Chinese Literature Podcast

Lee Moore talks about Chinese Literature.

Hao Jingfang - Folding Beijing 04/26/2025

The Greatest Fart Joke in Chinese History 03/29/2025

More Swindles from the Late Ming - Sex, Scams and Sorcery - Interview with Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea 02/28/2025

Joel Bigman - A Very Jewish Journey to the West 01/25/2025

2024 End of the Year Podcast 12/28/2024

Huang Chunming - Sayonara, Zaijian 11/24/2024

Huang Chunming - The Drowning of an Old Cat 11/02/2024

Interview with Daniel Bell 09/28/2024

Edward Yang - Yi Yi or A One and a Two 08/31/2024

Bai Xianyong - Winter Nights 07/27/2024

Taiwanese Comfort Women 07/06/2024

Yu Yonghe - Small Sea Travel Diary 06/22/2024

Ge Fei - The Invisibility Cloak 06/08/2024

Nicky Harman Interview - Jia Pingwa's Sojourn Teashop 05/24/2024

Ian Johnson Interview 05/11/2024

Jin Yong - Sword of the Yue Maiden 04/27/2024

Jin Yong - Part 1 04/13/2024

Sima Qian - Letter to Ren An 03/30/2024

Sima Qian - Letter to Ren An This week is the last in our Sima Qian series, but it is also definitely the best. We look at how Sima Qian lost his testicles while sticking to his principles. We consider the conflict between him and Emperor Wu that percipitated his castration. I also make a big announcement. Here is the Transcript: My name is Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese literature podcast. We are coming to the end of our Summa Chen series. Last week, we looked at Summa Chen's discussion of the capitalists, Summa Chen's defense of free market principles. This week, we are looking at one of the most famous Summa Chen works. And strangely, it might not even have been by Sima Qian himself. This week we are talking about the famous Bao Ren An Shu, the letter replying to Ren An, the letter to Ren An as it's sometimes translated. First we're going to discuss the controversy surrounding the letter and the context in which it was produced, and then we're going to dive into the letter itself. So what's the controversy? There's actually a debate as to whether or not Sima Qian wrote the letter. The letter to Renan, despite the fact that This is the work that Sima Qian is most known for. It doesn't appear in the shi ji, the records of the historian. The records of the historian is Sima Qian's main work. Why doesn't the letter of Ren'an appear in that work? We don't really know. Instead, it appears in the Han shu, the history of the Han, the book of the Han. The Han shu, is a work that appears almost two centuries after Sima Qian's death. Now, the letter to Renan appears in that work and it purports to be by Sima Qian. Did Sima Qian actually write this letter? It's hard to say. There's a book written by Li Weiyi, Michael Nylan, Han Venice, and Stephen Durant. They're all stunningly good. Scholars, professor Durant's a friend of the podcast has appeared on the podcast way back in April 17. They argue that this letter might actually be written by someone else, but they think it's pretty much true to Sima Qian. I don't understand what that means if The letter is written by someone else, but true to him, I don't, I don't know. That's a circle that I can't square, but that's fine. I just wanted to talk a little bit about that controversy. Is this letter by Sima Qian? We don't know. Does it matter? Probably not, because for two millennia, it's Chinese readers have been reading this letter and whether or not it was truly written by the real historical Sima Qian, it has become associated with the character of Sima Qian in the minds of so many Chinese readers. Okay. Enough on the controversy. Let's dive in to the circumstances surrounding this letter. Renan was supposedly a friend of Sima Qian. Renan is involved in a rebellion in 91 BC called the Liuzhou Rebellion. Renan is facing execution because he supposedly did not. display sufficient loyalty to the emperor during this rebellion. Ren An writes a letter to Sima Qian explaining what happened. Ren An doesn't think his execution is justifiable. Sima Qian replies to Ren An's letter. Sima Qian essentially tells Ren An to suck it up, deal with it. And then he, it is this long disquisition. By so much in explaining what happened to so much in himself and how he dealt with the prospect of almost being executed by the emperor and how in the end so much in lost his testicles though not his life. Let's jump back in time a bit. So much in served Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, Han Mu Di. Emperor Wu is very controversial. He institutes this new economic policy, something that we talked about in the last podcast. Emperor Wu also breaks with other traditions. So for about quite the past century, the Han dynasty largely kept the northern barbarians, that is the Xiongnu, in check. And they had done this with a pretty simple diplomatic formula. They paid them and they