Life as Dust: A Literary survey of Mount Beimang

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/rn301187m

Abstract

Mount Beimang was located to the northeast of the historical Luoyang. Ascending high on this mountain, one could enjoy a panoramic view of the capital city. The beautiful view of Beimang and its advantageous location just outside the capital city walls made it an ideal graveyard for the well-to-do and contributed to its role as a special poetic image in classical poetry. The purpose of this paper is to study this image and seek related aspects of it in poems from early medieval and medieval China. I shall first study poems composed in the pre-Tang period. Despite their paucity, these poems can be divided into two groups, each of which can be read within a similar pattern in terms of poetic sequences and motifs. Then I shall proceed to poems in the Tang, which display a more vivid and diverse picture of the mountain because of their vocabularies and images selected from a larger hoard. By surveying various tropes and themes in these poems, I hope to explore a full picture of the mountain and its cultural value in traditional China.

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