A Verse and Another Verse, A Ghost on a Fuchun Sandbar

During the Wuyue Kingdom, a person moored for the night on the Fuchun River in a place where the moonlight was tranquil. He noticed a person on a sandbar, who recited this:

I fell in the river—thirty years
The tides have struck my rotting corpse.
My family members all don’t know—
Where are wine cups poured for me?

The person from the boat asked, “You are who—might you not reveal your full name?” It further recited this poem:

Do not ask for my full name—
To you those words would be in vain.
Tide bears the sand, my bones are cold—
This soul is sad in the autumn winds.

吟
作者：富春沙际鬼
〈吴越时，有人夜泊于富春间月色澹然，见一人于沙际吟此。〉
陊江三十年，
潮打形骸朽。
家人都不知，
何处奠杯酒。

又吟
〈舟人问曰：“君是谁，可示姓名否？”又吟此诗。〉
莫问我姓名，
向君言亦空。
潮生沙骨冷，
魂魄悲秋风。

The Wuyue kingdom encompassing Zhejiang and southern Jiangsu was founded during the formal fall of the Tang Dynasty in 907 and was a major regional power through the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period until it surrendered to Song Dynasty forces in 978. So why’s this in a collection of Complete Tang Poetry? Well it turns out, and this just hadn’t come up before, CTP also covers the Five Dynasties period (but not the Ten Kingdoms, as Song had been founded by then). So now we know.

Now that’s what I call a right proper ghost poem. The Fuchun River is in Zhejiang. The wine is specifically a libation to the dead, which was indeed, as in many other cultures, a Chinese thing.

---L.