married the, uh, Han Dynasty princesses off to the Xiongnu as a way to make sure the Xiongnu had skin in the game and knew that if they raided Han towns along the borderlands, they were going to get cut off from the stuff. Essentially, the Han Dynasty was selling them goods and trying to get them addicted to the kinds of industrial goods that only a society like China could produce. And once they got used to these Industrial goods these luxuries they wouldn't attack the Han because they knew that they could get cut off and they constructed this whole sexual dependency as well They the Han Dynasty argued that Chinese women were more beautiful than these barbarian women And you can't get more beautiful Chinese women, unless you work with us, we'll send you Han dynasty princesses. If you don't attack our villages and we'll cut you off. If you do attack our, our towns on the borderlands, Emperor Wu stops all that. He is very frequently warring with the Xiongnu, those Northern barbarians. Emperor Wu says. We ain't going to pay the Xiongnu any more money for peace, and we ain't going to give them any more princesses. It's an incredibly expensive policy change. It's also something that Sima Qian promptly criticizes in his, uh, Xiongnu Liezhuan, the biography of the Xiongnu, where Sima Qian seems remarkably sympathetic to the Xiongnu's side, considering that his job, Sima Qian's job, is the archivist of Emperor Wu. Sima Qian goes out on a limb there and really expresses Uh, a lot of sympathy for the Xiongnu. Emperor Wu and Sima Qian have these philosophical differences. Sima Qian does not like Emperor Wu's economic policy. Sima Qian does not like how Emperor Wu deals with the Xiongnu. There are other things that go on. Then this thing happens. During one of the wars with the Xiongnu, a guy named Li Ling. Goes and shoots his mouth off. General Li Ling says he can destroy the Xiongnu with just a handful of troops. Initially, Emperor Wu is skeptical. He thinks General Li Ling is just talking trash, but Emperor Wu eventually gives General Li Ling his troops. General Li Ling marches on the Xiongnu. He meets the main body of the Xiongnu troops somewhere in the Altai mountains, in that region where modern Russia, Kazakhstan, Xinjiang, and Mongolia all come together. General Li Ling is now regretting mouthing off. He's surrounded by a much larger group of Xiongnu troops. General Li Ling and his troops fight bravely. In this passage, I'm going to read, Li Ling's forces are surrounded. They're running out of supplies. An officer from Li Ling's army is insulted. He defects to the Xiongnu and tells The Xiongnu, that Li Ling's troops are running low on arrows, so of course the Xiongnu push it harder. Li Ling's forces are in a bad way. The relief column did not come. The dead and wounded troops lay in piles. Nevertheless, Li Ling gave a shout to cheer up his army, and not a soldier failed to rise. He was crying, swallowing, tears running down his bloody face. Here is a translation. From here's my translation from the passage that I'm drawing from an entire country surrounded them for thousands of miles They had to turn and fight turn and fight their arrows exhausted the roads of escape Used up the backup soldiers. They had requested had not arrived the dead and the wounded soldiers Piled up, but Li Ling shouted to his army, and every soldier rose. Li Ling personally shed tears, and with his face bleeding, he drank his own tears. They drew back their empty crossbows, risking everything before the bright swords. Facing north, they fought. To the death with the enemy emperor Wu was incredibly pissed You've got to imagine general li ling had been running his mouth for all this time and he ends up surrendering emperor Wu was angry And then sima qian comes back into the story. Sima qian had kind of known li ling They hadn't had a beer together despite the fact that sima qian was not very close with li ling. He still defends him He says li ling is a good guy. He says that li ling and I we lived in the palace together I knew li ling Even if we were never good friends. Sima Qian tries to argue that Li Ling was a brave man. Emperor Wu takes out his anger at Li Ling on Sima Qian. He orders that Sima Qian be executed. But then, Emperor Wu rethinks what he has done. He grows a little bit less angry and he actually commutes Sima Qian's death. sentence. The punishment that he gives him is the lesser punishment of castration. Now, you got to understand, this is the Han Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, no self respecting man would live castrated. In the Han Dynasty, they thought that it was better to die than to be unmanned. So, when Emperor Wu commutes that punishment from execution to castration, He's not expecting Sima Qian to live on. Instead, he's giving him an out. Emperor Wu is allowing Sima Qian to commit