s pretty young. A lot of people end up taking this exam until they’re 50, 60 years old, trying to get into the imperial bureaucracy by memorizing and demonstrating their mastery of these Confucian.

text. In 1876, he gets a 141st place on the Jurin exam. That’s the second level of the exam. That apparently was not enough to push him to the top and final level of the exam. He’s pretty dissatisfied and then he does something that few Confucians would ever do instead of saying You know what? I’m gonna try and take this test again and do it until I’m 50 60 100 years old instead of saying that which is the Normal path that a good Confucian would take and it’s the path his family wanted him to take instead of doing all that He goes to Japan in 1877 he goes with Horu Zhang.

He is the first ambassador sent over to Japan, the first in the history of China. So, Kuang is a part of the first embassy to Japan ever done. In the millennium and a half, the two countries had been dealing with each other. China had never sent an ambassador to Japan. The expectation was that Japan would always send an embassy to China.

There was also this expectation, different from the way we think about diplomacy today, that Japan would not keep a permanent ambassador in China. Rather, embassies were temporary affairs. They happened once a year, once every three years, something like that. The embassy would come, have this kind of diplomatic intercourse, and then Go back home.

Huang Zunxian participates in the first ever embassy to Japan. This is a radical break with the past. This is China struggling to adapt to a modern world. Huang was the assistant to the Qing ambassador, and he was also one of the most effective members of the embassy. He interacted with Japanese society in a way that was very open minded.

You’ve got to remember, this is an era when most folks in China still think of themselves as the international top dog, the center of the world, the end all be all when it comes to civilization. That attitude is common amongst Confucianists, though there’s nothing inherently Confucian about it. Huang is mixing with these Japanese folks.

He’s learning how to get along in the society that many in China considered outside the pale of civilization until fairly recently. This is a pretty big deal. Huang demonstrates a kind of open mindedness that I think was rare at the time. In 1877, Huang arrives in Japan and he’s able to publish a book of poetry, That’s poems on random stuff in Japan.

That’s my translation. There are 154 heptasyllabic quatrains. So, Let me break that down for those of y’all who aren’t experts on poetry. A quatrain is just a four line poem. We have them in English. In China, they’re quite popular. Heptasyllabic, that’s less common in English poetry. All that means is that they have seven syllables per line.

In Chinese poetry, it’s common to either have lines that are five syllables long or seven syllables. Huang Zunxian publishes poems on random stuff in Japan. This book was extremely popular amongst elite Chinese readers who are thirsting for a knowledge of the wider world. That wider world is suddenly pushing in on China and Qing readers really want to know what’s going on out there.

Huang puts it in these poems. And lots of readers in China are fascinated, but it was not just Chinese readers who lapped up this book. Japanese readers also really liked it. Keep in mind, this is a Japan that opened up to Commodore Perry only two and a half decades before Huang arrived. The Meiji revolution is just a decade and a half old.

You still have lots of elite readers in Japan who are reading that is classical Chinese. So that book, Poems on Random Stuff in Japan, it’s published, it’s very popular. In 1882, Huang moves up diplomatically. He goes from being an assistant to the ambassador in Tokyo, to being the general counsel in San Francisco, which I mentioned earlier.

I suspect he was the first general counsel in San Francisco, but I’ve not been able to confirm that in the sources that I was looking at. He goes to San Francisco in 1882. This is the year. Of the Chinese exclusion bill, the 1882, 1883 legislation limiting Chinese immigration along racial lines. It’s a very important and sensitive position that he had.

He’s at the epicenter of the anti Chinese sentiment in America. And of course, he’s also writing a lot of poetry about San Francisco, which we discussed in that other podcast on the election. Huang Zunxian was also a leader of a revolution in poetry. He changed the topics about which Chinese poetry could be written, though he stuck quite fiercely to writing poetry using the traditional poetry rules.

