Writing on Border Matters, Zhang Qiao (300 Tang Shi #164)
Wednesday, 4 May 2022 07:51![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammerNo blowing horns break quiet autumn
And soldiers lean on garrison towers.
Spring-like breezes brush the green mound,
The bright sun sets behind Liangzhou.
No troops impede us through this desert,
Our tourists vanish across the border—
But foreigners’ feelings are like this water:
Forever wanting to flow on south.
书边事
调角断清秋，
征人倚戍楼。
春风对青冢，
白日落梁州。
大漠无兵阻，
穷边有客游。
蕃情似此水，
长愿向南流。
The mound is understood from context as the tumulus of Wang Zhaojun, one of the Four Great Beauties of China, married off to the Chanyu of the Xiongnu nomads, which is near modern Hohhot in central Inner Mongolia. Liangzhou is a fair ways due west of there in central Gansu, at the start of the Hexi Corridor and so associated with the frontier. The foreigners being scaremongered are probably Tibetans, even though they were encroaching from the southwest, and the water would be the Yellow River of the Ordos Loop. Lost in translation: the desert is “great/vast.”
---L.
And soldiers lean on garrison towers.
Spring-like breezes brush the green mound,
The bright sun sets behind Liangzhou.
No troops impede us through this desert,
Our tourists vanish across the border—
But foreigners’ feelings are like this water:
Forever wanting to flow on south.
书边事
调角断清秋，
征人倚戍楼。
春风对青冢，
白日落梁州。
大漠无兵阻，
穷边有客游。
蕃情似此水，
长愿向南流。
The mound is understood from context as the tumulus of Wang Zhaojun, one of the Four Great Beauties of China, married off to the Chanyu of the Xiongnu nomads, which is near modern Hohhot in central Inner Mongolia. Liangzhou is a fair ways due west of there in central Gansu, at the start of the Hexi Corridor and so associated with the frontier. The foreigners being scaremongered are probably Tibetans, even though they were encroaching from the southwest, and the water would be the Yellow River of the Ordos Loop. Lost in translation: the desert is “great/vast.”
---L.