suicide through means of his own choosing. He can choose a less gruesome death than the kind that he would have faced if he was executed. But the expectation is still that this punishment will result in Sima Qian's death, even if it's by suicide rather than an out. execution. According to the letter to Renan, Sima Qian makes a strange decision. Rather than commit suicide, he allows himself to be castrated. This is difficult to imagine. Why would he do this? He asks himself this question in the letter. How could he go on living without his manhood? To have lost your manhood To have lost your testicles in the Han Dynasty is to really not be a human. That's how Sima Qian describes it. Sima Qian, in the letter to Renan, calls himself, quote, the leftovers of the knife and the saw. Here's what he says in another passage. I may be an old horse that has outlived its usefulness, but I always hearken to the influence from my seniors. When I consider how my body has been mutilated, how fault has been found in whatever I have done, and how my desire to be of good benefit has brought ruin to me. Instead, my heart burst and I have no one to tell. In another passage, Sima Qian says, quote, there is no degradation worse than castration end quote. Then Sima Qian goes on to list examples of how people have been ashamed of having just been around castrados in the Chinese past. He mentions Duke Ling of Wei. Duke Ling shares a carriage with a eunuch. How does Confucius. respond when Duke Ling does this. Confucius actually leaves the duke. He does not even want to be around this man who has ridden in a car with a castrato. He goes through all these examples and then he ends this list of people who have been shamed by being associated with castratos. Sima Qian says this, when a man of even middling qualities has business to conduct with a unit, he always feels So, if castration is so horrible, why does Sima Qian accept that fate rather than just facing death? The reason Sima Qian says he does it is because fame is more important than anything else. Quote, the end of all action is becoming famous. The end of all action is making one's name known. I'm talking about this passage with my students in a few weeks, and I wonder, in an age of TikTok and Instagram, how they are going to respond to this passage. For Sima Qian, the question of shame, of death, those things are less important than fame. And the reason Sima Qian has to, has to stay alive, he says it's because he has to complete his father's work. He has to finish up this history that he is writing, the records of the historian. Interestingly, initially Sima Qian frames this in very filial terms, as a good Confucian. Initially, Sima Qian doesn't say, I did it because I wanted to finish that historical work that I was working on. He does that later on. Here's the passage where he actually admits that the reason he's doing it is because he personally has this investment in this historical work. Quote, the reason I bore through it in silence and chose to live At any cost, the reason I did not refuse to be covered in muck was because I could not stand to leave something of personal importance to me unfinished, because I despised perishing without letting the glory of my writings be shown to posterity. In the end, it comes out, I wanted to do it because this is my history, and this is the thing that will live on down the generation. In the end, Sima It is only the act of writing that can save him from a fate of insignificance. Quote, in the cases like Zuo Qiu Ming's sightlessness or Sun Zi's amputated feet, these men could never be employed. They withdrew and put their deliberations into writing in order to give full expression to their outrage, intending to reveal themselves purely through writing that would last into the future. In the last podcast, I talked about how Sima Qian's writings function as a way to attack Emperor Wu and his economic policies. This is where I was getting that from. Those of us who aren't kings, those of us who aren't emperors, all we can do when a ruler does something wrong and tosses us out, having us castrated or amputated for punishment, our only power left is the pen. Sima Qian sums it all up when he talks about death. There are lots of people who are rich and famous in the past, Sima Qian says, but most of them have been forgotten. Quote, the number of rich and noble men in ancient times whose names have been utterly wiped away is beyond reckoning. The only ones who are known are the exceptional one. Those who are outside of the norm. This is why Sima Qian decided to continue. This is why he decided to face the humiliating fate of being castrated. He says, Death comes for us all. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. It is not the fact that we die that matters. It is the way that we handle death. death that matters most. Here's what Sima Qian says, quote, Human beings truly have but one death. There are deaths that seem heavier than Mount Tai, but to some, death seems lighter than a piece of swan's down. The only Difference lies in what is done by die. It is only in the way that we die, that the meaning of our life works itself out. Chen's life has meaning because he chose to live in humiliation and complete his master work, rather than do the easy and expected thing and simply commit suicide. Chen chose to face a more humiliating fate and put a dent in the universe that I think is one of the most. Amazing passages in all of Sima Qian's work if we really believe that this is by Sima Qian Which of course I already pointed out. We don't we don't really know. Okay, y'all can see how incredible this piece is It's one of the greatest and most famous pieces of writing ever produced in China If you talk about this with a Chinese friend, they're gonna know about it They all had to read it in school. Today's Chengyu is To take history as a mirror or to look at oneself through history, to learn from history. This is the dominant mode of history in China. History is understood in China, first and foremost, as a moral lesson. It's a means for understanding the present. In China, history is more literary than in the contemporary Western world. In the West, we think of history and we expect it to be what happened. In the past, we expect it to be objective. We don't always expect it to have a moral message. Though, of course, history frequently does have a moral message in the West. For most modern Westerners, post Renaissance, history is about what happened in the West. In the past, but in China, there is still an expectation that history is ideological, that it has a moral point that it is trying to impart to the reader to take history as a mirror. This is a very famous Cheng Yu. It's originally written in the book of documents, the Shang Shu, but it's used throughout Chinese history. Now, before we go, I have a big announcement to make on the podcast. Previously mentioned that I was working on publishing a book. It is happening. I'm proud to announce that I am going to be the first author getting to be published by this awesome new publisher unsung voices books run by amy rath and don russo The two of them have a combined five decades in the publishing industry and they chose me as their first book Don has been a listener to the podcast for a while. The book itself is tentatively titled China's backstory, the literature and history behind today's front page, China news. The book tries to explain the literature and history behind for China related topics that are being discussed in the American media today, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese economy. These are all incredibly sensitive topics. This is the kind of book that couldn't get me castrated by Xi Jinping. All of these topics will make the authorities in Beijing want to reach for the knife and the saw in the book. I'm going to explain how those news stories came to be. News stories, taking the reader. To the stories behind the news story, weaving literature and history into a narrative that helps people understand the background behind these topics, the things that are rarely reported on the history, the literature behind the story. What I ask of you. If you're willing, dear podcast listener, I have posted the URL for the book's preorder page on the website. I would be very appreciative if you would go and show your love for me, the podcast, and the work I do, if you just go there and sign up for the preorder. So to preorder, you're not actually preordering in the sense that There is no credit card information required. You don't have to pay anything in order to pre order. All you have to do is give Unsung Voices Books your email address. What you're really doing when you pre order is you're signing up to be updated about my book as it gets closer and closer to being published, which I think will probably be in 2025. Unsung Voices Books Is asking me to turn in the manuscript August 31st. So I have been beavering away at the book. Some of y'all probably realized that something was up because I have been even slower than normal in replying to emails. If you are willing to support me, go to Chinese literature, podcast. com. Find the page that says, Pre order my book, put in your email address and then go tell your family, tell your friends, even tell your enemies, spread the word that this book is happening. Okay. That's it for me. You're going to hear me in later episodes talking about the book. Again, I'll keep you all updated on the status of the book as well. I really appreciate it. If you can go and pre order the book until the next episode, I'm Lee Moore, and this is the Chinese literature podcast. /episode/index/show/chineseliteraturepodcast/id/30598773