He was different from his frenemy Liang who’s another. innovator, probably more innovative than Huang Zunxian. Liang Qichao wanted to change the way Chinese poetry was written. He wanted to change the very strict rules by which you have stresses and what kinds of tones you can use, things like that, the very technical aspects of Chinese poetry.

He wanted to change that. Huang was like, no, let’s keep those things exactly the same. The way we’ve been doing it for a couple of thousand years, Huang wanted to change what poetry was written about. So he wrote about foreign things. He wrote about London fog, about the Eiffel tower, about the Suez canal.

He has a poem about. Frederick B, a white Californian politician who opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act and tried to help Chinese folks in America. And like I mentioned before, he wrote poems on American elections. All of this discussion of foreign things in Chinese poetry was incredibly innovative at the time.

Something that was considered revolutionary in China. How do you write about foreign things that, that just for a long time, that wasn’t done. Well, I say it wasn’t done. In fact, that’s not completely true. Tang poets had long written about Central Asian dancers and other foreign objects. And though Qing poets knew about all of that poetry, they read those Tang poets who wrote about foreign stuff.

But they themselves had grown. Kind of stale. I think that’s fair to say. They had grown stale in the topics which it was acceptable to write poetry. So Huang is really the first important, respectable poet in a long, long time to say it’s okay to write about foreign stuff. It’s okay to write about these western barbarians, these Japanese barbarians.

He makes those non Chinese topics a central part of his poetic work. All right, I think that’s enough of me babbling on. Let’s get to the two poems that I want to discuss today. Both of these poems come from a short cycle of ten poems written in 1870 after Huang went on a trip to the foreign colony of Hong Kong.

So when Huang was 22 years old, he traveled from his home in nearby. May County, Guangdong. He wanted to see Hong Kong, this land where China and Western barbarians rub shoulder to shoulder together. This was Huang’s first major encounter with foreigners. And he writes the cycle of poems called Xiang Gang Gan Huai Shi Shou.

Ten poems on remembering Hong Kong. I’m just going to read two of them, poem number eight and poem number nine. Here’s my translation of poem number eight. Beyond the incessant stream of Hong Kong’s traffic, painted boats skim smoothly over the ocean’s surface. The British live here as if they were Buddhas in heaven.

Even their Chinese servants take pride in their barbarian. Masters, people ride hydrogen balloons, a thousand feet into the air, a hundred horses dash around the racetracks fast as the wind only when the police patrol in the streets with their red Billy sticks does the racket of the market drop to a hush.

So I found poem number eight fascinating for a couple of reasons. First off, the Brits are. Presented as Buddhists, and it is their wealth that makes them Buddhists. Why is this interesting to me? First, I think it’s cool that Huang is kind of normalizing the Britts. You gotta think about it. This is 1870.

Most of his readers will never have met a foreigner. By this point. They will have trouble just imagining what a foreigner looks like by framing the Britts as Buddhas. He does several things first in this image of the Britts. positions the Brits in a fairly positive way. It paints an image of them as something that the Chinese reader of 1870 can visualize.

They know Buddhas, they know what the different Buddhas look like. That image of them normalizes them, but it also maintains that element of foreignness to the Brits. Buddha, of course, was not Chinese. Something that Chinese folks would have been very aware of. Even at this stage in Chinese history, Buddhism always maintained this on again, off again relationship with its foreign identities.

By comparing the Brits to Buddhas, you have this element of the familiar and the foreign all rolled up into a single image. I also liked poem number eight because of this image in the fourth line. Not only are the Brits like Buddhas, but there is the sense of surprise. Chinese people are their servants, and yet, despite that, they take pride in being the servants of these Buddhas.

Foreign barbarians. This is really something that if you read accounts today coming out of the PRC on the colonial experience You’re not gonna see that kind of thing. A lot of criticism of the colonial experience today Frames British rule in Hong Kong, and in fact, all Western colonialism in China. It frames it as if it was this entirely negative experience.

Those PRC historians who do talk about Hong Kong, and many of them just ignored Hong Kong, but those who do talk about Hong Kong do so framing it in a narrative of national shame as the territorial symbol of Britain defeating China, the end of Chinese dominance of the East Asian geopolitical cultural sphere.

They talk about the Brits as treating the Chinese horribly. That did happen. The Brits enacted a lot of incredibly vile racist laws in Hong Kong. As a part of their colonial rule, that’s not the full story. Lots of Chinese people took pride in working with the British. Not all of them. There’s a reason that Huang Zunxian says it with an air of surprise in that poem number eight, but it did happen.

And I think that looking at Huang Zunxian gives us a more comprehensive portrait of life in colonial. Hong Kong. I also like poem number eight because there is this real sense of wonder to the whole thing. You have this technological wonder, hot air balloons floating in the sky. You have these racetracks, this new way of recreating.

Hong Kong is a bustling, hustling place. And in the end, there’s only one thing that quiets the place down. That’s the red billy stick of the policeman strolling on his beat through Hong Kong. Again, this is pretty interesting. In general, Chinese sources today portray British imperial power as threatening.

But for Huang There’s nothing really threatening about it. It seems to me when I read this poem that the red billy stick is the one thing that keeps order in this very raucous place. That’s poem number eight. Let me read for you poem number nine in this 10 poem cycle. Ships pointed north towards China arrive from the west just as when of old the horses from Central Asia came.

Propellers beating the waves. Each day their cannons ring like thunder. Hong Kong is the point at which China and the outside world meet. Merchandise and money pile up. Climb up the peak and look at the ocean. See how far away the Chinese mainland is. I like this image. of line two in this poem, number nine, you have this familiarization of the British by pointing to another foreign thing that was common knowledge.

You have this simultaneous attempt to familiarize the British, but also to exoticize them. So these horses that he mentions, imperial China relied on. horses coming from Central Asia as a part of its war machine. They had to always buy these horses from Central Asia. Central Asia’s horses are much better than anything you could raise in China, just for geographic reasons.

China’s land was just ill suited for raising horses. There were never enough horses to provision its large armies. So they always had to buy horses from Central Asia. When Huang describes the Brits and the trade with the Brits, he again reaches back into Chinese history for this other foreign object, one that would be familiar to the Chinese and put these weird Western barbarians into simultaneously familiar and exotic context.

I also love this image of Hong Kong. It’s where China and the rest of the world meet. That’s how poem number nine describes it. That’s still very much how people in China and the West talk about Hong Kong today. It’s cool to see that this image goes back a century and a half. One of the last things I want to mention about poem number nine is the peak that he discusses.

The peak that this poem alludes to is of course Victoria Peak, which I think if you are a tourist and you go to Hong Kong, you’re pretty much legally required to go up to the top of it. If you haven’t gone to the top of it, you haven’t really visited Hong Kong. The thing I love so much about This last line in the poem, he’s sitting there at the top of Victoria Peak.

He looks out and sees China. And there is this sense of separation between China and Hong Kong. See how far away is the Chinese mainland. It is right there. It’s not that far away. The bay separating him from mainland China is about. Half a mile, maybe a kilometer at its narrowest point. It’s not that far off.

But in looking down and seeing how different Hong Kong’s bustling harbor is from mainland China, it seems like the gap is not a gap in terms of miles or kilometers. Instead, it’s a measure of historical time or civilizational time. That’s what Huang seems to be remarking on. To wrap it up, These two poems that I translated today are part of Huang Zunqian’s ten poem cycle called Xiang Gang Gan Huai Shi Shou.

Ten poems on remembering Hong Kong. It’s just one of the parts of Huang’s fascination with all things foreign. I think I’m going to end it there. As usual, you can find these poems in their original and with my translations on the website, ChineseLiteraturePodcast. com. If you want to show your support, I would love it if you would go to Patreon and show me some love.

Chinese Literature Podcast at Patreon. I’m Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese Literature Podcast.